Comrade Sinan remembers Mahmud Darwish: "Darwish did not choose to be born in al Birweh, a village in the Galilee, in 1941. Nor did he choose to leave; in 1948, his family was forced by Israeli troops to flee to Lebanon. When they returned, it was to another home; their village had been destroyed. By age seven he had witnessed and survived the obliteration, displacement and internal exile that would mark the Palestinian tragedy and become central themes in his poetry.“What can a poet do when confronted by the bulldozers of history?” These bulldozers were both literal and metaphorical. Darwish discovered the power of words early on and wrote fierce poems of resistance and love of land. He was imprisoned five times and put under house arrest by the Israeli military authorities."