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refaat alareer
A Year Into Israel’s Genocide, the Fight for Life and Dignity in Gaza Continues
The compass remains: a commitment to stop this war through deeds, actions, and words, and then to work toward rebuilding Gaza and healing the wounds of our people.
Oct 08, 2024
When I saw the news of the October 7 events a year ago, I wasn’t surprised. I had spent the past decade writing about and advocating for an end to Gaza’s isolation. I was among the small number of people who consistently warned that if the policies and measures taken by Israel and its allies against Gaza were not addressed, an explosion would be inevitable. It wasn’t a question of if this explosion would happen, but rather a matter of scale, intensity, nature, and direction.
It is impossible to treat the events of the past year as “history” or something that we might reflect on, because the genocide in Gaza continues. Every day, Palestinians in Gaza bury dozens of their relatives and neighbors. Much of the Gaza Strip still lies in ruins. Most of Gaza’s population remains displaced, living in temporary shelters and encampments that continue to be bombed and attacked by Israel.
At the beginning of this war, I was somewhat hopeful that it would stop, that genocide on the scale and intensity we’ve witnessed wouldn’t unfold. I don’t know if this was wishful thinking, given Israel’s brutality and its deep-rooted dehumanization of Palestinians, especially in Gaza. I understood early on that this war, this battle, this confrontation, was bigger than Gaza. It would expand and extend not only beyond the geography of the Palestine question and its century-long conflict with Zionism, but it would also become a battlefield for a clash of values and visions concerning the fate, existence, and collective dignity of the people of the region as a whole.
Do you know what it took to build that hospital? That university? Do you know what it took for someone like Refaat Alareer to become who he was?
It is utterly painful to search for meaning amid such massive loss. I lost friends and mentors. I witnessed the annihilation of Gaza as a place and as a memory. Streets I walked, places where I studied and worked, restaurants and cafés where my friends and I sat, chatted, and claimed brief moments of joy amid years of blockade and repeated aggressions—all gone. As a student of history, I used to marvel at places in Gaza that stood as evidence of the continuation of human existence and civilization for thousands of years, representing the diversity, richness, and transformations of a country and its people. I saw these structures, with all the deep meanings they carried, destroyed, bombed, and flattened by Israel’s bombs.
The scale of our loss as Palestinians from Gaza is unfathomable, even for us who come from there. What is especially painful about this loss is that life in Gaza was itself a fight. These semblances of life weren’t easily built; they were fiercely fought for, wrested from the grip of hardship despite the relentless challenges of making life happen in an isolated, impoverished, and de-developed place like the Gaza Strip.
Do you know what it took to build that hospital? That university? Do you know what it took for someone like Refaat Alareer to become who he was? It wasn’t easy. Gaza was all about attempts—repeated attempts—in the face of recurring aggression, destruction, and the nuclear-state-sanctioned sadism of “mowing the lawn.” So, when we mourn Gaza, life in Gaza, and those who lived in Gaza, we also think about these attempts at establishing and maintaining life against impossible odds, which makes the loss all the more painful.
Pain was synonymous with life in Gaza, as it continues to be. Most people knew that an explosion on an apocalyptic scale was only a matter of time, because even though they lived day to day, they were always troubled and burdened by the future—not in the long run, but in the immediate term. Questions about water and food security, Gaza’s population density and growth, and of course, the major issues of political exclusion and erasure faced by Palestinians in Gaza. Most importantly, there were constant questions about the future of Gaza amid a larger Palestinian future that was already being destroyed before our eyes.
In a way, there were those in Gaza who “found their answers” and decided to direct that explosion toward Israel, to bring the clash back to its origin, and to put an end to decades of dancing around the truth. After all, the schemes of population and crisis management were never meant to resolve the fundamental clash between Palestinians and Zionism, but to postpone it.
How can one see meaning through piles of corpses and rubble? The search for hope becomes almost shameful. How can you speak of hope if you haven’t experienced sheltering in a school for a year or had to look your children in the eyes, unable to protect them as Israel’s bombs fell around you? How do you make sense of it all when you are consumed by survivor’s guilt, knowing that while you sleep in a bed under a roof, eat a hot meal, and take a warm shower, your friends, neighbors, relatives, and community are deprived of all these things?
