If I Must Die

The importance of If I Must Die, lies not just in its detailed account of the decades long Zionist programme of dehumanisation and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians – a prelude to the genocide in Gaza being currently livestreamed into our homes on a daily basis – but in the depth and scope of Refaat Alareer’s humanity.

Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on 6 December 2023, said he chose to study English Literature in 1997 (at Imperial College, London) because he wanted to tell the story about being born and raised under Israeli occupation to a world audience.  He went on to gain a PhD on John Donne and to teach English Literature and Creative Writing at the Islamic University of Gaza.

‘His mind was unbreakable and beautiful and fine’ says Susan Abulhawa in her foreword, and ‘books were integral to his identity…His place in the world as a thinker, a teacher and a writer, was anchored to his library.’ In a video he sent her of searching his bombed out home in Tel al-Hawa, after a targeted Israeli airstrike on 3 December 2023, the damaged book he picked from the rubble of his library was an unabridged edition of Gulliver’s Travels. In his second chapter entitled ‘A Modest Proposal’, Swift’s influence is seen again in Alareer’s lampoon (of a lampoon) on the hypocrisy of colonialist discourse.

Despite the persecution and hardship of growing up under an illegal Israeli occupation – a Palestinian born in 2008 has witnessed seven wars including the current one – it is Alareer’s personality and character, his erudition, humour and compassion, that flood this book. As a Creative Writing teacher he worked closely with his students on projects such as the widely translated and best-selling Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (2014), asking them to begin by writing first-hand accounts of their experiences under occupation, and then ‘fictionalising’ them by putting them into the third person. 

He also tried to help them overcome prejudices when ‘judging people, or…analysing literary  texts.’ An emotional moment in his career came when he asked his students which character they identified with more, Othello with his Arab origins or Shylock. Most students were more sympathetic to Shylock with whom they identified as an outsider in an apartheid-like society. One girl altered the famous Act 3 speech to fit the Palestinian narrative: ‘Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions…?’ and ‘If you prick us do we not bleed?’.

Yet for all his progressive ideas and hopes for a peaceful solution, three days after sending the video of his ruined library to Abulhawa, Alareer was dead, murdered along with his sister, brother-in-law and four of his nieces and nephews after taking refuge with them. Four months later, in April 2024, his daughter Shymaa, her husband and small baby were also killed.

The history of US and Western-backed Israeli violence against the people of Palestine that Alareer records is devastating to read. One of the scores of examples the book cites is a description of the 2008 Operation Cast Lead which details numerous massacres, including the shelling of the al-Fakhoura School in the Jabalia refugee camp, and the use of phosphorous bombs to target populated areas. As in current attacks, Israel claimed they were targeting Hamas militants, but a UN inquiry found there had been no firing from the school and that no explosives were found there.

Ten years later, in March 2018, the Great March of Return, a peaceful protest involving a day’s outing by many Palestinian families with their children and relatives, was met by live rounds of bullets and tear gas canisters. Knowing that these massacres are not only still going on in Gaza and the West Bank but that they have increased a hundredfold and are being carried out with total impunity is a situation that is, for most people, indefensible; yet in his long poem ‘I Am You’ Alareer abjures revenge:

I do not hate you.
I want to stop you from hating
And killing me

and later:

    Would you stop shooting
            For a moment
              Would you?

The iconic title poem, ‘If I Must Die, Let It be A Tale’, dedicated to his daughter Shymaa, references the fact that Alareer was a storyteller and a kite maker along with his many other gifts and interests (he was also a volunteer at Gaza zoo).  It is now circling the world like wildfire and inspiring people on every continent as a rallying cry of solidarity. For as Nelson Mandela said ‘We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians’.

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

I felt honoured to be asked to review If I Must Die, knowing that it would be difficult to do justice to it or to the exceptional human being who wrote it. How I should have loved to meet him and discuss John Donne with him, the poet of paradox and empire in an era when America itself was being ethnically cleansed and conquered. Perhaps we could have planned collaborative visits between our two universities or with groundbreaking theatre groups such as Mandala Theatre Company, with its strong ties to Ashtar Theatre Company in Oxford’s twin city of Ramallah. That this can no longer happen is profoundly sad and a great loss. But as Alareer himself says – ‘Readers, as you peruse these chapters, what can you or will you do, knowing that what you do can save lives and change history?’ I suggest one thing everyone can do is to buy a copy of this book, for like its title poem it will become a seminal text, now and for future generations, in the struggle for truth and justice for the Palestinian people.

Jenny Lewis
Oxford, January 2025.

If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose by Refaat Alareer, compiled by Yousef M Alijamal, with a foreword by Susan Abulhawa. O/R Books, New York and London 2024.
£19 hardback, e-book £9.

---

Jenny Lewis’s latest publication is From Base Materials (Carcanet, 2024). She works with the Iraqi poet Adnan Al-Sayegh and the Palestinian-Lebanese writer/ translator Ruba Abughaida on the award winning, Arts Council funded programme ‘Writing Mesopotamia’ which aims to build bridges and foster better understanding between Arabic and English-speaking communities. She teaches poetry on the Creative Writing Master of Studies at Oxford University.