‘A Productive Language’: On Western Intellectual Paradigms and Refaat al-Areer
On the 6th of December 2023, Refaat Al-Areer was assassinated along with his brother, sister, and their children by an Israeli airstrike. Before his murder, Refaat had been contacted by an Israeli intelligence officer threatening to kill him. A literature professor at the Islamic University of Gaza and a refugee living in the al-Shuja’iyya neighbourhood in Gaza, whose brother was martyred during the 2014 aggression, Refaat had not only endured personal sacrifices that Israel imposed on him but also acted as a social leader and a role model for Palestinians and academics worldwide – in life and posthumously. Israel recognised his crucial role both in the blockaded Gaza Strip and beyond, and for that he was murdered. His death is thus premeditated, an attempt to tear apart Gaza’s social cohesion – a necessary condition for the collapse of any mass-based resistance movement – in the hope of demobilising Gaza through massacres of people in their thousands and through the tightening of the blockade. The Israeli-American ideological hegemony over Arabs assumes its most grotesque yet crystalline form in Gaza: an airstrike targeting a luminary intellectual and his family members for his personal and intellectual fight against Zionism and imperialism. This tribute to Refaat expounds upon the nature of his role within the context of Gaza, detailing the values he represents in the wider historical moment as one among many historical antecedents in the struggle for liberation.
Class Suicide: The Theoretical in Practice
Against the backdrop of the 1968 Battle of al-Karameh1 and Fatah’s rise to power in the Palestinian National Movement, Hanna Mikhail, a young Palestinian assistant professor of political science at Washington University in Seattle, decided to travel to Jordan to join the Palestinian resistance. His family pleaded with him to stay in the United States, to no avail; Mikhail’s response was always ‘Those are our people. We need to improve their conditions and strengthen their abilities.’2 Before his mysterious disappearance off the coast of North Lebanon in 1976, he spent the majority of his time in the training camps of the Fedayeen in Jordan and Lebanon where he was chiefly responsible for developing political mobilisation materials for Fatah outside and inside of the training camps – drawing inspiration from the Vietnamese, Algerian, and Chinese examples. Able to forge relationships between the socialist bloc and Fatah, Mikhail helped secure political and military support for Fatah from like-minded progressive movements and states throughout the world.
Comrades often recall Mikhail’s Marxist groundings, as well as his ‘sufi’3 attitude towards life and revolutionary praxis – his preference for staying on the front lines rather than having an office job. In one incident, he was granted the opportunity to represent the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Washington, D.C. He declined the offer on the basis that diplomatic work did not suit him, and that he would prefer to stay with his people in the training camps.4 When asked about the role of the intellectual cadres in the fight against Zionism, he replied that ‘every intellectual that does not engage in praxis is not worthy of being a cadre member in a revolutionary organisation.’5 Mikhail advocated for Palestinian intellectuals to reject material incentives, joining hands with the displaced masses for liberation, a sentiment shared by V.I. Lenin who rejected the stratum of intelligentsia that rejected their historical duty towards the land and the people. For both Mikhail and Lenin, the intelligentsia has the ability to put theory into practice and to use their knowledge for the betterment of mankind, and any role outside of this is simply rejected out of revolutionary necessity.
Amilcar Cabral’s theory of class suicide further elaborates on Mikhail and Lenin’s assertions. Calling for the petit-bourgeoisie to commit suicide as a class, they must ‘be reborn as revolutionary workers, completely identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which they belong’6 – in order to shape and mould the intellectual into a fighting force in the revolutionary context. Cabral’s recognition that the involvement of the petit-bourgeoisie and its intellectuals will go against their fundamental class interests is an invitation to this stratum of society to join progressive liberatory causes wherever they may be. It is through such a class suicide that revolutionary reincarnation happens, where estrangement from the fighting masses becomes near non-existent. Cabral, in this context, elaborates succinctly the stakes which the petit-bourgeoisie are put under at times of need. Basil al-Araj similarly elaborated on the role of the intelligentsia, asking, ‘Do you want to become an intellectual? You need to be a fighting intellectual. If you do not want to fight, then your intellectual [status] is worthless.’7
Fathi al-Shiqaqi’s Call to Action
Despite the loss of many of its cadres and intellectuals such as Mikhail, the PLO fought on. Its exile to Tunisia after 1982 pushed Palestinian intellectuals to conceive of alternative ideological models that were able to wage armed struggle against Israel in the heartlands of Palestine. In 1992, the Secretary General of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Fathi al-Shiqaqi, opened his speech at the Fourth Islamic Conference in Support of the Palestinian Intifada by emphasising the necessity of a revolutionary discourse at the time of the First Intifada. He stated that,
in large part due to the excessive consumption of words, we need to find a new productive language. A language that creates action and revolution, a language that is coalesced with blood and sweat… We need to take a serious step in the right direction, and I assert that this step necessitates the liberation of the will from what it has succumbed to – from the accumulated inaction and futility, as well as the poisonous culture that breaks [one’s] soul under the pretext of [political] realism!8
A cry for the intellectuals of Palestine to create a new revolutionary discourse amid signs of normalisation between the PLO and Israel, al-Shiqaqi himself is an example of this class suicide for abandoning both mathematics and medicine to create a revolutionary resistance organisation. He rationalised the creation of the PIJ as the alternative to the stalemate of the factions of the PLO on both the political and military fronts against Israel and soon the organisation began to discuss the necessity of Islam as a mobilising factor in the Palestinian context. Through rallying the Palestinian masses, the PIJ took up arms against Israel in the mid-80s until the present moment.
In the face of Western support for Israel during its genocidal assault on Gaza, we have seen several academics – Rashid Khalidi, Naomi Klein, Gilbert Achcar, and Adam Shatz to name but a few – condemn the October 7th military operation based on, to borrow from Lenin, intellectualist phrase-mongering, whereby semantics of how revolutionary violence should be used in congruence with the international US-led world order is prioritised over 75 years of dispossession and a 16-year brutal siege on the Gaza Strip. In the case of Shatz, he strips Frantz Fanon of the contemporary revolutionary element of his work – pushing the conversation away from the necessity of decolonial violence in the face of genocide into an intra-intellectual discussion on how Fanon should be read in the face of the so-called ethno-tribalism of the decolonial left. Shatz refuses the application of Fanon in any modern neocolonial context, focusing on isolating him within his time period while portraying the Palestinian resistance as having ‘primordial’ tendencies.9 He seeks to frame the discussion of resistance on a specific personal reading of Fanon, recasting decolonial violence as a simple desperate violent impulse rather than a calculated political decision brought forth by decades of settler-colonialism. For Achcar, meanwhile, he cannot imagine Hamas as a rational actor acting beyond pathological emotions, employing a successful military plan which aimed to bring the world’s attention to Palestine as they employed warfare as another means of conducting politics. The operation on October 7th was an attempt at a political rejuvenation of Palestine beyond the paradigms of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, but Achcar seemed to have missed that very crucial point for the convenient mainstream analysis of Hamas being an emotionally-charged religious fundamentalist movement. These analyses rehash old notions of the futility of resistance by virtue of its purported irrationality and extremism, while embellishing such faulty analysis with vague wording which is neither elaborated upon nor contextualised in their contemporary timeframe. One cannot help but make the connection to Lenin’s denunciation of intellectual phrase-mongering: vague slogans and words that are repeated ad-nauseam to downplay revolutionary sentiments while contributing nothing to liberation.
These positions by prominent academics, however, are hardly surprising; Western academia’s attempts at a positive and objective neutrality that won’t indemnify them lends itself to siding with Zionism. After all, what is the net gain for siding with Palestinians? One has so much more to lose materially in siding with Palestine and its resistance – whether it is that prize, work opportunity, or fellowship that may be denied. Never talking about the Palestinian resistance, or only talking about it when absolutely pressed to, coating it with a fundamentalist, primordial paint is convenient; it does not cost academics anything but rather asserts a dominant narrative that seeks to decontextualise October 7th and to disregard armed action entirely. Western academia is unable to grasp Palestinian resistance precisely because the latter represents the antithesis of what it stands for; it is a contemporary struggle for liberation from Israeli-American domination that is costly for its supporters in many cases. In some distant future, one may see a litany of literature about the Palestinian resistance and Palestine’s long march to liberation after the demise of Zionism. Writing about Palestine retrospectively will then become safe, and the books will laud Hamas and any other Palestinian movement for liberation. Until then, however, one is forced to make the conclusion that Palestine will remain impossible to tackle for Western academia outside of unproductive languages and terminologies because to scrutinise Israel comes with risk. It is within this context that Refaat’s martyrdom presents itself: it is a litmus test for the intellectual both in the Global North as well as the Global South. It is a call for class suicide, for humility in the face of Palestinian armed struggle.
