Khalil Abu Yahia
Khalil Abu Yahia (Khalīl Abū Yahyā) (خليل البطش), aka Khalil al-Baṭsh, 27, was a scholar, activist, and an organic intellectual. He dedicated his truncated life to cognitive liberation from colonial mental models and from Zionism’s epistemological erasure of Palestinians.
Abu Yahia worked as a public school English teacher and a freelance English translator. In September 2023, he was appointed a lecturer in the English Department of the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG).
He began engaging with postcolonial English literature at al-Aqsa University, where he earned a BA in 2018. It was there that he fell in love with the writings of Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Ghassan Kanafani, as he chronicled on his Instagram page. College was also where he became an activist with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which he advocated until his last days.
His mentor was Dr. Haidar Eid, professor of postcolonial literature, with whom he would develop a close collaboration. They worked on an oral history project interviewing 21 Nakba survivors in Gaza. They also produced a short film titled “Returning to Zarnouqa,” recalling the village from which Eid’s parents were expelled in 1948.
Eid and Abu Yahia were active in Gaza’s Great March of Return (GMR) protests, the huge weekly gatherings that lasted for nearly two years (2018-2019). The protests called for an end to Israel’s ruinous blockade on Gaza and asserted Palestinians’ inalienable right of return to the homes from which they were expelled in 1948.
The only time Abu Yahia left Gaza was in 2019, when he traveled to East Jerusalem for spinal cord cancer surgery. Availing himself of the rare opportunity to see the rest of Palestine, he made a pilgrimage to Ghassan Kanafani’s house in `Akka (Acre). Standing in front of the home, Abu Yahia wrote, “I hope to live for the day when my friends and I from Gaza can visit Ghassan’s house without Erez or occupation or colonialism (to hell and the dustbin of history).”
By this point, Abu Yahia was working toward his master’s degree in linguistics and translation at IUG. He also honed other kinds of research-based writing, including a deeply reported feature story with two Israeli coauthors on how Israel’s blockade undermined Gaza’s potential to build climate resilience.
In 2022, he earned his MA from IUG with a thesis titled Decolonizing The Nation through Translation: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Anti-Colonial Palestinian Narrative. The thesis shows how Palestinian translators leave an intentional mark in their works, reconstructing rather than merely transmitting texts to put forward a vibrant Palestinian counter-narrative.
Ten days into Israel’s 2023 assault, Abu Yahia told an interviewer: “I fear that I will die without achieving my dreams. I want to complete my PhD. I want to rebuild my family’s house.” And he reiterated his commitment to BDS: “When every government boycotts this colonial system, it will be isolated. And that’s how it will end.”
On 29 October 2023, Khalil Abu Yahia was killed by an Israeli airstrike on his in-laws’ home in al-Zawayda in central Gaza, along with his wife Tasneem Thabet and their two baby daughters, Elaf (2) and Retal (1). At least 17 other family members also perished.
Tributes poured in from all over the world, remembering a luminous mind cut down in its prime. Dutch university students named their protest encampment in Abu Yahia’s honor. A student at the University of Bologna dedicated his thesis to him. And editors of Jewish Currents eulogized Abu Yahia’s “unfettered imagination.”
