Honoring the lives and legacies of Palestinian academics whose voices have been silenced
I’m glad to see this website as a means of preserving the memory of the Palestinian academics who were murdered by Israel. I hope there will be other websites that do the same for journalists, healthcare workers, and others who have been murdered by the genocidal nation. All of Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity must be recorded and widely disseminated in multiple languages. We never forget or forgive.
Poetry in cover art excerpted from Mahmoud Darwish’s epic poem “Madīḥ al-ẓẓil al-‘ālī” (“In Praise of the High Shadow”):
Son of more than my father
How alone you were
The wheat is bitter
In the fields of others
And the water tastes of salt
The clouds are steel
And this star can scar
And you have to live and be alive
And in exchange for an olive
Have to give your skin
How alone you were
I created two songs in Arabic based on Mahmoud Darwish’s poem. The English version and Arabic lyrics are in the YouTube song description.
Version 1
Version 2
Here’s the English version of the lyrics:
“How Alone You Were”
(Inspired by the words of Mahmoud Darwish)
Verse 1
In lecture halls now turned to dust
Where chalk once traced the arc of trust
A voice still lingers in the air
A question no one’s left to bear
Names written softly, line by line
A universe in each mind
Professors, poets, guiding light
Now folded into endless night
Pre-Chorus
They carried books through broken streets
Turned grief to language, loss to meaning
Even as the sky fell down
They kept on teaching
Chorus
How alone you were…
Son of more than my father
The wheat is bitter in чуж lands
And the sky is forged in armor
And the water tastes of salt
And the clouds are made of steel
Still you chose to live, to speak
Still you chose to feel
In exchange for just one olive
You gave your skin, your breath, your years
Now the silence holds your name
And the world should hear
How alone you were…
Verse 2
A scholar in a shattered room
Still writing futures in the gloom
Equations, verses, seeds of thought
All the wars could never stop
They dreamed in data, ink, and art
Mapped whole worlds from the human heart
Not soldiers, not shields, but minds on fire
Carrying truth through the wire
Pre-Chorus
And even now their words remain
In every student still remembering
Every lesson, every page
Still whispering
Chorus
How alone you were…
Son of more than my father
The wheat is bitter in чуж lands
And the sky is forged in armor
And the water tastes of salt
And the clouds are made of steel
Still you chose to live, to speak
Still you chose to feel
In exchange for just one olive
You gave your skin, your breath, your years
Now the silence holds your name
And the world should hear
How alone you were…
Bridge
Refaat still writes in echoes of flame
Students carry what remains
A classroom buried, but not erased
Knowledge survives every place
From Gaza’s ruins, voices rise
Not ghosts—but truths we can’t deny
You can destroy the walls and stone
But not the minds you’ve never known
Final Chorus
How alone you were…
But not forgotten, not erased
In every book, in every face
The wheat will grow in your own land
The sky will open, not command
And one day free beneath the sun
Your lessons will outlive the guns
Outro
How alone you were…
How infinite you are.
An International Educator in Vietnam 