‘If I Must Die, You Must Live To Tell My Story’

My friend Refaat Alareer was murdered by Israeli invaders in Shujaiya, east of Gaza City, on Dec. 6. He is now among the more than 16,000 civilians killed by Israel in the besieged enclave since Oct. 7.

Our correspondence continued off-and-on for the past nine years. In our final exchange, on Nov. 27, as the bombing grew closer to his home, he told me, “Everything is running out. Food. Water. Cooking gas. Israel is bombing all sources of life. Solar panels, water tanks and pipes. Not one bakery is functioning.” 

Refaat was an author and educator who taught English literature at Gaza’s Islamic University, which has been completely destroyed. “Israel wants us to be closed, isolated — to push us to the extreme,” he explained to me. “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.”

In one of his last public interviews, with Electronic Intifada, Refaat vowed that, if necessary, he would die by the same pen by which he lived: “I’m an academic. Probably the toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade, if the paratroopers charge at us, going from door to door to massacre us, I am going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I do.”

Refaat was a model of the resistance that Israel and its patrons aim to destroy. I tell his story in the passages below, which are excerpted from my 2015 book, “The 51 Day War: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.”

The Teacher

Just a few months before I traveled to Gaza to cover the 51 Day War, I was dining with the literature professor Refaat Alareer, who usually lives in Gaza City, at an upscale Italian restaurant in Berkeley, California. We had been invited there by the Lannan Foundation, a Santa Fe, New Mexico–based foundation that supports a mix of artistic endeavors and progressive political causes. I had just delivered a talk on my book, “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel,” in San Francisco, beside the Palestinian-American author and journalist Ali Abunimah. For his part, Refaat had been touring the U.S. with a group of Palestinian authors from Gaza to promote the compilation of essays he had edited, “Gaza Writes Back.”

We had followed closely on each other’s heels throughout our book tours that spring. When I spoke at Western Washington University, a picturesque campus on the U.S. border with Canada, I was peppered with questions by a Jewish-American undergrad who seemed to have never encountered a critical analysis of Israel and Zionism. A week later, I learned from Refaat that the student had cried openly as he and two other young writers from Gaza, Yousef Aljamal and Rawan Yaghi, described growing up under siege to the campus audience.

By the time we gathered at the long dining table in downtown Berkeley, everyone seemed to be struggling with varying levels of exhaustion and bewilderment from our long cross-country tours. I felt slightly uncomfortable seated beside three young people on a brief furlough from the Gaza ghetto before white tablecloths spread with crystal goblets of Merlot and smooth wooden boards of artisanal cheeses. But I quickly forgot my discomfort as I fell into conversation with Refaat.

We spent the next hour chatting about his impressions of the vast and blindingly colorful country he had just barnstormed across. The American landscape had offered Refaat the chance to meet Jews who did not greet him from behind the barrel of an M-16, from inside the cockpit of an F-16, from the turret of a Merkava tank, or behind an occupation administrator’s desk. Refaat described it as his “Malcolm X moment.”

“When Malcolm X was in prison, his sister told him, ‘Elijah Muhammad said Islam is the true religion of Black people and the white man is the Devil.’ He thought of every white person he had ever met in his life and realized that he had been harmed in one way or another by every one of them,” Refaat explained. “This is what’s happening to us in Palestine, because you never come face-to-face with a Jewish person who’s not armed to the teeth trying to kill you. And that makes it very hard to break with your prejudice.”

It was not until Refaat visited the United States that he came face-to-face with a Jew who sympathized with his plight as a Palestinian. “When you talk to Jewish people about their lives, they host you in their homes, you spend time with their families, they can educate you in ways beyond imagination because they know about Israel, about Jewish life, about Zionism,” he marveled. “You learn so much because they are insiders. It was the tour to America that changed me in so many ways.”

Even as it stimulated his imagination and broadened his perspective, Refaat’s trip to the U.S. summoned pangs of regret. Like any other Palestinian academic, the occupation had cost him countless opportunities to study abroad and form relationships with his intellectual counterparts. In 2005, Israeli authorities refused to allow him to complete his master’s degree in the U.K. He lost an entire year of his studies along with his scholarship. Over the following two years, the Israelis refused to allow him to leave Gaza on 10 separate occasions. He remembered telling them, “If you have something against me, just put me in prison!”

