In the fall of 2023, as snow fell softly outside a classroom in Wyoming, I stood at the front of the room preparing to give a presentation about the First Amendment. The course was called Free Speech, and I had been looking forward to this discussion. Moments before I began, a message appeared on my phone: my friend and teacher, Dr. Refaat Alareer, had been killed in Gaza.
I froze. My body turned cold, as if the snow had found its way inside me. My classmate Zakaria, from Morocco, sat beside me. When I told him what had happened, he whispered, “You should tell the professor. You can’t give the presentation now.”
But I couldn’t stop. I told him, I have to do it. Maybe it was denial, maybe it was duty. I stood in front of my classmates and delivered my presentation while my mind was somewhere else, on Gaza’s shattered streets, on Dr. Refaat’s face, on the laughter we shared on the beach before I left.
When I finished, I sat down and stared at the snow outside the window. Around me, students chatted and laughed. Their voices sounded distant, like echoes from another world. I felt as if I were living in two dimensions, one where life moved peacefully forward, and another where everything I loved was collapsing. That was the day I learned what exile really means.
That distance deepened months later. One night, after an evening of laughter with friends at my home in Wyoming, a rare attempt to escape the heaviness of the news, my wife warned me, half-jokingly, “We’ve laughed too much tonight. Something bad will happen.”
After everyone left, I lay in bed scrolling through Facebook and family WhatsApp groups, checking on Gaza. Then I saw the post: my brother-in-law Amer had been killed.
He was cheerful and kind, a man of humor and faith. He was killed while trying to bring food for his children. I remember staring at the screen, my body shaking, tears refusing to come. My heart felt like it was being pressed under a stone. I didn’t wake my wife; I just waited for morning, knowing the world had changed again.
Wyoming, in many ways, has become another home for me. It is calm, generous, and safe. My professors and colleagues cared deeply, checking on me, even cooking for me when the war began. But even as I teach and write, I carry Gaza inside me. I am perhaps one of the only Palestinians in the state, and I hold that identity proudly. I tell my students, “My name is Abdalrahim. It’s hard to pronounce, but that’s who I am.”
In academic spaces, I never hide being Palestinian. My very presence in a classroom is a quiet act of resistance.
Still, there are moments of misunderstanding. Once, during a class presentation about Palestinian politics, a student interrupted to claim that Palestinians are “the most antisemitic people on earth.” I remember the sting of that moment, but also the comfort of seeing other students and even the professor stand up to challenge him. That day reminded me why I keep speaking: not to convince everyone, but to reach the ones who still want to learn.
I am doing my PhD in English – Public Humanities at the University of Wyoming. My scholarship mirrors my life. I study algorithmic injustice and the erasure of Palestinian voices in Western media. As a Palestinian scholar, I experience this every day when posts about Gaza vanish from social media feeds, when algorithms hide our grief, when news headlines reduce our lives to numbers. The digital world is building new walls, erasing memory with code. Through my dissertation, I try to document that erasure, to prove that this silencing is deliberate, measurable, and ongoing. To research is to resist.
For me, the public humanities are not abstract theory; they are a lifeline. They allow me to translate research into dialogue, archives into stories, and statistics into faces. To write is to remember, to insist that our narrative will not be buried under rubble or hashtags. My work is an extension of Gaza’s collective voice, refusing disappearance.
I have learned resilience from those I’ve lost. Dr. Refaat, who once teased me about living in Wyoming, “No one even knows where that is!” mentored me through every step of my academic journey. He helped me prepare for my scholarship interviews, connected me with work in Gaza, and believed in my potential long before I did. He was constantly attacked online for his writing about Palestine, but he never stopped. He taught me that writing itself is a form of courage.
Amer, my brother-in-law, taught me faith. Even in the darkest days, he cracked jokes, made everyone laugh, and told his children, “These times will pass.” I carry both of them with me—Dr. Refaat’s persistence and Amer’s hope—into every classroom, every page I write, every conversation with my children. Their voices guide me more than any textbook or theory.
Exile has changed my understanding of freedom and belonging. In Gaza, even speech can cost you your life. More than 250 journalists have been killed in this genocide simply for telling the truth. Here in the U.S., I can speak freely, but the safety feels fragile, conditional. The most dangerous kind of silence is the one that denies the truth, when people refuse to call Gaza’s destruction a genocide, or pretend history began on October 7. Ignorance is not neutral; it is complicity.
What keeps me going are my children—their laughter, their future, their right to live without fear. My parents, still in Gaza, tell me on the phone, “Keep going. Even if we die, we’re proud that you can continue our story.” Their faith is my fuel.
Every day, I live in two worlds. One is filled with safety, light, and the sound of my children learning new words in English. The other is filled with rubble, loss, and unanswered messages from family and friends. I have learned to live in both at once and to hold grief and strength in the same breath.
If I could speak to the world, not as a scholar but simply as a father and a Palestinian, I would say this: Look at Palestinians from a human perspective, not a political one. And if politics blinds you, then at least care for the children of Gaza, of everywhere. Because half of Gaza’s population are children, and they deserve the same simple things my own children have here: safety, light, and the chance to dream.