Refaat, A Nodal Link in Liberation
Refaat al-Areer, like Mikhail, Lenin, Cabral, al-Araj and al-Shiqaqi before him, emphasised the importance of staying close to his people. His students remember him on a very personal level; his tireless devotion to pushing them to do their best highlights his affectionate relationship with them. Elevating their voices, Refaat compiled their talents in Gaza Writes Back, a collection of writings of fifteen young Palestinian voices in Gaza. Refaat understood the necessity of becoming one with the people, of the futility of elitism in a colonial context, and it is in this sense that he was committing his own class suicide. Through his degree in English literature, academic skills, and socioeconomic standing, he could have left Gaza and lived the rest of his life in any European capital like many did before him. Instead, he (and as Louis Allday makes the comparison, Ghassan Kanafani too) chose to stay on the front lines knowing full well that he might one day be martyred.
Refaat’s TEDxShujaiyya talk is indicative of how he positioned himself on a personal level. He emphasised that ‘oral history should always belong to the people,’ stressing that this history is not of concern to just the elites, nor is it their property to claim. ‘Let’s beg [our forefathers] to tell us stories,’ exclaimed Refaat, in a manner reminiscent of Ghassan Kanafani’s approach in writing his famous short story, Umm Saad. Ghassan used to wait every Tuesday of the week to sit down with Umm Saad, asking her for the latest news about the Fedayeen. A Palestinian refugee from the Galilee that saw her own son joining the Fedayeen, the novella is not merely an abstract motif symbolising the plight of our ancestors with the flame of revolutionary vigour being passed down from generation to generation but is also a present material reality of the resistance in Gaza and its cells in the West Bank. It is through his real experience with Umm Saad that the story developed. Ghassan, just like Refaat, emphasised the role of the story as a driver for change – a story rooted in the experience of dispossession and war derived primarily from the material conditions of the masses. Iraqi Marxist Hadi al-Alawi’s attempts to regionalise Marxism in a West Asian framework, criticising the Marxists of his time for their failure to take oral and written heritage into account, is likewise strikingly similar to Refaat’s approach to literary writing.10 One can see the throughlines between Hadi and Refaat, whereby both of them reject the elitism which plagued their respective fields: Hadi in the Marxist academic sphere, and Refaat in the literary writing sphere.
Refaat’s martyrdom manifests itself in Shiqaqi’s call to produce a new language that appeals to the common people and unites them under revolutionary principles. Consumption of words has stifled us for generations: books, articles, intra-intellectual discussions in cosy cafés and the like. Such a criticism need not be anti-intellectual: it is clear that such a phenomenon of ‘consumption of words’ (peace, coexistence, terrorism, religious fundamentalism) is aimed at a large portion of intellectuals and their treatment of Palestine as a career in of itself or just another subject to talk about rather than a serious cause for the liberation of an entire people. Would Fanon support October 7th? Is Hamas acting on some sort of ‘primordial’ tendencies? Is there a compromise between Israelis and Palestinians that appeases both sides? What about the fact that Hamas is somehow fundamentalist? All of these discussions, in hindsight, seem to be moot in the face of everything happening to Gazans; their significance (and convenience) lies in the moment that such arguments are being made, but they do not form a productive discourse that Refaat would have wanted us to tackle. These arguments, focusing the crux of their attention on mainstream analyses of the resistance, are not made in good faith; they are meant to undermine the resistance. Focusing on debunking them, time and time again, is wasted energy that could be put to better use.
Intellectuals like Ghassan and Hanna Mikhail criticised the ‘bureaucratisation of the Palestinian Revolution,’ whereby fancy suits replace military gear, and semantic intellectual discussions replace actual work on the ground. Decades later, this bureaucratisation has manifested itself in the Palestinian Authority. It is clear how the slippery slope of elitism can drive entire national liberation movements (the PLO in this case) into submission and collaboration with Zionism and American imperialism. We cannot mourn Refaat without ridding ourselves of the old language of rational compromises, realpolitik and other buzzwords that aim to strip us of our collective agency for an amorphous solution to our plights – a solution imposed from the halls of the White House and intellectual conversations in the imperial core. Any solution to our plight should stem from the alleys of the refugee camps and the fields of the villages, from the very people who are suffering under the yoke of US imperialism and Israeli settler colonialism. Unequivocal support for the Palestinian resistance should be non-negotiable in the face of a world assault on its material existence, and such support should be the backbone of the new language that we can (finally) mourn Refaat in.
