Today is the 500^th day of the latest phase of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Mike Phipps reviews a remarkable collection of writings by one of its victims, If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose, by Refaat Alareer, published by OR Books.

On December 7^th 2023, Refaat Alareer was killed when Israel launched an airstrike on the house in which he was taking refuge in northern Gaza. He died along with his sister and brother and four nephews and nieces.

Human rights activists said that Alareer was deliberately targeted in an attack that came after weeks of death threats that he had received online and by phone from Israeli accounts.

Refaat Alareer was 44 years old. Five months later, another Israeli airstrike killed his daughter, along with her husband and baby.

Alareer was no stranger to Israel’s murderous collective punishments. In 2014, his brother and at least thirty members of his wife’s family were killed in an Israeli aerial attack. Alareer wrote of this atrocity:

“Israel’s barbarity to murder people in Gaza and to sever the connections between people and people, between people and land, and between people and memories, will never succeed. I lost my brother physically, but the connection with him will remain forever and ever.”

Refaat Alareer wrote poetry. He did his PhD on the poetry of John Donne and taught English Literature at the Islamic University of Gaza. He encouraged his students to write about their experiences and edited two collections of their writing, Gaza Writes Back and Gaza Unsilenced.

He co-founded the organization We Are Not Numbers, a mentorship program that matches writers in Gaza with authors abroad. The organization promotes the power of storytelling as a means of Palestinian resistance.

His university is now destroyed. His fearless journalism, which included articles for the New York Times and appearances on the BBC, made him an Israeli target – like many other journalists killed by Israel in the last sixteen months. At the time of the January 2025 ceasefire, over167 journalists and media workers had been killed in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and Lebanon, a mortality rate of over ten percent – dramatically higher than any other occupational group.

“Israel wants us to be closed, isolated – to push us to the extreme,” wrote Alareer in 2014. “It doesn’t want us to be educated. It doesn’t want us to see ourselves as part of a universal struggle against oppression. They don’t want us to be educated or to be educators.”

The earliest piece of writing here dates from 2010 and speaks of the 1,500 Gazans killed and 4,000 injured in that phase of the conflict. But it could equally have been written about the current situation:

“Has Israel really meant to target Hamas per se?… Does that include places Hamas members passed by or [had] been to? Does that include people who happened to shake hands with a Hamas member, unknowingly perhaps? The facts on the ground tell that it is the Gazans it is after not Hamas. Of the five thousand casualties, the majority are kids, women, elderly people and police cadets. Only a handful of fighters fell during the fighting.”

Alareer understood then, as Israel knows now, that ‘destroying Hamas’ was never really feasible. Indeed, as Tom Stevenson in a recent article in the London Review of Books points out on the latest phase of the conflict, “Gaza itself, not Hamas, was always the real target of a campaign which the former Israeli defence minister Moshe Ya’alon described as ‘ethnic cleansing’.”

Answering the question as to why Palestinians don’t flee their homes when they are under Israeli attack, Alareer wrote in 2015 – although his words apply equally to today: “Leaving was not an option because Israel wanted more than 150,000 people to go to the streets and schools, where Israel also targeted them.”

He writes movingly about the deaths of his relatives, sometimes at the hands of Israeli bombardments, sometimes as a result of Israeli bureaucracy, like his 18-year old cousin Awad, who died of bone cancer, unable to get permits from Israel to leave Gaza for treatment. “Cancer in Gaza is a death sentence,” observes Awad’s father.

His powerful writing humanises the Palestinian victims. He tells their back-stories and describes the lasting impact of Israeli killings on family members left behind.

Some of the most hard-to-read pieces here are tales from the author’s own childhood: his memory, aged six, of his father being shot while driving home; of being concussed, aged ten, by a grinning Israeli soldier who threw a rock at him from the top of a four-storey building. “Early in my life I learned… to run when you see soldiers, because who they target is largely arbitrary.”  A close friend, aged 13, was shot dead at point-blank range by an Israeli settler in front of his classmates, although he had not been throwing stones or doing anything else provocative.

Teaching English Literature in Gaza was challenging in more ways than one. Perhaps the most emotional moment in his six-year career, writes Alareer, was “when I asked my students which character they identified with more: Othello, with his Arab origins, or Shylock the Jew. Most students felt they were closer to Shylock… I had managed to help my students grow and shatter the prejudices they had grown up with because of the occupation and siege. Sadly, the exam papers which I stored in my office were set ablaze in a way that echoes how Shylock was stripped of his money and possessions.” Israel destroyed the administrative building, claiming without evidence that it was a ‘weapons development centre’.

More than anything else, this may be the reason the Israeli state killed Refaat Alareer. Despite its constant, barbarous efforts to obliterate and dehumanise the Palestinian people, Alareer managed to show their essential humanity, their empathy and thirst for justice. For Israel, this was unforgivably dangerous.

Alareer carried on writing and broadcasting after the Hamas attack on October 7^th 2023 and the subsequent Israeli onslaught on Gaza. As before, many Palestinians refused to leave their homes, because they did not want to be permanently dispossessed and because the schools they were being told to gather in were also being targeted.

Alareer is clear from the outset of this new offensive: this is extermination, genocide. He is also scathing about the Western media’s framing of events, which signalled “more than complicity.”

In one of his last messages, he said: “As Palestinians, no matter what comes of this, we haven’t failed. We did our best. And we didn’t lose our humanity.”

This vital declaration sums up this powerful book and helps explain why it is set to become a bestseller.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.