Refaat Alareer (Rif‘at al-‘Ar‘īr) (رفعت العرعير) taught literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG).  He earned a PhD in English Literature at the Universiti Putra Malaysia in 2017 with a dissertation on the English metaphysical poet, John Donne. He graduated ten years earlier with an MA from University College London, after having completed his BA in English in 2001 from the Islamic University of Gaza. 

Alareer was a prominent writer, poet and activist. He co-edited, Gaza Unsilenced, which includes commentary, testimonials, and poems that spoke to the Israeli onslaught on Gaza in 2014. That onslaught lasted 51 days and left more than 2,200 people dead, and proved to be a miniscule model of the current prototype. In his two essays in the said anthology, Alareer documents the death of his brother, Hamada, who was an actor and played the role of Karkour, a mischievous chicken, on a Gaza TV station, coupled with the destruction of their extended family’s house. 

In the second essay, he explains that his philosophy of teaching literature is to humanize the Other, and he uses the example of introducing the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai to his students. He also reminds the reader of the destruction by Israeli missiles of two buildings at his university, including the one with the offices of the English Department. 

Alareer’s posthumous, If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose, which contains a selection of his wide-ranging poems and essays, was published by OR Books on the first anniversary of his death. 

Alongside teaching and writing, he was an activist and co-founder of the organization, We Are Not Numbers. The organization matched experienced authors with young writers in Gaza, and promoted the power of storytelling as a means of resistance. Before his death, Alareer appeared on Democracy Now, the BBC and ABC News. 

Born in Gaza City on 23 September 1979, Alareer was killed on 6 December 2023 in an Israeli airstrike on his family house. (He had previously received death threats online and by phone from Israeli accounts.) The air raid also took the lives of other members of his family— his brother and sister and her three children. He was survived by his wife and their six children. 

Of Alareer’s much-cited poem, “If I must Die,” written to his daughter Shymaa in 2011, the British newspaper The Guardian wrote, “its seemingly simple verses vibrate, stretched taut between tragedy, tenderness and resolve.” In it he says to his daughter:

If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

………

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale

(Alareer in the early days of the Israeli invasion)

Photo credits: Ar.wikipedia; Electronicintifada