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Gaza City, Gaza Strip: The world's most recognized Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, delivered a stinging tirade against rival Palestinian factions on Sunday in his first public appearance in decades in the Israeli city of Haifa.
The reading by Darwish, known as the "Palestinian national poet," came a month after deadly battles between rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas last month in the Gaza Strip, claiming dozens of casualties.
The factions subsequently formed separate regimes. One is run by militant Islamic Hamas in Gaza, while the moderate Fatah formed a government in the West Bank.
Darwish, 66, who was born in a village near Haifa, described the Gaza infighting as a "a public attempt at suicide in the streets." He spoke to a packed auditorium in the Israeli port city. The recital was also broadcast live over Arab satellite television.
"We became independent," Darwish said mockingly. "Gaza became independent of the West Bank, and for one people, two countries, two prisons."
Darwish said bitterly the two governments made the possibility of creating a Palestinian state "one of the seven wonders of the world."
Darwish also directed barbs at Israel, blaming the Jewish state for not taking advantage of a historical chance at peace.
It was Darwish's first poetry reading in Haifa since he left the port city in 1970 to study in the former Soviet Union.
While Haifa is city known for its coexistence among Jews and Arabs, it was a flourishing, mostly Palestinian, town before Israel won the 1948 war that followed its creation. Most of its original residents fled or were forced out in 1948, and the town, nicknamed "the Bride of the Sea," looms large in Palestinian literature.
Since 1970, Darwish only briefly returned for personal engagements.
He joined the Palestinian Liberation Organization, living in different Arab countries. He resigned from the PLO in 1993 in protest over the interim peace accords that the late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, signed with Israel. Darwish moved to the West Bank city of Ramallah in 1996.
His poetry has been translated into more than 20 languages, and he has won many international prizes for his work.
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