#Gaza Unsilenced

[trashmuseum]

I've been reading Gaza Unsilenced (2015) by the martyr Refaat Alareer and I just gonna leave this quote, right from the beginning of the book. NEVER let them tell you it started on Oct. 7th.

"We frequently hear Gaza explained in the context of numbers: this many dead, and that many living, in this large of an area. But what does it really mean when children are deliberately targeted while running for cover, or when entire families are wiped out as they sit for their evening Ramadan meal, or when the only survivors are too young to tell you who they are? When there are so many dead and so little electricity that little bodies are piled into ice cream trucks instead of morgues? When children under six years old have witnessed three separate assaults in their still extremely vulnerable young lives? How can we reconcile these scenes with the impenitent statements of Israeli talking heads about selfdefense?"

[hussyknee]

Today is Refaat Alareer's birthday. He would have been 45 years old.

Dr. Alareer used to manage the social media account of Gaza's Municipality. Please consider donating at least a couple of dollars to Life for Gaza, so that his family might have water to drink, clean and safely dispose of waste. They're 40% short of their goal.

If I Must Die  by Refaat 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

Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine, edited by Refaat Alareer

Free PDF on Research Gate. Free EPUB.

Gaza Unsilenced, edited by Refaat Alareer and Laila El-Haddad

Free PDF on Academia.edu. Free EPUB.

[probablyasocialecologist]

[garadinervi]

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (نادرة شلهوب - كيفوركيان), The Constant Presence of Death in the Lives of Palestinian Children [«Mondoweiss», August 22, 2014], in Gaza Unsilenced, Edited by Refaat Alareer (رفعت العرعير) and Laila El-Haddad (ليلى الحداد), Just World Books, Charlottesville, VA, 2015, pp. 131-134

[loneberry]

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A post shared by Noura Erakat 🍉 (@nouraerakat)

Utterly devastating clip of Refaat Alareer, from his last speaking engagement before being killed by an Israeli air strike. You can hear a bomb at the end of the clip. 💔

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From Lit Hub:

Poet and scholar Refaat Alareer has been killed by an Israeli airstrike.

Dan Sheehan

The Palestinian poet, writer, literature professor, and activist Dr. Refaat Alareer was killed today in a targeted Israeli airstrike that also killed his brother, his sister, and four of her children. He is survived by his wife, Nusayba, and their children.

Dr. Alareer was a beloved professor of literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he taught since 2007.

He was the co-editor of Gaza Unsilenced (2015) and the editor of Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (2014). In his contribution to the 2022 collection Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, titled “Gaza Asks: When Shall this Pass?”, Refaat writes:

It shall pass, I keep hoping. It shall pass, I keep saying. Sometimes I mean it. Sometimes I don’t. And as Gaza keeps gasping for life, we struggle for it to pass, we have no choice but to fight back and to tell her stories. For Palestine.

Dr. Alareer was also one of the founders of We Are Not Numbers, a nonprofit organization launched in Gaza after Israel’s 2014 attack and dedicated to creating “a new generation of Palestinian writers and thinkers who can bring together a profound change to the Palestinian cause.”

Through his popular Twitter account, “Refaat in Gaza,” Dr. Alareer vehemently condemned the ongoing atrocities committed against his people by Israeli forces, as well as the successive U.S. administrations that enabled them.

This heartbreaking poem, pinned to his profile since November 1, speaks to the terrible future Alareer could see coming, and to the resilience that gave so many of his followers hope in the darkest of times:

[trashmuseum]

"Gaza is the example, and continues to be the example, time and again, for what happens when we fail to hold our leaders accountable for their actions and complicity. It is the story of steadfastness and resilience, of decades-long dispossession and an insistence on surviving and existing with dignity despite calculated efforts to rid Palestinians of their humanity and existence. And if we aren’t moved to act in solidarity, or at the very least, speak out, then we have lost everything."

Excerpt from "Gaza Unsilenced" by Alareer, Refaat.

Pictures by @tareq_matar