The Dice Player: A Symposium on the Life and Work of Mahmoud Darwish
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Mahmoud Darwish was the most important Palestinian poet of our time. He was born in 1942 in the Western Galilee in the village of Birweh, before it was razed in the 1948 war that would lead to Israeli independence. As a young man, Darwish joined the Israeli Communist Party and wrote poems and editorials for left-wing newspapers. In 1964, he published his first collection of poems, titled Leaves of Olives, which included his seminal poem “Identity Card,” an impassioned polemic in the form of a response to an Israeli police officer who has stopped him to ask for his papers.
