UN-Truth

To listen to a clip from Marcel Khalife’s song, Passport, based on the poem by Mahmoud Darwish, click here .

Mahmoud Darwish’s final journey took him from the United States, where he died in a hospital in Texas apparently following complications after his third heart surgery, to Ramallah via Amman.

That made it possible for Lebanese singer Marcel Khalife, who set to music and sang a number of Mahmoud Darwish’s poems, to pay personal tribute to Darwish. Khalife would never have been allowed to go to Ramallah. The Israelis would likely have given him a hard time if he had tried to cross the Allenby Bridge. Then, the Lebanese would have arrested him upon his return.

Once, it was possible to drive from Cairo to Beirut for lunch and shopping, or from Ramallah to Damascus…

As it is, Marcel Khalife was put on trial in Lebanon (in 1999), for having sung and performed the song, Yusuf, with the lyrics of Darwish’s poem — which the Lebanese government somehow found threatening to the religous stability of Lebanon.

It was reported in Jonathan Cook’s article in The National on Tuesday that “Darwish’s body was to be flown to Amman from the United States in a plane sent by Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed, President of the UAE and Ruler of Abu Dhabi, said Atallah Kheiry, the Palestinian ambassador to Jordan”. The article can be read in full here .

Filed under: Human Rights, International Law, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East Peace Process, Palestine & Palestinians