On learning from Dr. Refaat Alareer – Mondoweiss

The following three pieces were written by students and faculty as part of an event held to honor Dr. Refaat Alareer at the CUNY Graduate Center on December 15, 2023. The slideshow for the event, which includes clips from Dr. Alareer’s work and poems that were selected and read by students in the department, is available here.

As scholars of English, we are devastated by the loss of Refaat Alareer, professor of English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza. Dr. Alareer was assassinated by Israeli forces on the 6th of December, 2023, along with his sister, brother and four young nieces. 

Dr. Alareer was a teacher, a mentor, a journalist, a poet, a father, a husband, a son and a friend. To us, he was a colleague and interlocutor. While we did not know Dr. Alareer personally, we mourn him profoundly as an example of the best of what we aspire to be in our profession. 

Dr. Alareer was a beloved teacher and mentor. He published his students’ writing alongside his own in his edited anthology Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (2014- translated into Malay, Turkish, Italian and Bengali), and in the essay collection he co-edited, Gaza Unsilenced (2015). He published his own work in a collection Light in Gaza (2022) co-edited by his student Jehad Abusalim. Abusalim wrote that ‘More than a teacher, he was a mentor, a friend, and he truly cared about his students beyond the classroom.’ Another of his students, Yousef M. Al Jamal, wrote, ‘Refaat is immortal—he’s an idea, and ideas don’t die. Refaat is a word and a story, Refaat is a pen and a pun. Refaat is our poet, storyteller and mentor.‘ That Dr. Alareer was always thinking of his students is evidenced in his message to journalist Ali Abunimah, in the midst of bombardment and just weeks before he was killed: ‘All those pieces you publish for my students keep me going.‘ 

Dr. Alareer believed in the power of language, in the power of stories to make things possible in the world. Watching his lectures, we are reminded of the passion, curiosity and imagination that first drew us to the study of literature. Dr. Alareer also understood writing as a genuine and meaningful form of resistance against the violence of the occupation. If, as he claimed, the Zionist project had colonized Palestine first in the imagination, then his project was to take it back, to bind Palestinians—with love, with language—even tighter to the land that had been taken from them. ‘In literature‘ he said, ‘Jerusalem comes back to us.’ 

Dr. Alareer also understood—perhaps better than anyone—the danger of narratives. He tirelessly tweeted replies to Western media headlines, pointing out their complicity in Israeli genocide. To a BBC news headline ‘Londoner loses 42 family members’ he replied ‘Have they been found yet?‘; to a post stating that UNWRA ‘has verified 104 incidents at 82 premises since the start of the war’ he demanded ‘who the fuck is this mysterious creature who keeps hitting your premises?!‘ Dr. Alareer was often the first to name the violence of liberal both-sideism (labeling Naomi Klein a ‘shameless hack’), and relentlessly used his wit and sarcasm to excoriate the Israeli occupation, for example through his reworking of Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal‘ (2010). He was dedicated to communicating the truth of the occupation to a world beyond its borders, and his student Yousef Jamal explained that in the weeks leading up to his death Dr. Alareer ‘walked miles every day to have access to the internet to report on what was happening in Gaza.’ 

Dr. Alareer was in many ways a perfect example of the ‘artists and dreamers’ that Judith Butler has called upon to provide an alternative to Palestinian armed resistance. And yet he refused to wield his belief in the power of language as a form of resistance against those engaged in anti-colonial armed struggle. He understood that, in situations of tyranny and occupation, both kinds of resistance may be necessary. In one of his final interviews Dr. Alareer explained ‘If you know them in real life…these fighters, they are very simple people, lightly armed, modestly trained, but they have a weapon that Israel does not have, the weapon of the belief, the faith that this is your land, that you are fighting a brutal European colonial enterprise that has been brutalizing Palestinians for over seven decades.’ Two days before he was killed, he wrote ‘I wish I were a freedom fighter so I could die fighting back those invading Israeli genocidal maniacs invading my neighborhood and city.‘

