Refaat Alareer > Quotes

“There's a Palestine that dwells inside all of us, a Palestine that needs to be rescued: a free Palestine where all people regardless of color, religion, or race coexist; a Palestine where the meaning of the word "occupation" is only restricted to what the dictionary says rather than those plenty of meanings and connotations of death, destruction, pain, suffering, deprivation, isolation and restrictions that Israel has injected the word with.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“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”
― Refaat Alareer

“If a Palestinian bulldozer were ever invented (Haha, I know!) and I were given the chance to be in an orchard, in Haifa for instance,I would never uproot a tree an Israeli planted. No Palestinian would. To Palestinians, the tree is sacred, and so is the Land bearing it”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“What is there beyond the sky?' I asked my mother.

'Paradise.'

'What does it look like?'

'Like children’s dreams.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“All that I can tell you is that nothing can justify it, not even the most sacred ends in the world, not even peace itself, understand me?'

'Yes, Mom. Nothing can justify our scars.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“It is when darkness prevails that I sit by the window to look past all those electricity-free houses, smell the sweet scent of a calm Gazan night, feel the fresh air going straight to my heart, and think of you, of me, of Palestine, of the crack, of the blank wall, of you, of Mama, of you, of my history class, of you, of God, of Palestine—of our incomplete story.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“Gaza Writes Back' provides conclusive evidence that telling stories is an act of life, that telling stories is resistance, and that telling stories shapes our memories.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“What to tell you? Gaza is frustrating these days—well, these years. It’s a good exercise in patience, at least.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“Of all the people around me, you know best that it takes two to complete a story; it always does”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“It took only one gunshot. His brother and the canary were silenced forever, in front of his eyes...”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“The refugee card was and continues to be an insult to remind us of the little that refugees get in comparison with what they have really lost. Would a bag of flour compensate for the farmland they once had? Would a bag of sugar make up for the bitter misery those people have always felt after losing their sweet homes to dwell in refugee camps? Would the two bottles of oil make them forget their olive trees, which had been mercilessly uprooted as they themselves were? Or maybe it is simply a declaration that they are temporary refugees who once had the land which, as long as this card is still in their hands, would still be waiting for them to return. Only a shot of sharp pain brought me back to the present.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“A picture is not going to be like a stone that has been subjected to the rain and the heat and the cold and the dirt and the smell of Jerusalem. This stone is Jerusalem. It is.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“Gaza tells stories because Palestine is at a short story's span. Gaza narrates so that people might not forget. Gaza writes back because the power of imagination is a creative way to construct a new reality. Gaza writes back because writing is a nationalist obligation, a duty to humanity, and a moral responsibility”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“It grew darker, and thus harder to read, as the sun peacefully, sank to bestow a new life on other people. Hamza, sinking into the darkness struggled to read the dark lines lying lifelessly before him. It dawned on him earlier that as long as we sought life, we could give it, and there always must be life close to us, closer than we imagine.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“I am, day after day, falling in love with the years that dwell in his wrinkled face and the memories of the old days which are the beats of his weak heart.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“Awareness is Israel’s most hated and feared foe.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Unsilenced

“So many times, I tried to imagine how he would look like and always ended up believing he is no more than a faceless monster.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“a free Palestine where all people regardless of color, religion, or race coexist;”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine

“Al-Saifi believes that by destroying mosques, “the occupation was erasing the historical proof and evidence of our presence in Palestine.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Unsilenced

“Tomorrow there’s no school in Gaza, they don’t have any children left.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Unsilenced

