Refaat Alareer, a professor of English literature at the Islamic University in Gaza, was tragically killed in an Israeli air strike on December 6, 2023, along with his brother, sister and four of his nephews and nieces.
OR Books has put out a collection of his writings, If I Must Die, which offers a window into the death and destruction meted out by the Israelis, with U.S. backing, over the last decade in Gaza.
The collection has eerie echoes of some of the Holocaust literature written by Jewish authors like Elie Wiesel who recount their harrowing experience in Nazi death camps and try to come to terms with the human cruelty and rampant death surrounding them.[1]
Alareer’s book is a tale of horror that explains how every Gazan has experienced the death of friends, family and loved ones at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and that Gaza’s kids have been left traumatized by all the violence and suffering they have experienced.
Alareer lost his brother and 30 members of his wife’s family to Israeli air strikes in 2014. With an ominous foreboding, Alareer wrote to his colleague Susan Abulhawa on October 14, 2023, that “this time [is] going to be even worse. We are bracing for that. We have no way to defend ourselves.”[2]
If I Must Die’s iconic poem was written by Alareer in 2011 to his daughter Shymaa. It reads as follows:
If I must die,
You must live
To tell my story
To sell my things
To buy a piece of cloth and some strings
(make it white with a long tail)
So that some child in Gaza
While looking heaven in the eye
Awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
And bid no one farewell
Not even to his flesh
Not even to himself
Sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
And thinks for a moment an angel is there
Bringing back love
If I must die
Let it bring hope
Let it be a tale.
This poem reminds me of Pablo Picasso’s 1951 painting “Massacre in Korea,” which depicts roboticized U.S. soldiers shooting North Korean villagers, whose faces are covered in beautifully designed masks—symbols of humanity and life.
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Pablo Picasso, “Massacre in Korea.” [Source: everypainterpaintshimself.com]
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Alareer’s poetry similarly attempts to convey the beauty of life amidst the death brought upon by Western imperialists and their proxies.
Alareer was born in 1979 in Shujaiya in Gaza, which has long been a center of resistance to Israeli occupation. The last Gazan area to fall under Israeli occupation following the 1967 Six-Day War, Shujaiya played a major role in the first Palestinian Intifada (uprising) in 1987.
Alareer enjoyed flying kites as a youth, and was shot with rubber bullets by an Israeli soldier after throwing a stone at him as an eight-year-old during the First Intifada.
Alareer inherited his story-telling gift from his grandmother, who often shared his mother’s tale of surviving a near-death experience as a student in the 1960s when the IDF attacked Shujaiya during a military raid.[3]
After obtaining his Ph.D. in English literature in Malaysia, Alareer wanted to come back to teach students in Gaza “who had spent their entire lives confined behind Israeli fences.” He introduced his students to the writings of Malcolm X and many other authors, and organized free courses and lectures in an attempt to develop “an army of young writers and bloggers able to challenge Israel’s narrative on Palestine and convey their own experiences.”
In 2014, Alareer assembled a volume among some of his students entitled Gaza Writes Back, which told stories of “life in the face of death, hope in the face of despair, and selflessness in the face of horrible selfishness.”[4]
Alareer offered a bit of sarcasm when he stated that “the problem with Gaza is that it is full of Gazans,” adding that many Jewish people were “disappointed when they came to Palestine. Number one, there was no milk and honey…And there were people—there have always been people in Palestine.”[5]
According to Alareer, Israel deprived “everything and everybody [in Gaza] of the main traits they possess. Students can’t travel to study abroad, fishermen can’t fish, farmers can’t farm, teachers can’t teach, merchants are not allowed to engage in trade, businessmen do no business. Gazans can’t live in Gaza. And what is their reason. We are Gazans?”[6]
Alareer pays tribute to Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian journalist and activist supportive of the Palestinian cause whom Alareer believes was murdered by the Israelis, and Mustafa Tamimi, a 28-year-old who was killed by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank in December 2011 after they threw a tear gas canister in his face from close range.
Image: Vittorio Arrigoni [Source: corriere.it]
After discussing Tamimi, Alareer recounts his own experience being shot with rubber bullets after throwing a stone at an Israeli soldier, writing that, “before and since, the same situation has been repeating itself again and again: an armored jeep, a soldier armed to the teeth, a tiny figure of mere flesh and bones, and a stone smeared with blood on the side of the road.”[7]
One of Refaat’s teenage cousins, Awad Alareer, a farmer whose family had been expelled from the greater Gaza Strip in the 1948 Nakba, died of bone cancer after the Israelis refused to issue him a permit in time to visit a hospital in Jerusalem to receive the treatment he needed.[8]
Refaat notes the bitter irony that Israel bills itself as a global leader in cancer treatment, but routinely denies access to treatment for Palestinians who get cancer, synonymous with their status as second-class citizens, or worse (former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians “human animals.”)
Another of Refaat’s cousins, Oun Alareer, was among the hundreds of Palestinian prisoners tortured to death in Israeli prisons.[9]
Oun’s son Yasser was later arrested and placed in the same prison cell his father had been killed in because the Israelis feared that he might avenge his father’s death.[10]
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Gazans protest loved ones being held in Israeli prisons where many face gruesome torture. [Source: islam.ca]
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Refaat’s brother Mohammed (aka Hamada), a father of two, was killed by an Israeli air strike on his home during Israel’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge.
