Refaat Alareer, the Poet they Couldn’t Kill

By Saswat Pattanayak
New York, December 10, 2023

They could not kill the poet. They thought they did, when they implemented their targeted attack on the 44-year old poet activist and professor Dr. Refaat Alareer and his family in Gaza - with their surgical strike, using their technologically precise form of murderous weaponry designed to take lives of those they consider dangerous - the same strategy they of course conveniently forget to employ before carpet bombing children indiscriminately. Because 8,000-plus children they have murdered within past two months could have ended up becoming brilliant scholars of comparative literature like Dr. Alareer, if they had a chance. And by becoming like him, they could have dignified Palestinians as human beings. After all, Dr. Refaat was founder of “We Are Not Numbers” - an English language writing workshop project for Gaza’s students - one that refused to cater to their prescription of treating people as mere numbers.

Because “they” are not a country worth spelling out the way they demand others to do. They are a society of a lynching mob, a blood-thirsty child-killing empire aided by the world’s mightiest bully; they are a repugnant remnant of humanity’s worst, a parasitical entity which thrives at the very nadir of its own stench. The construct which has given rise to pathological liars who have failed even to be creative with their outright manipulation of corporate media and universities they threaten to defund the moment their lies get exposed. They are not the ones to be named. Their entity is not to be named. They are not the ones to be centered until they remember - never to forget - that they have emulated the worst of their former oppressors. They and their oppressors were foreign to the land they are willing to gleefully ravage today, whose olive trees they are happily bombing, whose indigenous inhabitants’ gory deaths they are mocking on social media. They are the ugliest makeup artists whose lipsticks are stinking blood, whose mascaras are rotten poop, whose tears are the most self-centered narcissistic outpouring of liquid hate. They are the ones who won’t be named when we celebrate Dr. Refaat Alareer who will forever be remembered for telling the truth, spreading the sermons of solidarity, sowing the seeds of revolution on the indivisible land of Palestine for all its people to live together in peace - just like they used to do, before 1948.

If it matters, Dr. Refaat had already predicted his own death. In a verse now more famous and more remembered than perhaps every Western poet since Shakespeare - he had written (and pinned to his Twitter) just a month before he was assassinated - “If I must die, let it be a tale” -

“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”

Dr. Refaat is today in the noble company of the ancestors - many of them freedom fighters of Gaza, and many thousands of them little children. While the world failed him despite his warnings that he was going to be targeted soon, he must be relieved that he is back in the company of those he had immensely loved and truly missed.

After all, it was Dr. Refaat who had brought to the world’s notice the endless list of children who were killed by what is now abundantly known as the World’s Most Immoral Army. Not a list of the 8,000 children killed since last two months. It’s a documentation of an Honor Roll of children who became martyrs between 2007 to 2014. And a stark reminder for all that nothing started on October 7 this year. The genocide against Palestine and its children have been going on for decades now. That website (Remember These Children) is now taken down, but Dr. Refaat had made sure to copy and paste many of their names and ages on his Wordpress blog for the world to see. What use is education, if it’s not to be directed towards keeping the memories of children alive? Children in that list ranged from as young as 23 days and as old as 16 years…They all had names and they were not merely numbers, Dr. Refaat would remind his readers.

As the Jamaican communist poet Claude McKay had written almost a hundred years ago against white supremacism, in a poem which had inspired Dr. Refaat -

“If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!…

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”

Dr. Refaat’s death was as noble as his life - he dedicated his entire education in English language to empower the students of Gaza to keep their head high and to learn without limits. He chronicled the videos of his classroom instructions, he republished articles and essays on his blog which championed the cause of a free Palestine. He twitted regularly to update the world about situation in Gaza which the mainstream media never bothered to report on. He ran nonprofits that depended only on donations and served the dispossessed materially and academically. His life was restlessly productive, infinitely hopeful, and enduringly revolutionary. In eliminating Dr. Refaat’s physical body from the face of the Earth, the immorals have inadvertently ended up immortalizing his words for the entire world.