“That an Israeli soldier could bulldoze 189 olive trees on the Land he claims is part of the "God-given Land" is something I will never comprehend. Did he not consider the possibility that God might get angry? Did he not realize that it was a tree he was running over? If a Palestinian bulldozer were ever invented (Haha, I know!) and I were given the chance to be in an orchard, in Haifa for instance, I would never uproot a tree an Israeli planted. No Palestinian would. To Palestinians, the tree is sacred, and so is the Land bearing it. And as I talk about Gaza, I remember that Gaza is but a little part of Pales tine. I remember that Palestine is bigger than Gaza. Palestine is the West Bank; Palestine is Ramallah; Palestine is Nablus; Palestine is Jenin; Palestine is Tulkarm; Palestine is Bethlehem; Palestine, most importantly, is Yafa and Haifa and Akka and all those cities that Israel wants us to forget about.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“I averted my eyes, looked around, and stumbled through all the faces in the room till they finally rested on his. He was standing like a scared bird, waving one wing and using the other to hide his scar. Aya Rabah- Scars”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“Honestly, the targeting of mosques on such an unprecedented large-scale reflects the barbaric and brutal nature of the Israeli occupation, and the army’s frustration and sense of failure, as it reached an impasse. It resorted to targeting civilians and places of worship, which have been guaranteed protection and immunity under all international conventions.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Unsilenced

“As for those refugees from 1948, who currently make up 75 percent of the population of Gaza—they are still prevented from exercising their right, as spelled out in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to return to their homes and their lands.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Unsilenced

“Israel’s allegation that for Palestinians life is cheap has a long pedigree among Western imperialists. The words of General Westmoreland, quoted in the 1974 film Hearts and Minds about the Vietnam War, always stuck in my mind. Generalizing, the general opined, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. We value life and human dignity. They don’t care about life and human dignity.” Westmoreland is a worthy heir to the notorious lights of European empires, the likes of the Britons Cecil Rhodes (South Africa) and Lord Cromer (Egypt), and the French Field Marshal Bugeaud (Algeria). This history of dehumanizing the “Orientals” still lurks below the surface in Western culture, despite the anti-colonial struggles and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States that made it impolitic to voice such unalloyed prejudice publicly. The need for “Orientals,” for barbarians, as a “kind of solution,” persists. Today they are the Arabs and Muslims, and the Israeli information section of the Operations Manual feeds on and into the latent racism.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Unsilenced

“You don’t know whether this is, this is it. We don’t deserve this. We’re not animals like the Israelis think. Our kids deserve better. Israel knows that they want to punish the kids, the civilians. And I have always said this, even before, even from the nineties when young Palestinians praised those valiant fighters. They are to be praised. But if you know them in real life, when you see the pictures of those fighters, they’re very simple people. They’re lightly armed, modestly trained, but they have a weapon that Israel does not have: the weapon of the belief, the faith, that this is your land, that you are fighting a brutal European colonial enterprise that has been brutalizing Palestinians for over seven decades.”
― Refaat Alareer, If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose

“That an Israeli soldier could bulldoze 189 olive trees on the Land he claims is part of the "God-given Land" is something I will never comprehend. Did he not consider the possibility that God might get angry? Did he not realize that it was a tree he was running over? If a Palestinian bulldozer were ever invented (Haha, I know!) and I were given the chance to be in an orchard, in Haita for instance, I would never uproot a tree an Israeli planted. No Palestinian would. To Palestinians, the tree is sacred, and so is the Land bearing it. And as I talk about Gaza, I remember that Gaza is but a little part of Pales tine. I remember that Palestine is bigger than Gaza. Palestine is the West Bank; Palestine is Ramallah; Palestine is Nablus; Palestine is Jenin; Palestine is Tulkarm; Palestine is Bethle- hem; Palestine, most importantly, is Yafa and Haifa and Akka and all those cities that Israel wants us to forget about.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“But Israel, in its arrogance, the PA’s Mahmoud Abbas, in his cravenness, and Arab regimes, in their complicity, seem to have agreed that a good Gaza is a starved Gaza.”
― Refaat Alareer, If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose

“I nearly forgot about my promise to write to you whenever happiness sneaks into my “little heart.” I’m afraid a letter filled with happiness risks never being written, so let me write to you without conditions; don’t deprive me of the sense of satisfaction I used to get when addressing you”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back