If I must Die
Refaat Alareer, OR books, £19.99

WHEN Refaat Alareer was murdered by an Israeli air strike on the December 6 2023, aged 44, thousands of people across Palestine and the world mourned the loss of a great writer, educator and liberated mind. 

In the days that followed, millions more became aware of his work, as a poem of his began to spread. His words: “If I must die,/ you must live/ to tell my story” became an icon of Palestinian resistance and the global ceasefire movement. They travelled not just on screens and at demonstrations, but scrawled on walls around the world, pasted up in windows of homes and cafes, appearing on billboards, translated into scores of languages.  

Murdered alongside the more than 45,000 people killed directly by Israel during the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Refaat Alareer became a symbol of that great loss. His poem gave voice and purpose to the helpless rage of those bearing witness to the daily horrors. 

His writings now appear collected for the first time in the beautiful If I Must Die from OR Books. Gathering together nearly 15 years of prose and poetry they form a literary body of work, but also the record of a man, and of a life lived under one of the most brutal sieges the world has ever known. 

What comes across instantly is the clarity of Refaat’s thought and writing. It was not by chance that Refaat – it is almost always just by his first name that he is known in Palestine and the world now – became the holder and communicator of so much loss and hope; this had long been his role. 

As a student in Palestine, England and Malaysia, and as a professor of creative writing at the Islamic University in Gaza, Refaat gave his time to raising up other voices, coaching and encouraging Palestinians to share their experience, to write their lives for the world. In the prose and poetry of this collection we see how much Refaat knew about clearly and humanely communicating life under Israeli occupation, apartheid, siege and invasion. 

In a mix of blog posts, poems and essays, we find a picture of a gentle, thoughtful and steadfast thinker, and we witness more than a decade of violence against Gaza. The works here cover the repeated Israeli onslaughts, detailing the increasing ferocity of the zionist violence, and demonstrating the ways in which all life in Gaza is shaped and warped by Israel. 

In the pieces here Refaat writes in English, often addressing a “Western” readership, but he is never performing a palatable Palestinianness for that audience. These are honest, fierce and challenging works. 

In his eulogy for Vittoria Arrigoni, the Italian activist murdered in Gaza, Refaat is uncompromising in his accusations and his demands: “Yes, we use the death penalty here in Gaza.” 

In the almost breathtakingly vivid transcripts that the book ends with, in which Refaat speaks to us from beneath Israel’s bombs, there is a piercing clarity on the Palestinian right to resistance, and the power and inevitability of al-Aqsa Flood. Elsewhere, the revisionism, lies, and holocaust denial utilised by Israel and the Western media in its deployment of terms like “pogrom” and “anti-semitism” is intelligently excoriated. 

What comes through most strongly is Refaat’s dedication to truth and to the bigger picture. As he tells a CNN journalist framing the current violence as a response to Hamas: “If you start the story from B, then you blame the Warsaw Ghetto Rebels, you blame the Native Americans, you blame the slaves who rebelled against the slave owners, and you blame the Palestinians.”

Where Refaat’s intellectual clarity dominates the transcripts and blogs, his love of language and his deep capacity to communicate feeling are best demonstrated in the poems that punctuate the collection. Many of them have the writer embody a resistance figure: the imprisoned poet, the grieving grandmother. Elsewhere he speaks directly to the Israeli soldier enacting his torture. 

His love of English verse and his great knowledge of that tradition come through powerfully. These are poems as devastating as they are playful: “I am in prison for words./ What would Hamlet say?/ Chains to the sweet?/ Cruel to be cruel?/ To die to die?/ No chance to dream?”

In the final piece of writing in the book, published posthumously, Refaat discusses a student offering him his place in the long queue for bread amidst a shattered city, the impossibility of taking it, and the beauty of the offer. The book ends there. A life cut heartbreakingly short. 

Refaat writes that when the Israelis come for him he will defend himself even if it is only by throwing his pen at the soldiers. In the end they did not give him the chance. Following repeated threats, Israel killed him, his sister, his brother and four nephews in a single air strike. Months later they murdered his daughter, to whom his most famous poem If I should Die is addressed. Refaat’s newborn grandchild was also killed. 

Amongst the mass killing, Refaat and his family were deliberately targeted by the Israeli regime. In the year since, it has been clear that the systematic killings of journalists, artists, poets, writers and professors is one aspect of the genocide in Gaza. This scholasticide seeks to undermine one of Palestine’s greatest achievements: its drive – despite generations of oppression and dispossession at the hands of Israel – to build one of the most educated and cultured populations in the world. 

The book is both a tragic document of a genocide, and also a beacon of hope for a Palestinian future. As Abulhawa puts it in his beautiful foreword: “Refaat did not die, he multiplied!”

If I must die

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.

Refaat Alareer