Day 355: Refaat Alareer's legacy

Dr. Refaat Alareer, the beloved professor, writer and teacher, would have turned 45 this past Monday had his life not been violently cut short by Israel last December.

Were it not for the genocide, Alareer would this week be celebrating his birthday on Gaza’s shoreline, or at Ristretto Café near the now destroyed Islamic University of Gaza, as his dear friend Asem Alnabih, one of the last people to see Alareer before he was killed, wrote for Mondoweiss.

Were it not for the genocide, Alnabih added, Alareer would be bonding with his first grandchild, Abd al-Rahman. Born after his grandfather was killed along with several other family members, Abd al-Rahman was murdered in the same April strike as his mother Shymaa (Alareer’s beloved daughter) and father Muhammad.

Their surviving family believe that Shymaa was targeted because she was Alareer’s daughter, Dr. Yousef M. Aljamal, a former student and close friend of Alareer, told The Electronic Intifada.

Aljamal, the Gaza coordinator for the Palestine Activism program at the American Friends Service Committee and a longtime contributor to The Electronic Intifada, joined the livestream this week to reflect on Alareer’s legacy, which continues to inspire people and reverberate around the world.

A replay of the livestream can be watched in the video above.

No “privilege of mourning”

Aljamal said Palestinians with strong ties to Gaza, where he was born and raised, “do not have the privilege of mourning” as there is no respite from Israel’s constant killing of their family members, friends and neighbors.

“We’re trying to maintain the legacy of our friends, our neighbors, to tell their stories,” Aljamal said, thereby carrying the torch lit by Alareer, who narrated his love for Palestine and its people through storytelling.

With the blessing of Alareer’s family, Aljamal is compiling the slain professor’s writing across many genres in a new anthology titled If I Must Die, borrowed from Alareer’s now famous poem that was written for Shymaa.

The Electronic Intifada recently published three previously unpublished diaries written by Alareer during the genocide and which will also appear in the anthology to be published by OR Books in October.

“This is just a small token of appreciation for what Refaat himself taught me and many other students and friends and colleagues,” Aljamal said, who added that Alareer planted seeds everywhere, particularly in his students.

“An army of writers”

Alareer trained his students to break Israel’s siege on Gaza by telling its stories, particularly in English. Thanks to his mentorship, The Electronic Intifada is currently publishing superb writing from Palestinians in Gaza who are narrating their experiences of the genocide on a daily basis.

“It was because of Refaat’s training that we have an army of writers … who understand the settler-colonial nature of Israel,” Aljamal said. “Refaat also politicized an entire generation, and that’s why Israel saw in him a target and a threat to their narrative.”

Alareer understood the power of words and storytelling, saying that storytellers threaten the colonizer’s narrative. And so he dedicated himself to training countless young people to tell their stories in powerful ways.

In 2014, Just World Books published Gaza Writes Back – a revolutionary collection of short fiction written in English by young Palestinians in Gaza and edited by Alareer.

The Electronic Intifada’s Nora Barrows-Friedman interviewed Alareer along with Aljamal and Rawan Yaghi, whose writing is also featured in Gaza Writes Back, when the book was first published 10 years ago.

During that interview, Alareer said that at the time of Israel’s 2008-2009 military offensive in Gaza, “I realized there was more I can do to resist the Israeli operations, Israeli racism and humiliation inflicted on Palestinians.”

For Alareer, this meant writing on his blog and publishing articles with Mondoweiss and The Electronic Intifada, “and basically after the war, everybody was writing but mainly writing personal reflections and experiences,” he said.

Eventually, he and others saw the need to “upgrade what we write into fiction” for a global audience “because fiction is timeless and universal.”

“So Gaza Writes Back came from these beliefs of the importance of writing back, in order to bring the Palestinian voices, the Palestinian narrative out there,” Alareer said during that 2014 interview.

A memorial edition of the book with updates from the writers and reflections on how Alareer impacted their lives, plus a foreword by The Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah, is forthcoming. Proceeds from the new edition will support Refaat’s family.

Stories of displacement

Meanwhile, Aljamal is also working on a book titled Displaced in Gaza that will be published in collaboration between the American Friends Service Committee and the Hashim Sani Center for Palestine Studies at the Universiti Malaya, where Refaat was a nonresident scholar, as was Raed Qaddoura, a contributor to The Electronic Intifada and close friend of Aljamal who was also murdered by Israel.

Testimonies collected from Palestinians in Gaza who have been repeatedly displaced can be currently read online and a Displaced in Gaza zine can be downloaded and printed “to raise global awareness about the violent and forced displacement inflicted upon the Palestinians,” as the project website states.

Along with Helena Cobban and Tony Groves, Aljamal is also cohost of Palcast, a weekly podcast which recently featured an interview with Rawan Yaghi, a former student of Alareer who is launching a newsletter titled Refaat Writes Back featuring the work of young writers in Gaza.

Battlefield analysis

Also on this week’s show, Nora Barrows-Friedman delivered her weekly news roundup from Palestine and beyond, which can also be read here.

And contributing editor Jon Elmer presented his weekly report on the state of the battlefields in both Gaza, where Israel has not succeeded in dismantling the resistance, and Lebanon, where the Israeli military launched intense attacks in recent days.

Hizballah has taken severe blows in the past week after Israel exploded thousands of communication devices and killed several of its founding commanders in a Beirut airstrike – suggesting a breach within the organization known for its tight operational security, as Elmer explained.

Elmer discussed the role that the elite Radwan commanders killed in the Beirut strike on Friday played in the nearly half-century-long evolution of Hizballah, including by training an entire generation of fighters.

During the group discussion towards the end of the livestream, Ali Abunimah said that Israel’s “goal in Lebanon, at least the initial goal, is to break the link between Lebanon and Gaza.”

He added that Hasan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hizballah, has said that “no matter what the price, we will not stop the support of Gaza.”

Abunimah pointed out that Israel’s advantage has been its air force and presented an analysis demonstrating that Tel Aviv may be overly confident on its Iron Dome missile defense system, for which it will struggle to acquire enough interceptors in the event of a prolonged war of attrition.

The Electronic Intifada’s Tamara Nassar produced and directed the program and Maureen Clare Murphy and Asa Winstanley contributed writing and production. Michael Brown contributed pre-production assistance and Eli Gerzon contributed post-production assistance.

Past episodes of The Electronic Intifada livestream can be viewed on our YouTube channel.