Flags were lowered to half-staff at West Bank government buildings on Sunday, ushering in three days of mourning for poet Mahmoud Darwish, who helped forge the Palestinians’ national identity and gave a voice to their yearning for independence.
Darwish died on Saturday, at age 67, following heart surgery at a Houston hospital.
The poet is to be buried on today in the West Bank city of Ramallah, rather than near his home village in what is now Israel, said his brother, Ahmed. The family had initially considered seeking burial close to home. However, this would have required Israeli approval, and would have made it difficult for people from across the Arab world to visit the grave.
“Mahmoud doesn’t just belong to a family or a town, but to all the Palestinians, and he should be buried in a place where all Palestinians can come and visit him,” Ahmed Darwish said.
Darwish will be buried next to Ramallah’s Palace of Culture, and a shrine will be erected in his honor, said Ramallah Mayor Jeanette Michael.
In the past year, Darwish had become increasingly concerned about the political infighting. Underscoring those divisions, it was not clear on Sunday whether the Hamas government in Gaza would join the three days of official mourning declared by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Gaza’s Culture Ministry planned to set up a mourning tent, starting yesterday, officials said. Hamas’ supreme leader, Khaled Mashaal, who is based in Syria, said that “with the death of Darwish, Palestinian literature lost one of its pillars.”
Moreed Bargouthi, a Palestinian poet, told the Voice of Palestine radio on Sunday that he had spoken to Darwish before his surgery and that Darwish had expressed his worry about the bitter political divisions.
In Ramallah, flags were lowered to half-staff on Sunday, to usher in the mourning period. Late on Saturday, as news of Darwish’s death spread, dozens of people lit memorial candles in Ramallah’s main square. Some radio stations played Darwish poems set to music.
Darwish’s works are taught in Palestinian schools and are also popular among the thousands of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel for security offenses. Prisoners traditionally spend their time in jail reading and organizing classes for each other. Darwish’s occasional readings in Ramallah drew overflow crowds.
Darwish’s poetry has been translated into more than 20 languages and he won numerous international awards. He first gained prominence in the 1960s with the publication of his first poetry collection, Bird without Wings.
It included the poem Identity Card that defiantly spoke in the first person of an Arab man giving his identity number — a common practice among Palestinians when dealing with Israeli authorities and Arab governments — and vowing to return to his land.
Many of his poems have been put into music — most notably Rita, Birds of Galilee and I Yearn For My Mother’s Bread — and have become anthems for at least two generations of Arabs.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS