Refaat Alareer

Based on Wikipedia: Refaat Alareer

In the final interview of his life, with Israeli bombs exploding somewhere in the background, a professor of English literature was asked what he would do if soldiers came to his door. He had no weapons, he said. But he would defend himself with his Expo marker.

It was a darkly absurd joke, the kind of thing a man who had spent his career teaching Shakespeare might appreciate. The pen versus the sword, literalized. Refaat Alareer understood the power of that image better than most. He had built his entire life around the conviction that words could be weapons too—that storytelling was itself a form of resistance.

Within hours of that interview, he was dead.

A Life Shaped by Occupation

Refaat Alareer was born on September 23, 1979, in Shuja'iyya, a neighborhood in Gaza City. This was during the period when Israel directly occupied the Gaza Strip, a small coastal territory about the size of Detroit that would become one of the most densely populated places on Earth.

To understand Alareer's life, you have to understand what it means to grow up in Gaza. The territory has been under some form of Israeli control since 1967, when Israel captured it during the Six-Day War. Even after Israel withdrew its settlements in 2005, it maintained control over Gaza's borders, airspace, and coastline—an arrangement that critics call an open-air prison and defenders call a necessary security measure.

Alareer himself put it simply: "Every move I took and every decision I made were influenced—usually negatively—by the Israeli occupation."

Consider what this meant in practice. When Alareer wanted to pursue graduate education, he had to navigate a blockade that frequently prevented Gazans from leaving. He managed to earn a bachelor's degree in English from the Islamic University of Gaza in 2001, then somehow obtained permission to study abroad, earning a master's degree from University College London in 2007. A decade later, he completed his doctorate at Universiti Putra Malaysia, writing a dissertation with the wonderfully academic title "Unframing John Donne's Transgressive Poetry in Light of Bakhtin's Dialogic Theories."

John Donne, for those unfamiliar, was a seventeenth-century English poet famous for lines like "No man is an island" and "never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." Mikhail Bakhtin was a Russian literary theorist who argued that all language is fundamentally dialogic—a conversation between voices. That Alareer chose to spend years analyzing how an English metaphysical poet broke the rules of his era, viewed through the lens of a theory about dialogue and multiple perspectives, tells you something about the kind of scholar he was.

Teaching Literature in a War Zone

In 2007, Alareer became a professor at the Islamic University in Gaza. This is not a typical academic posting.

The Islamic University has been bombed multiple times during various conflicts. Teaching there means conducting classes in a building that might be struck. It means students who disappear because their homes were destroyed, or because they were killed, or because they simply cannot make it across town during a military operation. It means a library that is always at risk of becoming rubble.

Yet Alareer taught world literature. He taught creative writing. And in a detail that reveals his intellectual ambition, he specifically engaged with Israeli poetry and depictions of Jews in English literature, with a particular focus on Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice, with its complicated Jewish antagonist Shylock, must have made for fascinating classroom discussions in Gaza.

His stated teaching goal was to highlight parallel experiences of Palestinians and Jews—two peoples whose histories are marked by displacement, persecution, and the struggle for a homeland. At the same time, he argued that Israel used literature itself as "a tool of colonialism and oppression." This is a recognizably academic position, drawing on postcolonial theory's analysis of how imperial powers use culture to legitimize their rule. Whether you agree with Alareer's application of that framework or not, it was a serious intellectual argument, grounded in the scholarly tradition he had spent years studying.

We Are Not Numbers

Alareer's most significant project outside the classroom was an organization with a deliberately provocative name: We Are Not Numbers.

The name itself was a response to how Gaza appears in news coverage. When you read about a conflict in Gaza, you typically encounter statistics: this many rockets fired, this many airstrikes conducted, this many casualties. The numbers are enormous and numbing. They create a kind of abstraction that makes it easy to forget that each digit represents an individual human life—someone who had a name, a family, ambitions, and fears.

We Are Not Numbers was a mentorship program that paired young writers in Gaza with established authors abroad. The organization published their stories, essays, and poems in English, making Palestinian voices accessible to an international audience that might otherwise never hear them. It was, as Alareer described it, an attempt to use "the power of storytelling as a means of Palestinian resistance."

