These selected articles, among those written by Mahmoud Darwish in recent years, give them the quality of a Palestinian poet's testimony to his time. The testimony here is not merely a commentary on time, but rather, it is essentially an accompaniment of time through the multiplicity with which it exists, from one horizon to another. It is, therefore, a writing with time, not about it.

For Mahmoud Darwish, accompanying time through writing does not come from dictating ready-made ideas, as is the custom of vulgar speech, but rather, it teaches the questions engraved in the concrete, where the event transforms into an intertwined state, its component parts taking precedence in construction, with no simplification or abbreviation, no concession or ease. An accompaniment without the willpower to absorb time without hesitation in the face of what tempts discourses to lean towards carefully formulating what is difficult to formulate, or forgetting what requires an immediate and confrontational presence in life, thoughts, and positions.

"Passersby in Fleeting Words" is the title of a poem written in the context of these articles. Here, it retains its place, while directly indicating its vitality and the vitality of its context in both time and writing. This title, the poem, gives the choice a leap of faith, while simultaneously affirming the insurrection's untamable demand: Israel's withdrawal from the occupied territories.

A radical demand, yet not a simple one, this time as a result of the deception of both these and those regarding the Palestinian Peace Initiative. Proving what the Intifada has been celebrating, since its inception and within the process of the Palestinian struggle, is what sparked the Israeli obsession with everything it undertakes before itself and global Zionism. Therefore, the articles accompanying the poem chart a new path in deconstructing Zionist thought, with its divergent sides, according to writing that confronts Zionist positions and ideas that no one has addressed before, in such detail that only an expert in Israeli affairs and its elite would know.

The poem highlighted that Israel needs an enemy through which to identify itself and through which to justify whatever it wishes in Palestine and elsewhere. Therefore, the poem's "hysteria" transcended the poem's boundaries, from the Knesset to America and Europe to the court in Paris. It was a hysteria against the Palestinian being completely clear, when he chose the stone to move the orbit of questions "from borders to existence," and when he ascended with writing to the horizon of what must be said.

Thus, the poem “Passersby in Fleeting Words” is written in the time of the Intifada, and through it, it is confirmed, once again, that Mahmoud Darwish is a poet who realized, a long time ago, that poetry is the twin of thought, and that poetry cries out, in our modernity, the issues of individual and collective existence, without complacency or slackness. The articles have a sublime space, with which you sense the layers of time stacked together in their infinity. It is inevitably Palestinian time, where one is inside the occupied land resisting the erasure of history and memory, and outside it confronting the siege, in the halls of the world’s airports to the neighborhoods of Sabra and Shatila.

In both places, Palestinian time assumes an exceptional status, subjected to fragmentation supported by "laws" but never disintegrating. It is cast into basements and hiding places, then returns to the place of martyrdom. Erasure is unstoppable, nor is siege. The Intifada is a public path traced by children with their stones, who followed, unconcerned, to their freedom. There, they seize the scenes to inform the world that they are alive and belong to their homeland. The image bears witness to the birth of hands, and the image recognizes, well, the universality and the Palestinian flag.