Palestine

Refaat Alareer was born in Gaza City in September 1979 during the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip. He was killed on December 6, 2023 by an airstrike in northern Gaza during the present invasion underway of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli army.

Alareer was a poet and an activist, and professor of world literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza. He considered the power of storytelling as an important form of resistance and co-founded the organization “We are not Numbers,” a mentorship program for Palestinian writers. He was editor of Gaza Writes Back: Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (2013), and Gaza Unsilenced (2015).

While sheltering in a UNRWA school, Alareer had received multiple death threats stating that the Israeli army knew his location. He sought refuge in his sister’s apartment which was subsequently bombed killing him together with his brother and nephew, and his sister and her three children.

Alareer wrote his poem “If I Must Die,” a few days before he was killed and it has been widely circulated and translated into over 40 languages since then. It was inspired by Black poet Claude McKay’s 1919 poem “If We Must Die,” a passionate denunciation of racism and all forms of oppression, and a call for resistance against such practices.

If I Must Die
Refaat Alareer (November 1, 2023)

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 story

In 2011, more than 12000 Palestinian children flew kites on the beach of the Northern Gaza Strip during a summer camp organized by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). They achieved the Guinness World Record for the largest number of airborne kites at a given time. During the event, the children also carried the portraits of 66 Palestinian children who had been killed in the Palestinian enclave by Israeli airstrikes during a previous conflict.

Credit: UN Photo/Shareef Sarhan https://www.flickr.com/photos/un_photo/6029204185