When Refaat finally managed to secure permission to travel to the U.S. in 2014, Sarah Ali, a 22-year-old English literature student and teaching assistant at Islamic University who had contributed to “Gaza Writes Back,” was refused a permit to join him on the book tour. Thus, at events around the country, Refaat and his fellow Gaza writers, Yousef and Rawan, delivered lectures next to a chair with a cardboard cutout that read: “Sarah Ali Should Be Here.”

“Israel wants us to be closed, isolated — to push us to the extreme,” Refaat reflected. “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.”

When Refaat returned to Gaza from the U.S., he redoubled his efforts to educate Gaza youth out of the narrow prejudices spawned in the seedbed of siege and occupation. At Islamic University, the conservative higher education institution co-founded by the assassinated Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 1978, Refaat introduced his students to Hebrew literature. Among the Jewish Israeli writers he assigned them was Yehuda Amichai, the legendary poet whose famed work, “God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children,” tells of short lives consumed in war and punctuated by intimate encounters with violence. The poem’s opening stanzas resonated easily with Refaat’s students:

God has pity on kindergarten children,

He pities school children — less.

But adults he pities not at all.

He abandons them,

And sometimes they have to crawl on all fours

In the scorching sand

To reach the dressing station,

Streaming with blood.

Refaat also assigned his students “The Merchant of Venice.” He encouraged the class to view Shylock, Shakespeare’s Orientalized, avaricious Jewish character, as a sympathetic figure who was struggling to retain a modicum of dignity under an apartheid-like regime.

When his students completed the play, Refaat asked them which Shakespearean character they sympathized with more: Othello, the Venetian general of Arab origin, or Shylock, the Jew. He described their response as the most emotional moment of his six-year teaching career: One by one, his students declared an almost visceral identification with Shylock.

In her final paper, one of the Refaat’s students reworked Shylock’s famous cri de coeur into an appeal to the conscience of her own oppressors:

Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs,

dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with

the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject

to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means,

warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer

as a Christian or a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?

If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,

do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

Refaat stored his students’ papers in his desk at Islamic University’s English Department like small treasures. Then, on Aug. 2, the Israeli military bombed his department along with the university’s administrative offices, sending those papers up in flames. The office where students met him during office hours was pulverized and the student library next door was decimated. When Israeli army spokesman Peter Lerner claimed that the air force had targeted a “weapons development center” in the school, Refaat’s students responded with a wave of jokes about PMDs, or Poems of Mass Destruction. “Open-minded Palestinians are more dangerous,” Refaat said. “That’s why [Israel] attacks the Islamic University. That’s why it attacks other colleges. Of course, they lied when they attacked it.”

Refaat had seen his school attacked by Israeli forces before, and he watched it be rebuilt. But there was little that could console him over the violence that sheared branch after branch from his family tree. During the war, he lost his brother-in-law, who also happened to be his best friend. He learned that his cousins were massacred in Shujaiya — Fathi al-Areer was among the survivors of Refaat’s extended family whom I interviewed in the rubble on Aug. 14. Next, he received news that his brother was killed.

In the months after the war, his brother’s young son, Ranim, slipped into desolation. “I hate Dad,” Ranim muttered on a routine basis. “He won’t come back.”

Holy work

In early 2015, as electricity shortages plagued Gaza, I struggled to stay in touch with Refaat. His electricity came on for less than six hours at varying times depending on which day it was, leaving us with only a brief window of time to connect on Skype. When I finally reached him in late January, I found him coping with the malaise spreading through Gaza after the war. His house and his neighbor’s house had been bombed, forcing him to spend days at UNRWA offices attempting to negotiate the reconstruction process. It had taken three months to demolish a section of his family’s home that threatened to collapse atop passersby. “If it took that long, imagine how long the bureaucracy of getting it built again will take,” Reefat sighed.

