Dr. Refaat Alareer was a Palestinian writer, poet, translator, university professor and activist from the occupied Gaza Strip.
Refaat Alareer was born in Gaza City, the capital of the Gaza governorate in Palestine, on September 23, 1979, during the Israeli occupation of Gaza. A native of Gaza City’s Shuja’iyya neighborhood, he received his MA in comparative literature from University College London and completed his PhD in English literature at the Universiti Putra Malaysia.
Alareer authored If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose (OR Books, 2024), edited by Yousef M. Aljamal and listed as both a USA Today bestseller and one of the top ten books of 2024 by The New Arab.
Alareer was also the editor of Gaza Writes Back (Just World Books, 2014) and coeditor, alongside Laila El-Haddad, of Gaza Unsilenced (Just World Books, 2015).
He was also a contributor to “Life in Occupied Palestine,” a special issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, an academic publication produced by the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, guest edited by Cynthia G. Franklin, Morgan Cooper, and Ibrahim G. Aoude.
While the editors worked with Alareer and other contributors that summer, Israeli forces killed Refaat’s brother, Mohammed Alareer, during Israel’s fifty-one-day siege on Gaza, leading the editors to dedicate the issue to Mohammed in the spring of 2014.
Since 2007, Alareer had taught world literature, comparative literature, and both fiction and nonfiction creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza. He also founded https://wearenotnumbers.org/ an organization dedicated to sharing stories by Palestinian writers.
On December 6, 2023, he was murdered by an Israeli airstrike along with his brother, sister and their children in Israel's ongoing genocidal siege of Gaza of 2023. He was 44 years old.
Just five weeks prior to his killing, he had shared the following moving poem titled "If I must die", and pinned it to his Twitter profile.
Amidst the outpouring of grief, as news of his death spread online, many people from around the world paid tribute to Refaat by offering their own translations of his prophetic poem in to their local languages. And since his death, he has been eulogized the world over.
Like many I am frequently feeling waves of intense grief about what is happening on Gaza but we must not give in to despair, nor must we ignore reality.
In a time when so many voices still rise for Palestine, there is still nothing more powerful, nothing more sacred, than hearing the words of Palestinians themselves, voices that have been silenced, distorted, or spoken over for far too long.
Though Refaat Alareer’s speech was extinguished by Israel, along with tens of thousands of Palestinians. It is incumbent on all of us to keep sharing their voices.
If I Must Die - Refaat Alareer
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 a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye a
waiting 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
