On this day two years ago, Refaat Alareer, a beloved Palestinian English poet and professor and powerful voice from Gaza, was killed in a devastating Israeli airstrike in in northern Gaza that destroyed his family home. He was just forty-four years old, but had already established a worldwide reputation.
The tragic attack also claimed the lives of his brother Salah, Salah’s son, his sister Asmaa, and Asmaa’s three children. An entire family wiped out in seconds. Soon after his daughter was pregnant with a daughter. They both were also murdered by the Israelis. In Israel's ongoing genocidal siege of Gaza of 2023.
Refaat Alareer spent his life trying to show the world the humanity of his people, and for that he was smeared, mocked, and dehumanized by people with massive platforms who should’ve known better. He deserved to grow old. He deserved a classroom, not rubble.
He had survived wars, siege, hunger, but he could not survive a missile backed by a smear campaign pushed by Bari Weiss who spent weeks painting him as a villain instead of a writer begging the world to pay attention.
In October 2023, Refaat Alareer warned that former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss had put his life in danger. Weiss tweeted that he “joked about Israeli babies burned alive” - a claim rooted in unverified atrocity propaganda that Israeli officials themselves later walked back. That smear campaign helped strip away his safety, his dignity, and the public’s ability to see him as a human being worth protecting.
Refaat tweeted: “If I get killed by Israeli bombs or my family is harmed, I blame Bari Weiss and her likes.” Weeks later, he was targeted and killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza as the IDF escalated its attacks against Palestinian scholars and academics.
Refaat wrote extensively about a range of topics: teaching Shakespeare and the way Shylock could be appreciated by young Palestinian students; the horrors of living under repeated brutal assaults in Gaza.
According to an interview published in Global Rights International Magazine in June 2018 and reprinted in the Kurdish newspaper ANF NEWS on October 19, 2018, Alareer began to write in English in 2008 during Israel’s offensive on Gaza. He seems to have felt obliged, to use his words, “to write back in English to reach out to the world to educate people about Palestine and save them from the dominant Israeli multi-million-dollar campaigns of misinformation.” Alareer repeatedly considered and promoted the use of English as a primary tool of expression not only for his creative works, but as an effective means to reach directly (not through translation) a worldwide audience. He stated in the interview:
“… as much as I believe [in], and love, translation, I also believe that we need to train ourselves to express our concerns in the target language, here English…. Palestinians who are able to speak for themselves in other languages should do that directly.”
Alareer also made other references, in this interview, to his poems, his experience writing poetry, and the hope that he would be able to publish some of his creative works, saying:
“I am hoping I will invest more time and efforts into writing fiction and poetry. I have few unfinished texts that I am hoping to bring out to the world.”
Unfortunately, Alareer had no chance in his lifetime to see any of his poems published in a collection. It is only after his death that a posthumous collection of his poems was published.
Just five weeks prior to his killing, he shared his poem titled "If I must die", and pinned it to his Twitter profile. “If I Must Die” stands out as only one of the early poems that Refaat Alareer chose to write in English (not in Arabic, his native language).
His poem, was widely circulated after his killing and was translated into more than 250 languages and is read and recited all around the world. It’s his Legacy for those who never knew him. And to all those who knew Dr. Refaat Alareer, his Legacy is love.
Two years since his airstrike, Dr. Refaat’s words still echo in every street of Gaza. Israelis may have taken his life, along with that of many in his family. But they will never destroy his standing as a dignified, eloquent, beautiful voice of Palestinian resistance.
Share his poems. https://poets.org/poem/and-we-live Keep his memory alive. May his words outlive every attempt to silence them. His words stand witness to the love he held for his land and to the Israeli atrocities.
If I must die - Refaat Alareer
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 a child, somewhere 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
From If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose by Refaat Alareer (OR Books, 2024), compiled by Yousef M. Aljamal.
Copyright © 2024 by Refaat Alareer.
Brian Cox reads If I Must Die the last poem by Refaat Alareer,