Only 21 at the time of his death, Alareer says that, of all his siblings (13 others), Mohammed was the “most distinguished and creative.” He had obtained a degree in public relations and came to play a key part in a popular children’s show on Gaza’s Al-Aqsa television network.[11]
During Operation Protective Edge, Israel dropped 120 one-ton (2,000-pound) bombs on Shujaiya along with hundreds of shells and mortars, which targeted densely crowded areas.[12]
Then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called the Israeli attack on Shujaiya a “hell of a pinpoint operation,” though on one night alone, a hundred locals were killed, hundreds more were injured and 1,800 homes and buildings were destroyed.[13]
Among those killed was Salem Shamaly, a 23-year-old helping medics and volunteers search for injured people in the rubble who was shot to death by an Israeli sniper.[14]
After Operation Protective Edge was over, Alareer says that he prepared for the new semester re-reading Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which he now saw clearly as a story about a “colonialist, supremacist master assuming ownership of a land that was not his.”[15]
Alareer found parallels with the Israeli masters in Gaza, whom he said were acting “like wild rhinos in a field of lavender.”[16]
Alareer emphasizes that a key part of Israel’s colonization—similar to that of other colonizing powers—has been the attempt to deprive Gazans of education and prevent them from identifying themselves as part of a struggle against oppression.
This is why he saw his work as an educator as being so important.
Yousef M. Ajamal, one of Alareer’s students, wrote that If I Must Die “speaks to a man who loved life, who took pleasure in it, and at the same time, who treated seriously his life’s mission as an educator for liberation.”[17]
Alareer saw Hamas as a creation of the circumstances of the U.S.-Israeli occupation and is critical of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Mahmoud Abbas for selling out Palestinian interests. Nevertheless, he believed that Israel would kill Palestinians no matter what they did, writing that, “in the West Bank, we see almost on a weekly basis how Israel brutalizes and kills and shoots peaceful, non-violent protesters. We see how Israel bans BDS activists who call for the human, for the equal right of Palestinians, and the right to return.”[18]
Alareer’s last columns in If I Must Die depict the hell of life under Israeli bombardment in Gaza after October 7, 2023. Alareer writes of bombs going off every minute, of buildings, roads and schools where people were sheltering being destroyed. He suggests that “no matter how many tweets you see, or how many livestreams you watch, the reality on the ground is a lot, a lot more terrible than it is on social media and on Twitter.”[19]
If I Must Die is a deeply disturbing, yet extremely valuable book that offers a rare Gazan perspective on a conflict whose reality has been suppressed in U.S. media and academic institutions for decades.
The brazenness of Israel’s mass murder in Gaza since October 7 has opened up a space for Palestinian voices as never before, so the timing of publication is opportune.
The book makes clear the unconscionable crimes of the State of Israel with U.S. backing, and the resiliency of the Palestinian people in the face of human evil.
Alareer will himself be long remembered as a truth-teller and chronicler of his people’s suffering—with which Jewish people should be able to empathize in light of their own history of persecution going back to biblical times.
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Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
Notes
[1] See, e.g., Elie Wiesel, Night, rev. ed. (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006).
[2] Susan Abulhawa, introduction in Refaat Alareer, If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose (New York: OR Books, 2024), xxii.
[3] Yousef M. Ajamal, introduction in Alareer, If I Must Die, xxi.
[4] Alareer, If I Must Die, 39.
[5] Alareer, If I Must Die, 2, 108.
[6] Alareer, If I Must Die, 7.
[7] Alareer, If I Must Die, 21. Alareer further wrote that “the pain the two rubber-coated bullets caused I can’t feel now. They do not hurt. But the grinning face of the Rambo-like Israeli soldier [doing the occupation thing for merry sport] still does.”
[8] Alareer, If I Must Die, 69. Basel, Awad’s brother, told Refaat that, “if we still had our land, we could have sold some of it and sent Awad to the best hospitals in America or Europe.”
[9] Alareer, If I Must Die, 164. Alareer reported that, after he died, there was a massive gap in the back of Oun’s skull and his body showed a Y-shaped autopsy incision, which led to suspicion that Oun’s body parts may have been harvested. What was certain was that he was beaten to death after he refused to confess to a fabricated crime. Alareer notes that there is a 99.74% conviction rate at Israeli military courts of Palestinian detainees. Meanwhile, Israelis who attack or kill Palestinians almost never face justice.
[10] Alareer, If I Must Die, 169. One of Yasser’s captors told him with a smirk that he had been the one to kill his father.
[11] Alareer, If I Must Die, 49, 50. Hamada had also led demonstrations against Israeli occupation and crimes.
[12] Alareer, If I Must Die, 59.
[13] Alareer, If I Must Die, 78.
[14] Alareer, If I Must Die, 75.
[15] Alareer, If I Must Die, 35.
[16] Alareer, If I Must Die, 54.
[17] Yousef M. Ajamal, introduction in Alareer, If I Must Die, xvii, xviii.
[18] Alareer, If I Must Die, 100.
[19] Alareer, If I Must Die, 182.
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