[News] “What existence is worth”: The Martyrdom of Refaat Alareer

[Anti-Imperialist News]

electronicintifada.net
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/what-existence-worth-martyrdom-refaat-alareer/42491>
“What existence is worth”: The Martyrdom of Refaat Alareer

Louis Allday <https://electronicintifada.net/people/louis-allday> The
Electronic Intifada
<https://electronicintifada.net/people/electronic-intifada> 8 December 2023
------------------------------

A Palestinian woman waves a Palestinian flag ahead of a protest in a tent
city along Gaza’s boundary with Israel, demanding to return to their
homeland, east of Gaza City, 29 March 2018.
APA images

Weeks before Palestinian writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani was
assassinated by Israel in 1972, a journalist asked what death meant to him.

He answered
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/09/a-race-against-time-the-life-and-death-of-ghassan-kanafani/>:
“Of course, death means a lot. The important thing is to know why.
Self-sacrifice, within the context of revolutionary action, is an
expression of the very highest understanding of life, and of the struggle
to make life worthy of a human being.”

Kanafani’s tragic end – and those words of his in particular – came to my
mind almost immediately when, on the evening of 7 December, I received the
painful news that Refaat Alareer
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/memory-dr-refaat-alareer/42466>,
like Kanafani before him, had been murdered by Israel along with members of
his family. In Refaat’s case, his brother and sister and four of her
children. In Ghassan’s, his sister’s daughter, his beloved niece, Lamis.

The two men shared a resolute commitment to the Palestinian people and
their cause. Both believed in and spoke about Palestine as a universal
human issue. They had an urgent desire to record and propagate Palestinian
culture and stories, and a fundamental belief in the righteousness of
Palestinian resistance in all its forms.

Both men studied literature. They were generous and passionate educators
and writers. They also both spoke English with sardonic humor and eloquence
and did not suffer fools or opportunists gladly. This combination – an
unshakable commitment to their cause and the means to powerfully express
that position in English to a global audience – is exactly why they were
such a threat to the Zionist settler-colonial project.

Neither man was involved in fighting militarily, but both wrote about and
understood the central role of literature, both in the Zionist colonization
<https://www.ebb-magazine.com/books/p/on-zionist-literature> of Palestine
and, crucially, in resistance to it.
“Palestine was first and foremost occupied in Zionist literature”

As Refaat explained
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRDwGMgWAMo&list=PL9fwy3NUQKwYGN66V9CL-c7DFnG0_Swb2>
in a 2019 lecture, when discussing Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan and the
role of cultural resistance:

Of course, we always fall into this trap of saying, “She [Fadwa Tuqan] was
arrested for just writing poetry!” We do this a lot, even us believers in
literature … [we say], “Why would Israel arrest somebody or put someone
under house arrest, she only wrote a poem?” So, we contradict ourselves
sometimes; we believe in the power of literature changing lives as a means
of resistance, as a means of fighting back, and then at the end of the day,
we say, “She just wrote a poem!” We shouldn’t be saying that.

Moshe Dayan, an Israeli general, said that “the poems of Fadwa Tuqan were
like facing 20 enemy fighters.” … And the same thing happened to
Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour. She wrote poetry celebrating Palestinian
struggle, encouraging Palestinians to resist, not to give up, to fight
back. She was put under house arrest, she was sent to prison for years.

And therefore, I end here, with a very significant point: Don’t forget that
Palestine was first and foremost occupied in Zionist literature and Zionist
poetry … It took them years, over 50 years of thinking, of planning, all
the politics, money and everything else. But literature played one of the
most crucial roles here … Palestine in Zionist Jewish literature was
presented to the Jewish people around the world … [as] a land without a
people to a people without a land. Palestine flows with milk and honey.
There’s no one there, so let’s go. … And there were people — there have
always been people in Palestine. These are examples of how poetry can be a
very significant part of life.

The thing that perhaps connects Refaat and Ghassan above all in my mind is
the fundamental choice they both made. The choice to stay in situations in
which the likelihood of them being killed was high.

Refaat was a highly educated academic, a specialist in English literature.
If his primary objective had been to secure a life outside Gaza for himself
and his immediate family, it could have been achieved. Likewise, by the
1960s, Kanafani was a celebrated novelist, a cultural figure of regional
renown with a Danish wife, Anni.

An escape route – and therefore a more comfortable, safer trajectory for
both of their lives – was clear and within their grasp. Yet, like the
unnamed author of the letter in Kanafani’s moving 1956 epistolary short
story, “Letter from Gaza
<https://www.marxists.org/archive/kanafani/1956/letterfromgaza.htm>,” both
men chose to stay amid “the ugly debris of defeat … to learn … what life is
and what existence is worth.”

People are generally divided into combatants and spectators, Kanafani once
explained
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/09/a-race-against-time-the-life-and-death-of-ghassan-kanafani/>
in a letter to his niece Lamis. He had “chosen not to be a spectator, and
this means that I have chosen to live the decisive moments of our history,
no matter how short they are.”

Just like Ghassan, Refaat was no spectator. Until the end of his life, with
humor, with passion and with dignity he fought as a combatant in his own
way against the monstrosities and lies of Zionism.

The act of resistance, John Berger once wrote
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/09/a-race-against-time-the-life-and-death-of-ghassan-kanafani/>,
is “not only refusing to accept the absurdity of the world-picture offered
us, but denouncing it. And when hell is denounced from within, it ceases to
be hell.”

In this spirit, how both Refaat and Ghassan chose to live their short lives
should be seen as an unyielding denunciation of the hell that Zionism has
imposed on not only the Palestinians, but also on countless Lebanese,
Syrians, Egyptians and others in the region into which it has temporarily
implanted itself.

All of us who had the privilege to come to know Refaat – whether from afar
thanks to the internet and social media, or more intimately than that –
must honor that legacy. We cry and we mourn, but we do not despair or
give in.

“If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story …
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale.”

Refaat’s poetic directions
<https://twitter.com/itranslate123/status/1719701312990830934> to us
were clear.

I have a dream, one that I have never said out loud or written until this
moment, to visit a liberated Gaza and look out at the Mediterranean Sea
from a seaside café.

A sea in which Israeli warships, those harbingers of death, no longer lurk
menacingly on the horizon. They would instead be a memory from a dark time
that has now ended. If that dream comes true, looking out at the sea, I
will think of Refaat, the teacher of Gaza, and thank him for all that he
has done and taught us, for the profound legacy that his martyrdom
left behind.

*Louis Allday is a writer, editor and historian.*
T
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20231208/9bc66145/attachment-0001.htm>