Refaat Alareer Remembered By Writers Yousef Aljamal & Muhammad Shehada

The Katie Halper Show

Katie Halper

News

4.6 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2023

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this special bonus episode of both The Katie Halper Show and Useful Idiots (the show Katie co-hosts with Aaron Maté, on which she interviewed Refaat Alareer) Katie talks about the murdered Gazan poet with two of his former students and current writers Yousef Aljamal and Muhammad Shehada. Muhammad Shehada is a writer and analyst originally from Gaza who is now based in Sweden. His writing has appeared in Ha'aretz, Newsweek, The Forward, Al Jazeera. Yousef M. Aljamal is a Palestinian refugee from Gaza now based in Turkey. He has been involved on a number of book projects and is also a contributor to Gaza Writes Back and Light in Gaza. Mr. Aljamal has published a number of journal articles on topics that include Palestinians in the diaspora, travel restrictions imposed on Palestinians, and struggles for liberation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Back in October, Aaron and I were joined by Gazan poet, writer, translator, and
0:09.8	Professor Raffa Alarir. On December 6th, Raffaat-Alarir. On December 6th, Rifat was killed by the Israeli Army in what
0:17.4	looks like a targeted attack. The 44-year-old father of 6 was killed in his sister's apartment. Only his
0:24.8	sister's apartment was bombed. The entire rest of the building was not. On today's
0:30.9	show, I'm joined by two Gazan writers.
0:33.5	Mohammed Shahada, a writer and analyst originally from Gaza,
0:37.6	who is now based in Sweden.
0:39.2	He was on the same episode that we did was Raffait back in October. I'm also joined by
0:44.5	Youssef M. Al-Gemal, who was a Palestinian refugee from Gaza now based in Turkey.
0:50.4	He has been involved on numerous book projects and is also a contributor to Gaza
0:55.6	writes back, which was edited by Raffa and Light in Gaza.
0:59.7	Mohammed joins us from Egypt for reasons you'll shortly understand.
1:05.0	So please enjoy this special episode of useful idiots where we honor the life and legacy of Rufat-Alarir.
1:14.8	Mohammed and Youssef, thank you so much for joining the show.
1:20.9	Thanks for having this. And I'm so sorry for your loss. Can you tell us
1:25.8	about how you got to know refat? So I got to know refat in 2007. I was his student, I attended two of his classes and we became friends since then.
1:40.4	We became close friends when we traveled together to Malaysia by chance.
1:47.0	I happened to trouble on the same day.
1:50.0	Nrefat also lived Gaza and we were on the same plane heading to Kuala Lumpur,
1:57.0	where Rifat took me in his house for three weeks because they didn't have a place and I got to live with him for three weeks because I didn't have a place and I got to live with him for three weeks and I got to see you know another side of him as you know like a human being away from the formalities of the student and a teacher.
2:17.0	He took care of me, he even gave me some money that I gave him back later because I didn't have enough money at the time.
2:28.1	He supported me in all possible ways and then we, I contributed a short story called Omar X to Gaza Rice Back which RF had edited in 2014 and we
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