Description
This paper examines the ways in which Palestinian activists, intellectuals, journalists, scholars and cultural producers in Gaza, anticipating their own impending death in the face of an Israeli onslaught determined to find, target, and snuff them out, requested that the world give them a political afterlife and become ‘other’, become revolutionary, in conversation with their ghosts. It focuses on the Gazan poet and academic Refaat Alareer, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike on December 7th, 2023. Since his death, Alareer’s poem ‘If I Must Die’ has circulated routinely across the globe. It makes routine appearances on social media, is read out at protests and vigils, and has featured on banners held during marches and hung up in the halls of universities by student protestors, some of whom have renamed halls after him. The tweets he wrote have also continued to circulate, and are regularly quote tweeted by pro-Palestine activists as a means of responding to unfolding events and preventing those he held responsible for his death from escaping accountability. Refaat knew he was likely, if not certainly, going to die. I argue that the inevitability of death in this case was productive of an anticipatory politics of haunting that asked those of us who would live on, outside of but for Gaza, to be in conversation with and in service to its ghosts. This insistence on living on after death gives new meaning to the Palestinian phrase, ‘existence is resistance’, expanding existence beyond the realm of the living to encompass the dead and their enduring political legacies.
