The Electronic Intifada Podcast 14 December 2024
On this week’s livestream, The Electronic Intifada honored the life and work of Alareer with his close friend and former student Yousef M. Aljamal (also a contributor to The Electronic Intifada) and Helena Cobban of Just World Books – cohosts of the weekly Palcast podcast.
Raised in Gaza and currently living in Turkey, Aljamal compiled and wrote an introduction to the new anthology of Alareer’s writing across multiple genres titled If I Must Die. Published by OR Books, the collection features a foreword by Palestinian novelist and commentator susan abulhawa.
Just World Books recently published a memorial edition of Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, which was edited by Alareer and features the work of his students, including many contributors to The Electronic Intifada.
The memorial edition of Gaza Writes Back, which was originally published in 2014, includes a foreword by The Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah. It also features updates from the original contributors to the anthology that Just World Books managed to reach amid the genocide. The fates of several of the contributors to the original edition remain unknown.
Visionary
Aljamal and Cobban reflected on the experience of producing these new books in conversation with livestream hosts Abunimah and Nora Barrows-Friedman.
“It’s the honor of my life that I got to meet Refaat and be his student and be his friend,” Aljamal said. He said he felt “a huge responsibility” in compiling Alareer’s poetry and prose “between two covers and publish them as a book to preserve his legacy so that people could access his writings.”
While working on the book, the royalties from which will support Alareer’s surviving family, Aljamal said he “realized how Refaat was already ahead of his time. He was visionary in many different ways. He would see things that we wouldn’t see.”Aljamal recently visited Malaysia, where he lived at the same time as Alareer and their mutual friend Raed Qaddoura, who was killed along with dozens of his family members in Jabaliya, northern Gaza, in the first weeks of the genocide.
It was an intense emotional experience for Aljamal to revisit the places where he spent so much time with Alareer. But he met with Dr. Noritah Binti Omar, a professor at Universiti Putra Malaysia and Alareer’s former supervisor.Binti Omar is working on publishing Alareer’s PhD dissertation on John Dunne as a revolutionary poet, Aljamal said.
Gaza Writes Back was Alareer’s most revolutionary project and a testament to “the universal nature of fiction,” as Aljamal said. A copy of the book was found in the same room where he was murdered, Alareer having carried it with him throughout his displacement after his home was bombed weeks earlier.
When he reread the collection of short stories ahead of writing the foreword, Abunimah said he was struck by “how fresh and how prescient and how powerful it is. There is nothing dated about this book.”In addition to Abunimah and Aljamal, two contributors to the original edition of the book – Sarah Ali and Mohammed Sulaiman – marked the one-year anniversary of Alareer’s killing in a webinar hosted by Helena Cobban that can be watched below:
Cobban observed that If I Must Die and the memorial edition of Gaza Writes Back “highlight two different parts of Refaat’s legacy” and how many of Alareer’s former students have become leading intellectuals in their own right, including Aljamal.Alareer urged his students to invest their lives in Gaza as he did, even if they received compelling opportunities abroad.
“I think it’s important that his students carry on this legacy, to go back to Gaza and rebuild Gaza in a decolonial way, as Refaat envisioned,” Aljamal said. This includes “rebuilding the education system in Gaza, so that it continues to produce people like Refaat who emerged to be a global intellectual … despite the siege.”
Constant loss
Also on this week’s livestream, Barrows-Friedman delivered a summary of the latest developments on the ground in Gaza, where Israel’s extermination campaign in the northern sector is now in its 10th week.
Abubaker Abed, a regular contributor to The Electronic Intifada and a former student of Alareer, joined the livestream from central Gaza. His appearance on the livestream coincided with the one-year anniversary of the killing of his dearest friend Al-Hassan Mattar.Abubaker said that five of his relatives were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City hours earlier.
“When you lose someone who’s very close to your heart, and you don’t even have the time to grieve this loss … this has taken a very heavy toll on every single one of us in Gaza,” Abubaker said.
Everywhere Abubaker had shared experiences with Mattar – his home, their university, the places they frequented together – is now destroyed. Abubaker urged the world to not let down his slain friend’s surviving older brother and mother and “intervene and stop this genocide.”
Resistance fights on in Gaza, Syria collapses
Contributing editor Jon Elmer delivered his regular report on the state of the battlefield in Gaza, where the Palestinian resistance undertook several remarkable operations dedicated to slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in southern Rafah. Meanwhile, Palestinian fighters remained undefeated by the Israeli military in Gaza’s north.
Cobban, a longtime observer of Syria, joined The Electronic Intifada livestream team for a discussion of the paradigm-shattering events in that country following the ouster of Bashar al-Assad by insurgent forces.In hundreds of strikes across the country, the Israeli military completely destroyed Syria’s army, navy and air force, totally eliminating its capacity for self-defense. Meanwhile, Israel grabbed even more Syrian territory without protest by the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the al-Qaida offshoot that led the victorious insurgency backed by Turkey and the US.
The group discussed the potential impact of the collapse of the Syrian state on the regional axis of resistance and the longstanding efforts by the opposition to drive a sectarian wedge in the global Palestinian rights movement.Cobban distilled many points raised during the livestream discussion in a recent post for the Globalities project hosted by Just World Educational. Abunimah and livestream co-host Asa Winstanley together authored an overview of the recent events in Syria that analyzes why Israel is touting the situation as a victory.
You can watch the program on YouTube, Rumble or Twitter/X, or you can listen to it on your preferred podcast platform.
Tamara Nassar produced and directed the program. Michael F. Brown contributed pre-production assistance and Eli Gerzon contributed post-production assistance.
Past episodes of The Electronic Intifada livestream can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
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