One of Refaat’s brothers lost his job when the ice cream factory he worked in was bombed by Israel. He was left to scramble to collect enough money just to pay his monthly rent. His father, who had not been able to find work in 20 years, depended on help from his unmarried sons. But they considered themselves lucky compared to the thousands of government employees who had not worked in months and had no family assistance. “We always ask ourselves how they survive,” Refaat said of the unpaid workers. “You get to the point that you will do anything for a buck. It’s no surprise that crime is up, that domestic violence is up, that divorce is skyrocketing. Does the PA or Israel understand that sooner or later this will lead to an explosion?”

With the Rafah border crossing almost hermetically sealed by the Egyptian junta, Refaat had little chance of escaping Gaza to complete his Ph.D. His only release from frustration was in the classroom. As the siege tightened in the immediate aftermath of the war, he returned to Islamic University and redoubled his efforts to expand his students’ intellectual horizons. “I find myself releasing most of my anger at the situation by teaching young people about the struggle and about being creative in the way we fight for our rights and freedom,” Reefat said. “It’s very rewarding.”

In December 2014, Refaat’s class played host to my colleague Dan Cohen. Dan observed as Refaat presented his class with a story by one of his students, Noor Elborno, written from the perspective of an Israeli veteran of an assault on the Gaza Strip. The soldier had returned to his family in Israel plagued with post-traumatic stress disorder and consumed with nightmares about the children he had killed back in Gaza. As the Palestinian children in his nightmares turned to his own, the soldier descended into madness. If the story had been written by an Israeli, it would have fit neatly into the country’s hackneyed shooting-and-crying literary sub-genre, the most notable example being “Waltz With Bashir,” in which soldiers sought personal absolution through anguished confessions of crimes they committed against Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Authored by a young Palestinian in Gaza taking on the perspective of an Israeli directly engaged in violence against her society, however, it reflected an unusual yearning to understand the psyche of the occupier.

Refaat turned to his class and asked them if they could sympathize with the soldier in the story. Some among the class said they might be able to, but only on the condition that they were released from the bonds of occupation. Others protested that the soldier was complicit in their oppression, and that he was a baby killer who deserved to suffer for his crimes. The angry voice of a young woman suddenly rose above those of her classmates. “I hate them all!” she exclaimed. She emphasized that she was referring to all Jews.

Refaat emphasized to the class that not all Jews were Zionists, and challenged them not to implicate an entire group for the cruelty of a state that claimed to be acting in their name. “I told my students about my time in the U.S. staying with Jewish friends, being with their families, about seeing them defend Palestinians,” he recalled. “It’s abstract to them because Israel won’t even let my students travel to meet other people. Actually, three of my students have been prevented from leaving recently. But if these kinds of discussions help 10% that’s wonderful, because later on, when they get to break the walls of isolation the occupation and Egypt are creating, when they meet Jewish people who are working for our cause, it’s going to make all the difference.”

Towards the end of the class, Refaat asked his students to raise their hands if they had lost their home or friends and family during the war. Most in the room threw a hand in the air. The young woman who declared her hatred for Jews had, in fact, lost her home in Shujaiya and witnessed the death of family members and neighbors. “It clearly showed how Israeli violence is pushing everyone to the extreme,” Refaat remarked. “This war was so horrible, it really touched everyone.”

When class was over, 15 young women in colorful headscarves and long dresses approached Dan all at once, peppering him with questions. “The class had apparently known that I was a Jew,” Dan told me, “and they wanted to know what I thought about them, about Gaza, about my life in the U.S. They had never met a Jew before and they really showed me a lot of respect.”

The following day, the young woman who declared her hatred for Jews approached Refaat to express regret. Hearing herself verbalize her resentment left her feeling ashamed, she told him. And the meeting with Dan after class had provoked her to consider redirecting the anger that had gripped her after the war.

“Gaza is the most maligned place in the world, and if we were to believe what we’re told by established Jewish groups in the U.S. and mainstream media, we would think that a Jew in Gaza would be ripped apart, that Gazans are running around looking for a Jew to kill,” Dan reflected later. “In this supposed hotbed of antisemitism, everything was completely the opposite of the way I was told it was going to be. What I found were people like Refaat fighting to keep the violence that had consumed the physical lives of his students from consuming them internally. What he’s doing is holy work.”

Days before his death, Refaat pinned the following poem he wrote to the top of his Twitter/X timeline:

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