This approach—resistance through narrative rather than violence—reflects a particular philosophy. The idea is that occupation depends partly on the occupied population being invisible, reduced to statistics and stereotypes. If you can make people see Palestinians as individuals with complex inner lives, the thinking goes, you undermine the psychological architecture that makes their suffering tolerable to outside observers.

The Editor and Anthologist

Alareer extended this philosophy into publishing. In 2014, he edited a collection called Gaza Writes Back, gathering short stories from young Palestinian writers. The following year, he co-edited Gaza Unsilenced with Laila El-Haddad, an anthology responding to Israel's 2014 military operation in Gaza.

That 2014 war had a particular significance for Alareer. His brother Hamada was killed in the bombing campaign. So was his wife Nusayba's grandfather, brother, sister, and three nieces. By the end of his life, Alareer and his wife had lost more than thirty relatives to Israeli military operations.

This context matters for understanding everything Alareer said and wrote afterward. He was not a dispassionate observer of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He was someone whose brother's blood was on the rubble, whose wife's family had been shattered. When he expressed anger at Israel—and he did, frequently and vocally—it came from a place of profound personal loss.

A Voice During Crisis

During the 2021 conflict between Israel and Hamas, Alareer wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times that became one of the most widely read accounts from inside Gaza. It centered on a conversation with his eight-year-old daughter, Linah.

She had asked him a question: Could Israeli forces destroy their building if the power was out? The question contains its own heartbreak—an eight-year-old trying to work out the tactical logic of when she might die. Alareer wanted to tell her the truth, he wrote: that Israel could destroy any building in Gaza, at any time, with American-supplied weapons and international impunity. That their homes "annoy the Israeli war machine, mock it, haunt it, even in the darkness."

Instead, he lied to her. "No, sweetie. They can't see us in the dark."

It's a devastating piece of writing, and it illustrates why Alareer became such a prominent voice. He could take the abstract horror of life in Gaza and render it in terms that Western readers could feel viscerally—a father lying to his daughter, knowing the truth but unable to speak it.

Controversy and Condemnation

Alareer was not simply a sympathetic victim. He was a polarizing figure who made statements that drew sharp criticism.

After the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023—in which militants killed approximately 1,200 Israelis and took over 200 hostages—Alareer described the assault as "legitimate and moral." He compared it to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, when Jewish fighters in Nazi-occupied Poland staged a desperate revolt against their murderers.

This comparison is either illuminating or obscene, depending on your perspective. Those sympathetic to Alareer's view might argue that both cases involved a besieged population with no other options turning to violence against their oppressors. Those opposed would point out that the October 7 attack targeted civilians at a music festival and in their homes, killing entire families—hardly analogous to fighting against Nazi genocide.

Alareer also rejected allegations that Hamas had committed sexual violence during the October 7 attack, calling such claims lies used to "justify the Gaza genocide." This denial has been contradicted by substantial evidence, including testimony from survivors, forensic examinations, and investigations by multiple news organizations and human rights groups.

Perhaps most controversially, when confronted with a claim—later debunked—that Hamas had killed a baby by putting it in an oven, Alareer responded on social media: "with or without baking powder?" The joke, if that's what it was, drew widespread condemnation. It was exactly the kind of callous, dehumanizing rhetoric that Alareer accused Israelis of directing at Palestinians.

Patrick Kingsley, the Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times, wrote that Alareer's remarks "drew accusations in Israel of being virulently anti-Israeli and antisemitic." Whether those accusations were fair or opportunistic, whether Alareer's fury had led him to moral blindness or whether he was simply treating Israeli claims with the contempt he felt they deserved—these are questions that resist easy answers.

Death Threats and Targeted Killing

In the weeks before his death, Alareer received threats. According to the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, he was receiving death threats "online and by phone from Israeli accounts." One caller told him they knew the location of the school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (commonly known as UNRWA) where he was sheltering with his family.

That threat convinced Alareer to leave the school. He moved to his sister's apartment.