Dr. Refaat knew the immorals only too well. Therefore he wrote-

“But why would they bomb a university? Some would say they bombed the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) to punish its 20,000 students or to punish Palestinians to despair. Well, that is true. To me, IUG is only danger to the occupation and its apartheid regime in that it is the most important place in Gaza to develop students’ minds as indestructible weapons. Knowledge is I—L’s worst enemy. Awareness is I—L’s most hated and feared foe. That is why they bomb a university. They want to kill openness and determination to refuse living under injustice and racism.”

Awareness and knowledge are the main tools of the freedom struggle in Palestine. Which is why unlike every other country in the past who made concessions to their colonizers and agreed to “two-state” and divide-and-rule theories, Palestine has not surrendered. Palestinians refuse to concede. They have the knowledge of Nakba and the awareness of history with them. In fact, they happen to know their enemy more than the enemy knows itself. The enemy migrated to their land and got busy with illegal expansions. The enemy had no love towards the land and its people. The enemy had no religious agenda. After all, in Palestine there always have lived peacefully Christians, Muslims and Jews. They had no problem until the enemies arrived with a colonialist agenda. And the immorals resulted in forcible displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their own land and made it illegal for the natives to have a right to return. The immorals tried to take advantage of brief pauses in their genocidal phases to encourage more expansions for US American zionists to come and settle down there (in West Bank for instance) by evicting indigenous Palestinians with violence and military force.

Dr. Refaat knew and taught to children of Gaza, what the immorals don’t know nor do they care to. One has to be in absolute love with their colonized land to free the people and in the process, death never becomes an obstacle. The world knows only too well, Palestinians can’t be scared - they refuse to leave and abandon their homes not because they have material prosperity there, but because it is their homeland with memories of their grandparents, of their dogs and cats and children and kites and pebbles and sparrows.

Dr. Refaat’s poem “Over the Wall” reads of those indelible connections -

“I am sure of Grandma

Who always was

And is still

And will always be.

She smells like soil.

And smiles like soil.

And blinks like soil

When touched by rain…

She has a house that is a tent

She has a key

And a memory.

She has a hope

And two hundred offspring…

Grandma is here

But lives there.”

Gazans are refugees in their own land. Their power lies in them never forgetting that. Who else knows it better than their colonizers. Almost seven decades ago, today’s colonizers had been evicted from their own homes, after all. It’s another story they decided to settle down and take over the very place which had welcomed them with open arms. Dr. Refaat writes of their uncanny resemblance and also of the opposite persona between him and his oppressor -

I am just you.

I am your past haunting

Your present and your future.

I strive like you did.

I fight like you did.

I resist like you resisted

And for a moment,

I’d take your tenacity

As a model,

Were you not holding

The barrel of the gun

Between my bleeding

Eyes.

The very same gun

The very same bullet

That had killed your Mom

And killed your Dad

Is being used,

Against me,

By you.

Mark this bullet and mark in your gun.

If you sniff it, it has your and my blood.

It has my present and your past.

It has my present.

It has your future.

That’s why we are twins,

Same life track

Same weapon

Same suffering

Same facial expressions drawn

On the face of the killer,

Same everything

Except that in your case

The victim has evolved, backward,

Into a victimizer.

I tell you.

I am you.

Except that I am not the you of now.

I do not hate you.

I want to help you stop hating

And killing me.

I tell you:

The noise of your machine gun

Renders you deaf

The smell of the powder

Beats that of my blood.

The sparks disfigure

My facial expressions.

Would you stop shooting?

For a moment?

Would you?

All you have to do

Is close your eyes tightly

So that you can see

In your mind’s eye.

Then look into the mirror.

I am you.

I am your past.

And killing me,

You kill you.

—-

“They” are killing not the Gazans since Palestine will never die. They are merely killing themselves if they could only look into their mind’s eye and then looked into the mirror. If only they could take a break from all those bombings and gathered some spare time whose vacuum wouldn’t have to be filled with their disdain for the truth-teller, now and forever, Dr. Refaat.