[News] ‘Let It Be a Tale’: On Refaat Alareer and the Martyrdom of the Gaza Intellectual

[Anti-Imperialist News]

counterpunch.org
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/14/let-it-be-a-tale-on-refaat-alareer-and-the-martyrdom-of-the-gaza-intellectual/>
‘Let It Be a Tale’: On Refaat Alareer and the Martyrdom of the Gaza
Intellectual
Ramzy Baroud
December 14, 2023
------------------------------

Refaat Alareer. (Via Instagram)

What is taking place in Gaza is meant for the history books: an epic tale
of a small nation under a long, brutal siege for many years, facing one of
the greatest military powers in the world. And yet, it refuses to be
defeated.

Not even the legendary tenacity of Leo Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ characters
can be compared to the heroism of Gazans, living over a tiny stretch of
land while subsisting on the precipice of calamity, even long before the
Israeli genocide.

But if Gaza has already been declared
<https://www.voanews.com/a/un-says-gaza-could-become-uninhabitable-by-2020/4569898.html>
uninhabitable by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
(UNCTAD) as early as 2020, how is it able to cope with everything that took
place since then, particularly the grueling and unprecedented Israeli war,
starting on October 7?

“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no
electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” said
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defense-minister-announces-complete-siege-of-gaza-no-power-food-or-fuel/>
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on October 9. In fact, Israel carried
out far greater war crimes than the choking of 2.3 million people.

“No place is safe, not even hospitals and schools,” the UN Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on X on November 11.
Things have become far worse since that statement was made.

And, because Gazans refused to leave their homeland, the 365 sq kilometers
– approx. 141 sq miles – turned into a hunting ground of human beings, who
were killed in every way imaginable. Those who did not die under the rubble
of their homes or were gunned down by attack helicopters while attempting
to escape from one region to another, are now dying from disease and hunger.

Not a single category of Palestinians has been spared this horrible fate:
the children, the women, the educators, the doctors and medics, the
rescuers, even the artists and the poets. Each one of these groups has an
ever-growing list of names, updated daily.

Fully aware of the extent of its war crimes in Gaza, Israel has
systematically targeted Gaza’s storytellers – its journalists and their
families, the bloggers, the intellectuals and even the social media
influencers.

While Palestinians insist that their collective pain – and resistance –
must be televised, Israel is doing everything in its power to eliminate the
storytellers.

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said in a statement on December 6
that 75 Palestinian Journalists and media workers have been killed by
Israel since the beginning of the war.

The above number does not include many citizen journalists and writers who
do not necessarily operate in an official capacity. It also does not
include members of their families, like the family
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/1/to-kill-a-family-the-loss-of-wael-dahdouhs-family-to-israeli-bombs>
of journalist Wael al-Dahdouh or the family
<https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/al-jazeera-says-22-relatives-gaza-correspondent-killed-by-israeli-shelling-2023-12-06/>
of Moamen Al Sharafi.

Aware that their intellectuals are targets for Israel, Gazans have, for
years, attempted to produce yet more storytellers. In 2015, a group of
young journalists and students formed <https://wearenotnumbers.org/about/>
a group they called ‘We Are Not Numbers’. “We Are Not Numbers tells the
stories behind the numbers of Palestinians in the news and advocates for
their human rights”, WANN described <https://wearenotnumbers.org/about/>
itself.

A co-founder of the group, Professor Refaat Alareer, is a beloved
Palestinian educator from Gaza. A young intellectual, whose brilliance is
only matched by his kindness, Alareer believed that the story of Palestine,
Gaza in particular, should be told by the Palestinians themselves, whose
relationship to the Palestinian discourse cannot be marginal.

“As Gaza keeps gasping for life, we struggle for it to pass, we have no
choice but to fight back and tell her stories. For Palestine,” Alareer wrote
<https://www.amazon.com/Light-Gaza-Essays-Jehad-Abusalim/dp/164259699X> in
his contribution in the volume ‘Light in Gaza: Writing Born of Fire’.

He edited several books, including ‘Gaza Writes Back
<https://justworldbooks.com/books-by-title/gaza-writes-back/>’ and ‘Gaza
Unsilenced
<https://www.amazon.com/Gaza-Unsilenced-Refaat-Alareer/dp/1935982559>’,
which also allowed him to take the message of other Palestinian
intellectuals in Gaza to the rest of the world.

“Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about
our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story,” he
wrote <https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/26644039-gaza-writes-back> in
‘Gaza Writes Back’.

Alareer reportedly refused
<https://twitter.com/itranslate123/status/1723756799361228853> to leave
northern Gaza, even after Israel had managed to isolate it from the rest of
the Strip, subjecting it to countless massacres.

As if aware of the fate awaiting him, Alareer tweeted this line, along with
a poem he had penned: “If I must die, let it be a tale.”

On December 7, the writers’ collective, We Are Not Numbers, declared that
their beloved founder, Refaat Alareer, was killed
<https://www.instagram.com/p/C0kHn_fsJlQ/?hl=en> in an Israeli airstrike in
northern Gaza.

Alareer was not the only member of the collective who was killed by Israel.
On October 14, Yousef Dawas
<https://wearenotnumbers.org/yousef-maher-dawas-killed-oct-14-2023/> and on
November 24, Mohammed Zaher Hammo
<https://wearenotnumbers.org/contributors/mohammed-zaher-hamo/>, were
killed, with members of their families, in Israeli strikes on various parts
of the Gaza Strip.

In one of the workshops I did with the group, prior to the war, Yousef
Dawas stood out, and not only because of his unusually long hair, but
because of his clever and pointed questions.

He wanted to tell the stories of ordinary Gazans, so that other ordinary
people around the world can appreciate the everyday struggle of the
Palestinian people, their righteous quest for justice and their hope for a
better future.

These storytellers were all killed by Israel, with the hope that the
stories will die with them. But Israel will fail because the collective
story is bigger than all of us. A nation that has produced the likes of
Ghassan Kanafani, Basil al-Araj and Refaat Alareer will always produce
great intellectuals, who will serve the historic role of telling the story
of Palestine and her liberation.

This is the last poem shared by Alareer.

*“If I must die,*

*you must live*

*to tell my story*

*to sell my things*

*to buy a piece of cloth*

*and some strings,*

*(make it white with a long tail)*

*so that a child, somewhere in Gaza*

*while looking heaven in the eye*

*awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—*

*and bid no one farewell*

*not even to his flesh*

*not even to himself—*

*sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up*

*above*

*and thinks for a moment an angel is there*

*bringing back love*

*If I must die*

*let it bring hope*

*let it be a tale.”  *

*Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He
is the author of five books. His latest is “**These Chains Will Be Broken*
<https://www.amazon.com/These-Chains-Will-Broken-Palestinian/dp/1949762092>*:
Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity
Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the
Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU).
His website is **www.ramzybaroud.net* <http://www.ramzybaroud.net/>
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