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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/14/let-it-be-a-tale-on-refaat-alareer-and-the-martyrdom-of-the-gaza-intellectual/">counterpunch.org</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">‘Let It Be a Tale’: On Refaat Alareer and the Martyrdom of the Gaza Intellectual</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Ramzy Baroud</div>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">December 14, 2023<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div>
<div id="gmail-attachment_307769" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-307769" src="https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Screen-Shot-2023-12-13-at-6.48.26-PM-680x386.png" alt="" width="425" height="241" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-307769" class="gmail-wp-caption-text">Refaat Alareer. (Via Instagram)</p></div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>But if Gaza has already been<a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/un-says-gaza-could-become-uninhabitable-by-2020/4569898.html"> declared</a>
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?</p>
<p>“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,”<a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defense-minister-announces-complete-siege-of-gaza-no-power-food-or-fuel/"> said</a>
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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>While Palestinians insist that their collective pain – and resistance
– must be televised, Israel is doing everything in its power to
eliminate the storytellers.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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<a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/1/to-kill-a-family-the-loss-of-wael-dahdouhs-family-to-israeli-bombs"> family</a> of journalist Wael al-Dahdouh or the<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/al-jazeera-says-22-relatives-gaza-correspondent-killed-by-israeli-shelling-2023-12-06/"> family</a> of Moamen Al Sharafi.</p>
<p>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<a href="https://wearenotnumbers.org/about/"> formed</a>
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<a href="https://wearenotnumbers.org/about/"> described</a> itself.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Light-Gaza-Essays-Jehad-Abusalim/dp/164259699X"> wrote</a> in his contribution in the volume ‘Light in Gaza: Writing Born of Fire’.</p>
<p>He edited several books, including ‘<a href="https://justworldbooks.com/books-by-title/gaza-writes-back/">Gaza Writes Back</a>’ and ‘<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Gaza-Unsilenced-Refaat-Alareer/dp/1935982559">Gaza Unsilenced</a>’, which also allowed him to take the message of other Palestinian intellectuals in Gaza to the rest of the world.</p>
<p>“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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/26644039-gaza-writes-back"> wrote</a> in ‘Gaza Writes Back’.</p>
<p>Alareer reportedly<a href="https://twitter.com/itranslate123/status/1723756799361228853"> refused</a>
to leave northern Gaza, even after Israel had managed to isolate it
from the rest of the Strip, subjecting it to countless massacres.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>On December 7, the writers’ collective, We Are Not Numbers, declared that their beloved founder, Refaat Alareer, was<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C0kHn_fsJlQ/?hl=en"> killed</a> in an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza.</p>
<p>Alareer was not the only member of the collective who was killed by Israel. On October 14,<a href="https://wearenotnumbers.org/yousef-maher-dawas-killed-oct-14-2023/"> Yousef Dawas</a> and on November 24,<a href="https://wearenotnumbers.org/contributors/mohammed-zaher-hamo/"> Mohammed Zaher Hammo</a>, were killed, with members of their families, in Israeli strikes on various parts of the Gaza Strip.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>This is the last poem shared by Alareer.</p>
<p><em>“If I must die,</em></p>
<p><em>you must live</em></p>
<p><em>to tell my story</em></p>
<p><em>to sell my things</em></p>
<p><em>to buy a piece of cloth</em></p>
<p><em>and some strings,</em></p>
<p><em>(make it white with a long tail)</em></p>
<p><em>so that a child, somewhere in Gaza</em></p>
<p><em>while looking heaven in the eye</em></p>
<p><em>awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—</em></p>
<p><em>and bid no one farewell</em></p>
<p><em>not even to his flesh</em></p>
<p><em>not even to himself—</em></p>
<p><em>sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up</em></p>
<p><em>above</em></p>
<p><em>and thinks for a moment an angel is there</em></p>
<p><em>bringing back love</em></p>
<p><em>If I must die</em></p>
<p><em>let it bring hope</em></p>
<p><em>let it be a tale.” </em></p>
</div><p>
<em>Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “</em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/These-Chains-Will-Broken-Palestinian/dp/1949762092"><em>These Chains Will Be Broken</em></a><em>:
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 </em><a href="http://www.ramzybaroud.net/"><em>www.ramzybaroud.net</em></a>
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