Review of If I Must Die

If you do not wish to read further then the TL;DR is:

Summary: This is a collection of short form poetry and prose by one of the many shining lights of Palestinian literature, Refaat Alareer. It feels like both a journal and journalism as it describes the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation and oppression.

My conclusion: This book proves one thing more than anything else. Israel is built on myths that shatter on contact with Palestinian reality. Refaat Alareer's words, demonstrate that reality with stunning clarity and is necessary reading.

This review has been posted on other platforms with code words to avoid suppression. The version here does not.

The vile American backed state of Israel hates Refaat Alareer, the author of “If I Must Die” which is a collection of his works, for the same reason that it hates the BDS movement and the UN agency UNWRA. The reason being that any sign of non-violent resistance towards its atrocity filled occupation, whether it be through the arts, or advocacy, or even bureaucracy, destroys the morally bankrupt and violent Zionism which it derives its legitimacy from. An ethno-supremacist ideology whose foundation rests on nothing more than mindless bigotry against Palestinians.

Alareer, a Palestinian professor of English Literature as well as teacher, editor and writer, accomplishes this by the simple act of recording, in spare yet descriptive language the facts of his people’s lives under occupation.

About forty of these short pieces are collected here roughly in the order they were written, from 2010 to 2023.

The first of these works is a retelling of Jonathon Swift’s A Modest Proposal. It is, I feel, the weakest part of the book as the adaptation of the Irish satire to his situation felt forced. Every other however belongs completely to him and his people even though they are written in English, the language of the British, who gave away Palestine even though they had no right to, and the Americans who continue to fund and arm the crime of crimes being committed against his people for more than seven decades and counting.

The first 180 pages of the collection were written before October 2023. They describe the experience of his people as one of unending oppression punctuated by days of extreme violence. The tragedies inflicted on Alareer, his family, and Palestinians in general should be overwhelming, but his words also highlight the resilience of his people. It is impossible to get more than a bare glimmer of understanding of the horror that Palestinian's face or the beauty of the culture that is able to withstand it with steadfastness. That Alareer is able to provide these glimmers over and over is a testament to his skill and to his heart.

The last 72 pages consist of what Alareer wrote and said in interviews from October to early December 2023. The horror is that what he recounts of Palestinians being massacred by Israel is not very different from all he wrote before, it just happens harder, faster, without pause.

It is the rare page of “I Must Die” that will not shatter a feeling heart, the few that do not are setting up the ones that will. But the heart that will break will be an ignorant one and in need of breaking. The one that will grow in its place will not only be more aware but also more committed to justice, resistance, and freedom for Alareer’s people. It is his triumph, a triumph that belongs not only to him but to all Palestinians who will be remembered for their resistance to tyranny and oppression and the heavy price they paid for the freedom that they will have wrested for themselves soon, Inshallah.

Throughout this review I have been speaking of Refaat Alareer in the present even though he was ripped from this world by a cowardly Israeli airstrike in December 2023 on a residential apartment block. An attack that killed not only him but his siblings and some of his nephews and nieces as well.

This is because he lives still through all of those who read and remember his words and commit to action to end the injustices visited upon him and all Palestinians. He has done his part in bringing to the world stories of freedom for Palestinians and proving the hollowness of the stories told by their Zionist oppressors. Now the torch has been passed to us to take the next step and bring that story to fruition.

As he notes. “Don’t forget that Palestine was first and foremost occupied in Zionist literature and Zionist poetry”.

And so Palestine is freed first and foremost in Refaat’s literature and his poetry. And not only his, as he makes clear he comes from a long line of writers and fighters and poets; a link in a chain that will extend far into the future and will become the reality of Palestinians living and building in all of Palestine in freedom.

This is required reading for the whole world as far as I’m concerned.