In February last year, I went to a talk by Dr Zahira Jaser, which focused on what it’s like being a Palestinian woman in the UK lately. One of the issues mentioned was some people’s attitudes to people wearing the keffiyah. These days, people seem to think it means ‘terrorist’.
Jaser spoke eloquently about the design of the keffiyah, about the pattern modelled on the fishing nets of Gaza, where once the blue sparkle of the Mediterranean was dotted with Palestinian fishing boats, and not an Israeli sniper in sight. She pointed out the borders of leaves, symbolising the olive and citrus groves that once spread across Palestine, where no one ever dreamed of a super-imposed nation that would take JCBs to ancient olive trees; and the bands around the edge, representing the international trade roads that used to run across Palestine in all directions, making the country a meeting place of all the cultures and religions of the ancient world, as traders passed along the Mediterranean coast.
It reminded me of the myriad migrating birds in Palestinian skies, described in Colum McCann’s Apeirogon, which attempts to reach across Israel’s ferocious occupation, to tell the stories of the lives of two peacemakers, Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin, who regularly defied Israel’s apartheid laws to cross those fences and walls, and work together with grieving families from both Israel and Palestine.
All that feels like ancient history now, because the only pictures of Palestine we see now are pictures of rubble and tents, and anyway, the genocide machine has drawn the media’s attention away to its next act, the destruction of Iran.
Refaat Alareer survived only three months after Israel began its most intense ever bombing campaign in Gaza but not long before he was killed by Israel, he wrote the poem, If I Must Die.
The poem went viral on social media when he died, and was soon followed by a collection of writings and poetry from the final years of his life, put together by Yousef M Aljamal.
Refaat was a literature professor at Gaza university, and made it his business to train students to tell their own stories, but also to reach out to the world and find platforms for their work, by means of everything from podcasts and blogs to student visas to carry their voices across the world, so the rest of us would hear the stories of Palestinians, told by Palestinians – not just because it counters the media-and-politics skewed stories, but also because humans need human stories, stories they can relate to, and like Jaser’s eloquent descriptions of the orange groves of Palestine, and like Elhanan and Aramin’s stories of their own lives and travels, the works of Alareer and his many students from Gaza University will live on and give us a real history that will live in our minds whatever happens next.
When you looked at this picture, did you think it was Palestine, or Lebanon, or Iran – or maybe one of the many countries the USA/Israel has brought “liberation” to with earlier bombing campaigns?
Click here to hear the regime change list so far (I think he may have missed one or two).
The destruction of people’s homes, lands and histories is spreading across the world.
What can we do, to keep the treasures of human society alive? Keep asking that question, and keep telling the stories.
Please read Alareer’s collection, and find his other books, and his website, to grant his dying wish:
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
Human stories. They are what he lived for, and what he died for.
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Kay Green 