News at Eleven: But this refusal to be limited by

the Palestinian relationship with Israel was not a strategy of avoidance. The struggle for freedom was always central to [Mahmoud] Darwish's work. In 2002, he confronted the invasion directly in State of Siege, where he wrote:

(to a killer:) If you'd contemplated the victim's face
and thought, you would have remembered your mother in the gas
chamber, you would have liberated yourself from the rifle's wisdom
and changed your mind: this isn't how identity is reclaimed.

from The Guardian: Books Blog: Mahmoud Darwish--a poet of peace in a time of conflict

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