What is the Refaat Mobile Library?
The Refaat Alareer Mobile Library is a traveling, volunteer-operated, liberation library and mutual aid project based in what is currently known as Atlanta, Georgia. Our primary purpose is to promote and increase access to political education towards the liberation of Palestinians from Zionist occupation in this lifetime and to respond to the urgent needs of Palestinians most immediately affected by the genocidal siege on Gaza since October 2023. We also acknowledge the degree to which our struggles are intrinsically intertwined and are thus guided by the belief that Indigenous, colonized and occupied peoples globally have a right to self-determination. Through our work, we seek to connect solidarity movements across communities in an effort to make clear our mutual moral duties toward collective liberation.
Origins
The Refaat Mobile Library was established in Spring 2024 at the height of police violence on university campuses. Inspired by the numerous makeshift Gaza solidarity encampment libraries created by students to build community on campus and make political education more accessible, a few of us pondered what something like this might look like in a state like Georgia, where students witnessed some of the most violent and immediate police crackdowns on encampments and protests. The militarized escalation against pro-Palestinian students and faculty made it near impossible to establish a standing community hub, let alone a functioning library, without risk of destruction.
After connecting online, a small group of volunteers—among us a journalist, an activist and a nurse—brought a folding shelf and ten books to a Palestine teach-in on the Emory University quadrangle. Since then, we’ve lugged our library wagon to solidarity events all around the city: art exhibits, seders, mutual aid fundraisers, political education workshops and beyond. Our growing catalog features a wealth of Palestinian and anti-Zionist literature, as well as readings rooted in connecting local and global struggles. You’ll find nonfiction literature on Black liberation, Indigenous resistance, abolition, colonialism, as well as children’s literature, poetry, fiction and more.
Dr. Refaat Alareer
Like many of the temporary student-made libraries constructed in Spring 2024 on college campus encampments around the world, ours is named for martyred Palestinian poet and professor Dr. Refaat Alareer, who grew up in the Shujaiya neighborhood of Gaza City under Israeli military occupation and blockade. Throughout his life, Refaat resisted by being a writer and a teacher. He spent more than a decade as a professor of literature and creative writing, was co-editor of Gaza Unsilenced (2015) and editor of Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (2014). An essay of his is featured in the 2022 collection, Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire. In December 2023, Refaat was murdered in a targeted Israeli airstrike, along with his brother, sister, and her four children. Refaat’s eldest daughter Shaimaa, to whom he wrote the beloved poem “If I Must Die” was martyred shortly after.