The past year has been a daily struggle between all these thoughts and feelings, yet the compass remains: a commitment to stop this war through deeds, actions, and words, and then to work toward rebuilding Gaza and healing the wounds of our people.
I recently had the honor of meeting several genocide survivors—young people who were injured or accompanied their injured relatives outside Gaza. It was my first time meeting people who had experienced the genocide for months and then managed to evacuate. They had different opinions about what had unfolded and what they had experienced, and in their Gazan way, they made sure to share and share, in ways that made me feel like I was finally home—sitting at the barber shop or with my friends in one of the cafés in Gaza City, where people would loudly complain about politics, the economy, and everything else, making sure everyone could hear them.
Meeting these survivors filled me with enough inspiration and determination to work for Gaza for years to come. It was a reminder that the battle for Gaza is far from over. Despite the profound loss Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere are experiencing, they continue to fight for life and dignity. We must aid them in their fight, which began long before this genocide unfolded. It continues today in spite of the ongoing devastation.
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Israel Kills Daughter, Infant Grandson of Slain Palestinian Poet Refaat Alareer
"I have beautiful news for you. I wish I could tell you in person. Do you know you have just become a grandfather?" Shaima Alareer wrote to her slain father before she, her baby, and her husband were killed.
Apr 29, 2024
The daughter, infant grandson, and son-in-law of Refaat Alareer—the renowned Palestinian poet assassinated last year in an Israeli airstrike—were killed Friday in another Israel Defense Forces bombing, this one reportedly targeting a building hosting an international relief charity in Gaza City.
Shaima Alareer, her husband Muhammad Abd al-Aziz Siyam, and their 3-month-old son Abd al-Rahman were killed in the strike on a home where they were sheltering in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, Anadolu Agencyreported.
Siyam was an engineer. Alareer was an accomplished illustrator and the eldest daughter of Refaat Alareer—one of Palestine's most famous poets and professors—who was slain in a December 6 Israeli strike on Shejaiya that also killed his brother, sister, and her four children.
A month before his killing, Alareer posted his now-famous poem, "If I Must Die," on social media. The poem was written for Shaima.
"I want my children to plan, rather than worry about, their future, and to draw beaches or fields or blue skies and a sun in the corner, not warships, pillars of smoke, warplanes, and guns," Refaat Alareer explained a decade ago.
After giving birth, Shaima Alareer wrote to her slain father: "I have beautiful news for you. I wish I could tell you in person. Do you know you have just become a grandfather? Yes, dad. This is your first grandchild. He's more than a month old now. This is your grandchild Abdul Rahman whom I always imagined you would carry. I never imagined I'd lose you so soon before you got to meet him."
The Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor found that the strike that killed Refaat Alareer and his relatives was "apparently deliberate" and followed "weeks of death threats" that came after Alareer—co-founder of the Palestinian writers' group We Are Not Numbers—called the Hamas-led October 7 attacks on Israel "legitimate" and mocked uncorroborated reports that Hamas militants baked an Israeli infant in an oven.
Friday's strike came amid relentless Israel attacks on Gaza by air, land, and sea, including a bombing of the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza that killed at least 15 people on Saturday. Monday airstrikes targeting three homes killed at least 20 people including numerous children in the southern city of Rafah—where around 1.5 million Palestinians, most of them refugees forced from other parts of Gaza, are bracing for an expected full-scale Israeli invasion.
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'If I Must Die, Let It Be a Tale': On the Martyrdom of Palestinian Poet Refaat Alareer
The state of Israel has killed our storytellers in Gaza with the hope that the stories will die with them. But they will not.
Dec 15, 2023
What is taking place in Gaza is meant for the history books: an epic tale of a small nation under a long, brutal siege for many years, facing one of the greatest military powers in the world. And yet, it refuses to be defeated.