Despite suffering under the imposed isolation of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, Dr. Alareer saw himself as part of a movement for liberation that transcended national borders. He taught el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X) alongside John Donne and Shakespeare alongside Fadwa Tuqan. ‘Israel,’ he explained, ‘doesn’t want us to see ourselves as part of a universal struggle against oppression.’ Since his assassination Dr. Alareer’s poem ‘If I must die, let it be a tale,‘ which he wrote in 2011 and pinned to his Twitter feed in the weeks before his death, has been translated into Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Bosnian, Irish, Tagalog, Tamil, Macedonian, Jawi, Turkish, Japanese, and more. This poem extends a long anticolonial lineage- from Claude McKay’s interwar African Diasporic/Cominternationalist poem “If We Must Die” to LD Barkley’s battle cry inside the 1971 Attica Rebellion- that echoes an unflinching demand for dignity in the face of inhumanity. 

As scholars of English literature, we are moved by this demand, and by the way in which Dr. Alareer embodied it in his life and his work. In his final interview with Dr. Alareer, Ali Abunimah expressed grief that he had failed his friend and colleague. Dr. Alareer responded: ‘I think, we didn’t fail. We did not. And that’s, when it all comes to an end, no, we didn’t, we didn’t submit to their barbarity, we didn’t submit to their brutality.‘ 

To echo a sentiment that has been widely shared: ‘We are all now students of Refaat.‘ 

May we in literature find the resources to nourish a sense of justice that is not bound by state lines, that extends to the nurture and care of those we are entrusted to teach, that does not seek purity but humanity in our resistance. May we, as writers, commit to fiercely imagining the justice that we cannot yet taste, or hear, or touch, while at the same time relentlessly challenging the narratives that would limit that justice. 

May we all continue learning from Refaat.  

Opening Remarks- CUNY English Ph.D. Program Tribute to Refaat Alareer, December 15, 2023

These opening remarks were given by professor and program chair Siraj Ahmed, at the CUNY English Ph.D. Program’s tribute to Dr. Refaat Alareer on December 15, 2023.

Refaat Alareer was killed in the Old City of Gaza (al-Daraj) at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, December 6th. An Israel Defense Forces missile ripped through his sister’s apartment, killing alongside Refaat, his brother, his brother’s son, his sister, three of her children, and a neighbor, while leaving the rest of the building untouched. 

December 6th was the second time during the Gaza genocide that Refaat was inside a building that was bombed. On October 19th, his apartment building was hit, his own apartment badly damaged and a neighbor and her two daughters killed. Rescue teams could not retrieve their bodies from under the rubble for fear that the IDF would bring the building down on their heads. 

Refaat assumed the IDF bombed his building because it possessed its own power generator and solar panels, thus allowing countless people in other buildings to have electricity, to pump water, and to maintain freezers. His building needed to be destroyed because it allowed countless Palestinians, in Refaat’s words, ‘to live a “normal” life, despite Israel’s attempts to starve us and eliminate the possibility of living with dignity.’

During the July-August 2014 Israeli bombing of Gaza, Refaat lost his brother and his brother-in-law, who was also his closest friend, as well as his wife’s grandfather, sister, and three nieces.

I am struggling to understand how Gazans maintain their dignity in the face of this apparently endless series of atrocities, of immeasurable loss, of inescapable trauma—how they maintain their dignity despite the most purposeful and ruthless effort imaginable to take it away from them. How to remain dignified is one lesson Refaat Alareer wanted to teach his students, one lesson he meant his whole life to embody. I’ve been trying since his death to learn this lesson from him.

Refaat foresaw his own killing weeks, if not years, before it happened. His family repeatedly reminded him about the danger in which he had put his life with his media appearances and his Twitter feed, which exposed and savagely mocked propaganda that served in any way to justify the genocide (he may be the first person ever to be executed for a tweet). But for Refaat, speaking and writing were always literally, unavoidably, a matter of life and death. His words contain the vitality of the living precisely because he refused to censor them to any extent even when threatened with extermination. 