On December 6, 2023, at approximately 6:00 in the evening, an Israeli airstrike hit that apartment. Alareer was killed, along with his brother Salah, his sister Asmaa, and four of his nephews. According to the Euro-Med Monitor, the apartment was "surgically bombed out of the entire building"—meaning the strike was precise enough to destroy that specific unit while leaving the rest of the structure standing.

This level of precision suggests that Alareer was specifically targeted, though Israel has not confirmed or denied this. The Israeli military regularly conducts targeted killings of individuals it considers threats, a practice that is either extrajudicial assassination or legitimate counterterrorism, depending on whom you ask and who the target is.

Alareer had refused to evacuate from northern Gaza at the start of the war, despite Israeli orders for civilians to move south. Many residents of northern Gaza made similar choices—some because they didn't believe the south would be safer, some because they refused to abandon their homes, some because they were too old or sick to travel, some because they had nowhere to go.

If I Must Die

Before his death, Alareer had written a poem that would become his epitaph. It was called "If I Must Die," and it went like this:

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.

After his death, this poem spread across the world. It was translated into more than 250 languages. It was read aloud at protests, printed on posters, shared millions of times on social media. The poem accomplished exactly what Alareer had spent his life arguing for: it made one death personal, individual, impossible to reduce to a statistic.

In December 2024, a year after his killing, Alareer's collected writings were published posthumously under the title If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose. The book became a bestseller.

The Losses Continue

On April 26, 2024—five months after Alareer's death—an Israeli airstrike killed his eldest daughter Shaimaa, her husband Mohammed Siyam, and their newborn baby.

Shaimaa had given birth after her father's death. She had written him a message, knowing he would never read it:

I have beautiful news for you. I wish I could convey it to you while you are in front of me. I present to you your first grandchild. Do you know, my father, that you have become a grandfather? This is your grandson Abd al-Rahman, whom I have long imagined you carrying. But I never imagined that I would lose you early, even before you see him.

Abd al-Rahman was the Arabic name she gave her son. In English, it means "servant of the Most Merciful," referring to one of the names of God in Islam. He lived for only a few months before he was killed along with his mother and father.

The Question of Legacy

What do you make of a man like Refaat Alareer?

To his admirers, he was exactly what he claimed to be: a voice for the voiceless, a teacher who insisted on the humanity of his students, a writer who used narrative as a form of resistance against erasure. Ramy Abdu, founder of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor and Alareer's friend, called him "the voice of Gaza, one of its best academics."

To his critics, he was an apologist for terrorism, a man who celebrated the murder of Israeli civilians and mocked claims of atrocities against them. His comparison of the October 7 attack to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising struck many as not just wrong but obscene—a desecration of Holocaust memory in service of violence against Jews.

Both portraits contain elements of truth. Alareer was a man of genuine literary accomplishment who also made statements that were cruel and callous. He experienced tremendous personal loss and also minimized the suffering of others. He advocated for Palestinian humanity while seemingly unable to extend the same recognition to Israelis.

Perhaps this is what happens when you spend your entire life in a conflict zone. Perhaps trauma and anger erode the capacity for moral consistency. Or perhaps Alareer simply believed, as many do, that the violence of the oppressed and the violence of the oppressor are fundamentally different things, regardless of how similar they look.

The Palestinian-American professor Sami Al-Arian said after Alareer's death: "He was an amazing poet, an articulate voice for Gazans, and a true bridge to people outside Palestine."

Poet Mosab Abu Toha, another friend, said: "We didn't just lose Alareer, but we lost his poetry; it's all underneath the rubble, all the future poetry he would have written."

In the end, perhaps that's the truest thing anyone said about him. Whatever you think of Refaat Alareer's politics or statements, he was a forty-four-year-old man who spent his life teaching literature and writing poems. He had a wife and six children. He told his daughter a kind lie about the darkness. And then an explosion ended everything he was or could have been, along with his brother and sister and four nephews whose names most of the world will never know.

Whether that death brought hope, as his poem asked—whether it became a tale worth telling—depends on what happens next. And that, for now, remains unwritten.