Listen: Refaat Alareer's voice from the archives (2025)

Alareer was a beloved professor, poet and mentor who helped sharpen countless young minds and who still inspires people all over the world. He was murdered by Israel on 6 December 2023, along with six other members of his extended family in Gaza.

Alareer was a regular contributor to The Electronic Intifada; and when the genocide began in October 2023, he was the first guest on the first episode of the livestream – just two days after the bombings began.

In 2014, Just World Books published Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, which was edited by Alareer. It features the work of his students, including many current contributors to The Electronic Intifada.

That year, he and writers Rawan Yaghi and Yousef Aljamal toured the US to talk about Gaza Writes Back. They were accompanied by The Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah and Just World Books’ publisher, Helena Cobban.

I was lucky to interview the writers when they visited the San Francisco Bay Area.

Just a few months after that interview, Israel launched 51 days of attacks on Gaza, killing more than 2,200 people, including 551 children, and bombing tens of thousands of residential and commercial buildings and vital infrastructure.

Israel also bombed the prestigious Islamic University of Gaza, where Alareer taught his courses. The university was again completely decimated by Israeli forces early on in the genocide in 2023.

In October 2014, I spoke with Alareer and asked him to talk about the classes he was continuing to teach after Israel destroyed parts of the campus – and as students tried to resume their studies after so much destruction and personal loss.

A year after the 2014 attacks, Alareer and writer Laila El-Haddad spoke to us about the continuous siege of Gaza. They spoke, too, about how the reconstruction of the tens of thousands of homes Israel destroyed had not yet begun.

They discussed the book that they co-edited, Gaza Unsilenced, also published by Just World Books.

In 2018, Alareer spoke to us twice about the Great March of Return, the sustained unarmed demonstrations that had taken place along the Gaza-Israel boundary. Palestinians had organized the rallies in protest at Israel’s siege and demanded the right to return to lands from which they were expelled in 1948.

He was at the demonstration on 30 March 2018.

When he walked through the massive crowd, closer to the boundary, he saw that people were being shot. Fourteen Palestinians were killed that day by Israeli soldiers who opened fire on thousands of people taking part in the rallies.

For that interview, Alareer was joined by Rawan Yaghi, who also attended the March of Return a few days after him.

I spoke with Alareer again a few weeks later, in May 2018, as he reported from the ongoing Great March of Return.

His new book, If I Must Die, a collection of poetry and prose, has just been published by OR Books. It has immediately become a bestseller.

And the memorial edition of Gaza Writes Back, the powerful volume of short stories by young Gaza writers edited by Alareer and first published in 2014, is also out.

Ali Abunimah had the honor of writing the foreword for the new memorial edition, and the book also has updates from many of the writers who contributed to the original edition.

Listen to the audio documentary via YouTube above, on SoundCloud below, or on your favorite podcast platform.

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