Jewish Voice for Peace

May his memory continue to fuel a revolution.

And last year, on the first anniversary of his death, Refaat’s collection of poetry, If I Must Die, was published by OR Books.

In 2024, students and faculty across US universities renamed their encampments, halls, and libraries after Refaat Alareer, amplifying their call for divestment from the Israeli government and its institutions.

Refaat’s memory and writing has been honored around the world. Years after his murder, protesters still march with signs quoting his poetry: “If I must die, you must live to tell my story.”

“Gaza narrates so that people might not forget. Gaza writes back because the power of imagination is a creative way to construct a new reality. Gaza writes back because writing is a nationalist obligation, a duty to humanity, and a moral responsibility."

One of Refaat’s projects was a collection of short stories by young Gazan writers that he edited titled Gaza Writes Back. In it, he wrote:

Refaat was born and raised in Gaza City. He taught literature at the Islamic University of Gaza, and encouraged his students to write about their experiences living under Israeli military siege. He worked with We Are Not Numbers to ensure that the voices of Palestinians in Gaza were never silenced.

Tomorrow marks two years since the Israeli military killed beloved Palestinian professor, writer, and activist Refaat Alareer in an airstrike on his sister’s home.

$27 million in divestment victories. - JVP The West Bank is in crisis as Israel expands its genocide and extremist settler violence reaches record highs.

To read more about these victories, check out our weekly newsletter, The Wire at: jvp.org/ibvictories

What’s more, we’re showing these decision-makers that our movement will persist in our organizing until they do the right thing: divest from violence against Palestinians and invest in our communities.

Thanks to months and years of dedicated organizing by thousands of people, financial officers are beginning to see that Israel bonds are both unethical and poor-performing investments.

That’s $26.4 million divested in under two weeks.

Minnesota’s state board of investment both declined to reinvest and sold a combined $13 million+ in Israel bonds. And most recently, North Carolina sold all $6.74 million of Israeli government bonds held in the state pension fund.

And now, the wins are adding up. As a result of grassroots campaigning, the Michigan Department of Treasury decided not to reinvest all State of Michigan Retirement System (SMRS) investments in Israel Bonds, totaling $10 million.

JVP chapters and partners across the country have been organizing to demand their state and local fund managers divest from Israel bonds and its support for genocide and apartheid, and invest instead in the health and well-being of our communities.

For decades, the sale of Israel bonds has funneled billions of dollars into almost every sector of the Israeli economy–supporting every aspect of violence against Palestinians, from the illegal displacement of Palestinian families across the occupied West Bank, to the genocide in Gaza.

This number might seem small, but it shows that cracks in unconditional support for Israeli apartheid and genocide are beginning to grow.

BDS WIN! In the last two weeks, $26.7 million have been divested from Israel bonds, and will no longer serve as unrestricted loans to the Israeli military and government.

Join us now in emailing IU-Bloomington to let them know that bullying and censoring anti-Zionist students is unacceptable, and to demand this departmental director step down immediately.

jvp.org/defendstudents

IU-Bloomington is censoring, bullying, and abusing power to suppress academic freedom, target a student for their political views, and further the anti-Palestinian climate spreading on U.S. university campuses.

As anti-Zionists, we know our history of oppression, but we reject Zionism as the answer. Zionism is the political ideology that asserts Jewish safety requires a Jewish-only nation-state, serving as the foundation of the state of Israel and the Israeli military's ongoing genocide of Palestinians.

Because he deemed her work to be unacceptably anti-Zionist, he sought to penalize her. Yet anti-Zionism is a position rooted in opposition to oppression and in advocacy for freedom. This student’s stance should be recognized and respected, not treated as grounds for punishment.

After an anti-Zionist Jewish Ph.D. student refused to remove her "Free Palestine" profile picture, her departmental director, Professor Günther Jikeli, first expelled her from a Zoom meeting and then unilaterally blocked funding for the student's approved conference funding.

Indiana University-Bloomington is the latest university engaging in blatant censorship and violations of academic freedom against its anti-Zionist community members.

May her memory be a blessing and may her fierce commitment to truth and the humanity of all peoples continue to guide us in the struggles of our own time.

For Arendt, the true promise of Jewish political life lay not in domination or exclusion, but in building relationships devoted to bringing about radical change in our world.

And she presciently argued that, far from being a solution to antisemitism, the state of Israel’s rejection of the rights of the oppressed would lead it to partner with nationalists and antisemites who would be bad for world Jewry.

In 1944, four years before Israel’s founding, she presciently warned that the Zionist project’s refusal to grant political rights to the majority Palestinian population would force upon the indigenous population “the choice between voluntary emigration or second-class citizenship.”

She was an early and prominent Jewish critic of the newly founded state of Israel, including for its denial of political rights to Palestinians. She recognized the impossibility of an exclusionary ethnostate.

We honor Hannah Arendt’s intellectual fearlessness, including her willingness to challenge dominant thinking within the Jewish community out of a commitment to truth and justice.