When Just World Books published the first edition of Gaza Writes Back in 2014, we partnered with the American Friends Service Committee to bring Dr. Refaat and two of his story contributors to tour eight cities in the United States. You can find many photos and descriptions of events on that tour at this small blog we created. (In the above image you can see Refaat, at right, along with story contributors Yousef Aljamal and Rawan Yaghi, speaking at the University of Pennsylvania during the tour. Sarah Ali was supposed to be with them, but the Israelis would not allow her to leave Gaza.)
For many of the American attendees at our events, meeting and interacting with Refaat and his colleagues was the first time they had ever knowingly met a Palestinian from Gaza. The three Gazans left a deep impression on everyone they met and made long-lasting friendships with Americans from a broad range of backgrounds.
In 2019, Refaat created his own Youtube channel. This is an amazing resource! When the coronavirus struck the following year, he used it to document many of the English-lit courses he then taught online, 2020-22.
His channel contains many other treasures, including readings of three of the stories in Gaza Writes Back.
Elsewhere on Youtube, you can find the lovely 15-minute talk in English that Refaat gave in 2016 to “TEDxShujaiya”, a gathering he had helped to assemble. You can also find numerous other longer or shorter videos in which Refaat is speaking– either before or during the genocide that Israel started undertaking against Gaza in October 2023.
Youtube also hosts some great resources related to Gaza Writes Back, including:
- this 16-minute assessment of the book by Stephen Heiner (which contains a couple of short readings from the book)
- this 16-minute interview with Yousef Aljamal, about the story “Omar X” that he had contributed to the book.
There’s a lot of other great Refaat-related content in the archives of Just World Educational, Electronic Intifada, or We Are Not Numbers.
One of Refaat’s best-loved poems was “If I Must Die”, which he wrote and shared on social media back in 2011. Especially after the Israeli military killed him– along with seven family members– in a targeted assassination, its text became iconic, ricocheting around the world in more than 200 translations. Nine days after his killing, we had already collected 38 of them!
In December 2024, Refaat’s former student, Dr. Yousef Aljamal, who over the years had become his dear friend and collaborator, worked with OR Books to pull together an anthology showcasing much of Refaat’s poetry and prose under the title If I Must Die.
Efforts to collate and document much more of Refaat’s literary and pedagogical legacy are continuing.