‘How many dead Palestinians are enough?’ The unbearable prescience of the late poet Refaat Alareer

Refaat Alareer wrote the poem If I Must Die in 2022 for his daughter, who was killed a few months after her father. Photograph: Tony Heriza/AFSC

In the face of siege and war in Gaza, the writer and educator Refaat Alareer fought for his people’s right to narrate their experiences and history. “As a Palestinian, I have been brought up on stories and storytelling,” writes Alareer. “It’s both selfish and treacherous to keep a story to yourself.”

First written in 2022, these lines now sit at the heart of If I Must Die, a posthumous collection from Alareer’s eclectic and compelling oeuvre. Published by OR Books to mark a year since the writer’s death by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, If I Must Die contains a selection of journalism, literary criticism, essays and poems written between 2010 and 2023. Taken together, they provide a glimpse into a restless political and literary mind, one that was still rising to the height of its powers.