“In Palestine…we are born and we are raised on stories, to cherish stories, to love stories, to seek stories, and at the same time, we are taught early in our lives to tell and retell these stories that we hear from our grandparents, especially our grandmothers, and our parents, especially our mothers...these very stories are the stories that shaped me, that made me the person I am now, the stories that inspire me to continue...that teach me the moral lessons, the stories that connect me to my past, to how my parents lived under Israeli occupation, my grandparents…[storytelling] connects all the generations...as a Palestinian we feel obliged to tell the story...if the story stops, if we don’t narrate the stories to others, the stories are going to die, and [destroy] our heritage and future...
Israel wants to push us to despair…to stop telling stories, to stop living, to stop studying, to stop going to university, to stop going to work, and that’s why, as Palestinians, we see every aspect of our lives… as resistance, even going to school, even the mundane, horrible, boring task of doing your homework, we see this as resistance…living is an act of resistance.”
— Dr. Refaat Alareer, the Palestinian author, poet, and professor of English literature, who was born in Gaza, and was there assassinated, on December 6, 2023, by an Israeli airstrike. The quote is from this podcast, ""Gaza Writes Back: Narratives on Children and Youth," recorded in 2021, which I recommend listening to in its entirety, and the photograph was taken by Refaat's friend, the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha.
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