First things first RIP Dr. Refaat Alareer, an academic, a poet, and a journalist in Gaza who was one of the best sources of consistent updates on the horrors unfolding there. Refaat was murdered yesterday in an Israeli airstrike along with several of his family members. Take a look at his Twitter feed to get a clear sense of just how culpable western politicians are in his death.
When this genocide first kicked off more than two months ago (!!!!!) I had people asking me who they could follow to get a better idea of what’s truly happening in Gaza. Refaat was always one of the first names I would suggest, not just because of his English language skills, but because he had a way of tying the violence to the rhetoric of western politicians and pundits. He was a freedom fighter that carried no weapon. He was a fearless writer, he was an eloquent educator, and the apartheid state murdered him for his refusal to bow to their military might. Such a strange coincidence how everyone in Gaza who's in any position to effectively communicate and demonstrate what Israel is doing keeps dying. But the world loves a dead poet more than a living one.
The International Federation of Journalists said 94 journalists have been killed so far this year, with the vast majority murdered by the Israeli military in Gaza. The IFJ expressed concern at the climbing number of media professionals killed around the world doing their jobs this year, with the apartheid state’s ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing claiming more journalist lives than any conflict in over 30 years.
The videos and photos from Gaza continue to shock, even 60+ days into this nightmare. The apartheid-defending Israeli army arrested dozens of Palestinian civilians yesterday from a school in Beit Lahia in the north of Gaza, and the subsequent images are horrific. The cowardly Israeli soldiers forced Palestinian men to take off their clothes and left them sitting in the cold street before detaining them. The Israeli regime claimed these were all Hamas fighters who chose to surrender, but they were in fact civilians. Several have already been identified by family members as journalists, engineers, or simply Palestinians who chose not to evacuate their homes in northern Gaza.
While these Palestinian civilians are arbitrarily detained, stripped, and blindfolded, the genocidal Israeli prime minister overseeing this is busy claiming that to even investigate Israel’s war crimes is “pure anti-Semitism”. This coward is gaslighting the entire world about the war crimes in Gaza, which other Israeli officials are not shy about expressing. It’s textbook ethnic cleansing being sold to the west as counterterrorism.
This article from the Financial Times states that, “Citing estimates of damage to urban areas, military analysts say the destruction of northern Gaza in less than seven weeks has approached that caused by the years-long carpet-bombing of German cities during the second world war.” One important distinction for what Israel is doing in Gaza is that unlike the bombing of German cities (which was also a war crime btw), the ongoing destruction of Gaza is perpetrated with precision weaponry, over a matter of weeks, against an entirely defenseless population with nowhere to go.
If you’re brave enough, read this article from The Independent, describing the daily reality at the European Hospital inside the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, as described by British war surgeon Tom Potokar, who works for the International Committee of the Red Cross. The first paragraph alone was enough to turn my stomach, but it’s an important look into how dire the medical situation is right now.
As a professor of English literature in Gaza, Refaat recorded many of his lectures and posted them online. I encourage you, dear reader, to watch some of them and witness the love he had for poetry, for Shakespeare, and above all, for Palestine. I sign off today by sharing a poem written by Refaat just days before his murder:
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
May he rest in peace in the highest levels of heaven, and may his murderers be haunted by their inhumanity in this life and the next.