The Communist Party of Israel and the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash) mourn the loss of the great poet, comrade Samih Al-Qasim. Arab-Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim has died on Tuesday in the village of Rameh in the Galilee at the age of 75, after a long battle with cancer.

Samih al-Qasim in the today’s Al-Ittihad front-page

Born in 1939, Al-Qasim was widely considered one of the Arab world’s and Palestinian people’s greatest poets. A-Qasim is also regarded as an important author among the Arab-Palestinian “resistance poets” in Israel who began their writing career during the military administration that was imposed on the Arab-Palestinian minority by the Israeli government in 1948-1966. It should be noted that those poets used to publish their poems and essays in communist literary journals and newspapers.

Al-Qasim was a member of the Arab-Druze community, and was a prominent figure in the struggle against the forced conscription of Druzes to Israeli military, and against the Israeli attempts to divide and rule the Arab-Palestinians by setting the Druzes apart from the rest of them. Al-Qasim served as deputy editor of the communist newspaper “Al-Ittihad” and a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.Al-Qasim left a wife, four children, and over seventy books of poetry and prose.The funeral will be held tomorrow, Thursday August 28, 2014.