The thread that ties Refaat al-Areer to Hanna Mikhail, V.I. Lenin, Amilcar Cabral, Fathi al-Shiqaqi, Hadi al-Alawi, as well as Ghassan Kanafani, is the collective rejection of attempts to place the intellectual on a podium separate from the masses. This podium is the logical outcome of the theory of homo economicus, which positions individualist material advancement above the collective interest of the people; the dominant ideology necessitates submission in favour of certain material gains which strip one’s class consciousness from that of the ordinary people. As such, rejecting this dominant ideology necessitated the revolutionary thinkers stepping off this podium and joining the masses. Some of them took up the gun, and others, like Refaat, took up the pen. In Refaat’s case, he built love among his peers and disciples. Unabashedly clear-cut and affectionate with his people, Refaat did not spare Zionists and conditional allies alike from critique. Within the tragedy of his assassination, one can find a semblance of solace: that he lived for his students, children, and friends, that he will become immortalised in the mind of every student who is writing on Gaza, and that he will forever stay cherished as a social leader who was invaluable to Gaza. He will be remembered by people firstly as a friend, secondly as a proud Palestinian, and thirdly as an intellectual whose love for Palestine and its resistance knew no bounds. To honour Refaat, to really mourn him, is to produce a new language unbounded by Western concerns. Striving to be just like Refaat, uncompromising towards bad-faith actors while focusing the crux of our attention on discussions that merit a response to people who are genuinely trying to learn and broaden their theoretical and historical lens, is the truest mourning one could give to him.
References
1 The Battle of Al-Karameh (21st of March, 1968) was an Israeli offensive against the Palestinian Fedayeen at the border town of al-Karameh. It resulted in approximately 28 dead and 90 wounded Israeli soldiers. The casualties forced Israel to halt its offensive, with the Fedayeen winning the Arab public’s support as a result of this battle in contrast to the still-fresh defeat of 1967.
2 Helo, Jihan. Ghoyyeba Fa Izdada Houdoran: Hanna Ibrahim Mikhael (Abu Omar) He Was Absent but More Present: About Hanna Mikhael. (Amman: Al-Ahliyya, 2019), p. 91.
3 The word sufi here is a reference to an Islamic ascetic approach to life which posits the material as a factor to an individual's moral and ethical corruption.
4 Helo, Jihan. Ghoyyeb Fa Izdada Houdoran, p. 62.
5 Helo, Jihan. Ghoyyeb Fa Izdada Houdoran, p. 58.
6 Cabral, Amílcar, and Richard Handyside. Revolution in Guinea: An African People’s Struggle: Selected Texts. (London: Stagel, 1974), p. 89.
7 Rafidi, Wesam, 'The Researcher-Fighter in the Face of Settler-Colonialism: Palestine as a Case Study.' In al-Araj, Basil. Wajjadtu Ajwibati: Hakatha Takallama Asshaheed Basil al-Araj I Have Found My Answers: This Is How Martyr Basil Al-Araj Spoke. (Jerusalem: Dar Ra’bal, 2018), p. 374.
8 Al-Shiqaqi, Fathi, and Refaat Sayyed Ahmad. Rihlat al-Dam Allathi Hazzam al-Sayef: al-Aamal al-Kamila Lal Shaheed al-Doctor Fathi al-Shiqaqi The Journey of the Blood that Defeated the Sword: The Complete Works of the Martyr Dr. Fathi al-Shiqaqi. (Cairo: Yaffa Center for Studies and Research, 1997), 2:1283.
9 This issue was discussed by Abdaljawad Omar in his interview for Ebb with Louis Allday in November 2023.
10 Hadi al-Alawi, named the Scion of the Two Civilisations for his interest in both Islamic and Chinese histories and heritage, is an Iraqi Marxist thinker and opposition figure that attempted, through his writings, to root West Asian (primarily Arab) culture in a Marxist lens via examining the social relations that produce the history and heritage of the region. See: Suleiman, Khaled, and Haidar Jawad. Al-Hiwar al-Akheer Ma’ al-Mufakker Hadi al-Alawi: Hiwar al-Hadir wa al-Mustaqbal The Final Conversation with Hadi Al-Alawi: A Discussion about the Present and the Future. (Damascus: Dar al-Talee’a, 2015), p. 56.