Refaat’s language always expressed in equal measure—without qualification, without apology, without fear—both love and disdain. A limitless love for his people (and, by extension, for all colonized peoples)—for example, his pride in Gazans during this genocide giving what they had to others even when doing so left nothing for themselves. An almost equally deep disdain for those who, even indirectly, give ammunition to Israel—in particular, Western intellectuals and media personalities whose condemnations of Palestinian resistance curry favor with the liberal establishment.

It’s this love and disdain, inseparable from each other, that together constitute dignity in its most steadfast form. In Refaat’s case, the sheer intensity of his love and disdain burned his ego away. His apparent inability to worry about himself, the visceral pain he felt for those around him, suggest that dignity like his is antithetical to the instinct for self-preservation. Refaat immersed himself instead in the daily struggles of his city, reportedly taking 25,000 steps around it every day, attempting to take in every detail. When his office was bombed in 2014, he was most concerned, a friend explains, with the loss of his students’ writing; he collected what remained as if each piece were a treasure. In the final weeks of his life, seeing their works published in international venues is what kept him going. The components of his career seem to be almost exactly like ours: writing, encouraging others to write, helping their writing get published. Yet I can’t help but feel that the meaning he gave to each of these acts was more powerful than anything we are able to imagine.

Though Refaat chose purposefully to immerse himself in the darkest violence this century has yet seen, my sense is that he was not completely of this world. He was one of those figures of deliverance that enter history from time to time to remind us of radically different possibilities. If we are lucky enough to encounter them, they work on us in ways beyond our awareness.

So may our tribute this evening seed his memory deep in our being. May it gradually, indiscernibly, take root there. When the season arrives, when the time is ripe, when resistance is required, may Refaat’s memory rise up in each of us again, his infinite love, his incandescent rage, his willingness always to sacrifice his life, his refusal ever to compromise his principles, the lesson he left us with. The war is always won by those who live and die with dignity.

Siraj Ahmed is Professor and Chair, CUNY Graduate Center PhD Program in English.

As I can live: After Dr. Refaat Alareer (1979-Dec. 7, 2023)

The following poem was written by Dr. Melissa Castillo Planas in response to Dr. Alareer’s poem ‘If I Must Die, Let it be a Tale,’ and read at the event to honor Dr. Alareer at the CUNY Graduate Center, December 15, 2023.  

As I can live
let me never unsee 
children burying their 
mothers, fathers, siblings
friends
let me never unsee parents & 
grandparents burying 
children that should have buried 
them
let me never unsee hospitals, 
schools, universities
homes, archives, memories 
knowledge, history turned into 
nothing but grey rubble
let me never unsee men publicly 
stripped & paraded in their underwear 
let me never unsee the pregnant & menstruating 
women with nothing to clean 
themselves
& let me never unsee the tik tok 
videos of Israelis celebrating 
mass civilian murder 
& mocking Palestinian humanity.

As I can live 
let me never unhear
the wail of a Palestinian doctor
at work when her lifeless daughter
was wheeled past her
let me never unhear the cries 
of children undergoing
surgeries without anesthesia
let me never unhear the pain of a father holding the blown apart pieces of a son 
in a plastic bag
let me never unhear the rumblings of stomachs 
that have not been feed
the cracking of journalist voices
who have not had water 
the Palestinians prayers 
for their families 
let me never unhear
the press conference of children
pleading to live
the nightmares of children 
pleading to dream 
& let me never unhear the sound
of bombs laced with genocidal words 
of Israeli leadership 
and the international silences 
that killed them.

As I can live,
let me never unsmell 
the wonder of fresh air
the warmth of Palestinian food 
full of spices, fresh olive oil
friendship & love 
and remember all they
smell is death
the decomposing of bodies 
not given the dignity of a proper
burial. 

But most of all,
As we can live 
let us never unsee, unhear, unknow
the bravery of grieving families
turn to help others
the medics who stayed to die
with their patients
the journalists who used their last
breath to upload a report 
and the poets who died 
to bring us hope,
to be a tale. 

-Melissa Castillo 

 Dec. 8, 2023

Melissa Castillo Planas is an associate Professor of English at Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Center.