Not even the legendary tenacity of Leo Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ characters can be compared to the heroism of Gazans, living over a tiny stretch of land while subsisting on the precipice of calamity, even long before the Israeli genocide.
But if Gaza has already been declared uninhabitable by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) as early as 2020, how is it able to cope with everything that took place since then, particularly the grueling and unprecedented Israeli war, starting on October 7?
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” said Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on October 9. In fact, Israel carried out far greater war crimes than the choking of 2.3 million people.
“No place is safe, not even hospitals and schools,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on X on November 11. Things have become far worse since that statement was made.
And, because Gazans refused to leave their homeland, the 365 sq kilometers—approx. 141 square miles—turned into a hunting ground of human beings, who were killed in every way imaginable. Those who did not die under the rubble of their homes or were gunned down by attack helicopters while attempting to escape from one region to another, are now dying from disease and hunger.
Not a single category of Palestinians has been spared this horrible fate: the children, the women, the educators, the doctors and medics, the rescuers, even the artists and the poets. Each one of these groups has an ever-growing list of names, updated daily.
Fully aware of the extent of its war crimes in Gaza, Israel has systematically targeted Gaza’s storytellers - its journalists and their families, the bloggers, the intellectuals and even the social media influencers.
While Palestinians insist that their collective pain—and resistance—must be televised, Israel is doing everything in its power to eliminate the storytellers.
The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said in a statement on December 6 that 75 Palestinian Journalists and media workers have been killed by Israel since the beginning of the war.
The above number does not include many citizen journalists and writers who do not necessarily operate in an official capacity. It also does not include members of their families, like the family of journalist Wael al-Dahdouh or the family of Moamen Al Sharafi.
Aware that their intellectuals are targets for Israel, Gazans have, for years, attempted to produce yet more storytellers. In 2015, a group of young journalists and students formed a group they called ‘We Are Not Numbers.’ “We Are Not Numbers tells the stories behind the numbers of Palestinians in the news and advocates for their human rights,” WANN described itself.
A co-founder of the group, Professor Refaat Alareer, is a beloved Palestinian educator from Gaza. A young intellectual, whose brilliance is only matched by his kindness, Alareer believed that the story of Palestine, Gaza in particular, should be told by the Palestinians themselves, whose relationship to the Palestinian discourse cannot be marginal.
“As Gaza keeps gasping for life, we struggle for it to pass, we have no choice but to fight back and tell her stories. For Palestine,” Alareer wrote in his contribution in the volume ‘Light in Gaza: Writing Born of Fire.’
He edited several books—including ‘Gaza Writes Back’ and ‘Gaza Unsilenced’—which also allowed him to take the message of other Palestinian intellectuals in Gaza to the rest of the world.
“Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story,” he wrote in ‘Gaza Writes Back.’
Alareer reportedly refused to leave northern Gaza, even after Israel had managed to isolate it from the rest of the Strip, subjecting it to countless massacres.
As if aware of the fate awaiting him, Alareer tweeted this line, along with a poem he had penned: “If I must die, let it be a tale.”
On December 7, the writers’ collective, We Are Not Numbers, declared that their beloved founder, Refaat Alareer, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza.
Alareer was not the only member of the collective who was killed by Israel. On October 14, Yousef Dawas and on November 24, Mohammed Zaher Hammo, were killed, with members of their families, in Israeli strikes on various parts of the Gaza Strip.
In one of the workshops I did with the group, prior to the war, Yousef Dawas stood out, and not only because of his unusually long hair, but because of his clever and pointed questions.
He wanted to tell the stories of ordinary Gazans, so that other ordinary people around the world can appreciate the everyday struggle of the Palestinian people, their righteous quest for justice and their hope for a better future.
These storytellers were all killed by Israel, with the hope that the stories will die with them. But Israel will fail because the collective story is bigger than all of us. A nation that has produced the likes of Ghassan Kanafani, Basil al-Araj, and Refaat Alareer will always produce great intellectuals, who will serve the historic role of telling the story of Palestine and her liberation.
This is the last poem shared by 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.
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