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As per your wishes we’re striving to live—hopefully a deeper and more reflective life, including a life of action against the genocide in Palestine.
First, I heard of your death. Then I heard about your poetry; various—maybe many—people read the now-most-famous poem—“If I Must Die, Let It Be a Tale”—or sections of it as part of the news. Like many thousands of others, I bought your book, as a sort of remembrance or sympathy card, something concrete to hold onto, honoring and remembering your life and death. It’s a far cry from the kite you requested, a kite to be seen flying high in the heavens. A kite to bring hope and love to a child, perhaps to one of your children, looking skyward somewhere in Gaza.
Still, there is a tale and I’m writing to tell it. Let me say I found the poem’s opening lines, “If I must die / you must live,” extremely significant. Such a clear instruction to those of us under the weight of the ongoing catastrophe, wondering what to do. Wondering, can we, in good conscience, go about our daily lives knowing the urgency of the situation in Palestine, knowing, in my case, that it’s my government and my tax dollars funding the death and destruction. I’m inspired, and grateful for your dictate that we live.
For the first time, I’ve taken over some vegetable planting in our garden. I thought of you as I pushed in a pound’s-worth of onion sets, hoping to grow “better” onions than we’ve gotten in the past. I thought of you as I hoed and scratched the clumped, rich river-bottom dirt in the garden to ensure my tiny carrot seeds would grow into nice, straight carrots. I thought of you as I planted sweet peas along the garden fence. And the chickens; I had to rebuild my flock, diminished by predators. It was OK, I realized; this is also my life, to be obsessed by possible chick opportunities on Craigslist, OK to check every few hours even as things deteriorated in Gaza.
This is also part of the mandate to live—in a time of catastrophe, to take action, to call out the genocide is a critical part of living.
And then there’s the rest of the property. Areas of our large corner lot have been naturalized and “let go.” Areas where trilliums and jack-in-the-pulpits surprise me; where bloodroot and ferns sprout from out of nowhere. I found a renewed appreciation of these as part of “my life,” as part of living on when others are dying from lack of food, shelter, healthcare and endless bombs. When territory—land and all that lives and grows on it—is being poisoned and confiscated; hundred-year-old trees cut down. While tending and observing the wonders of spring in this verdant yard, I thought daily about your directive to live. I tried to hold it in my mind along with the thoughtful advice of Wendell Berry: “You can describe the predicament we’re in as an emergency,” he’s said, “and your trial is to learn to be patient in an emergency.”
And, then it was May and Mother’s Day was approaching. Mother’s Day! A day historically set aside to honor women dedicated to peace; how could we let Mother’s Day pass without calling attention to the ongoing Israeli-American femicide and infanticide in Gaza? How could the day pass without acknowledging the thousands of mothers without children, the thousands of children orphaned, without mothers? This is also part of the mandate to live—in a time of catastrophe, to take action, to call out the genocide is a critical part of living.
We declared a 24-hour Mother’s Day Vigil and Fast on Main Street—from noon on Sunday, May 11 until noon on Monday, May 12. Like Julia Ward Howe’s original call to action, we asked women to leave home for peace just as men leave house and home for war. We painted signs and banners, we hoisted a Palestinian flag on the wrought iron fence behind us. We wore our keffiyehs, and banged on pot tops. We splayed our stuffed-doll “dead babies” with signs about how many children have been killed on the sidewalk in front of us. Two comrades walked across the broad Main Street intersection with the walk light; horns blasted and whistles blew in support of freeing Palestine and Palestinians. Nao painstakingly copied out your poem in colored chalk on the sidewalk. And so the day passed.
(Photo: Laran Kaplan)
At one point late in the afternoon a man on a bike rode up and stopped in front of me: “What about us?” he screamed.
“We’re for us too,” I said. Unsatisfied, he swore and rode away. He returned a few minutes later, speeding along the sidewalk, bent down, grabbed one of the stuffed figures and rode away despite our protest.
A middle-aged white man came and stood in front of us with a Trump 2025 banner. We asked but he declined to move to another location along the sidewalk. “What about all the children killed by abortion?” he taunted. What about this, what about that. We ignored him, and he eventually left but not before taking some heat from passersby.
People, maybe as many as 20 people at one point—both men and women—came, sat, and stood together throughout the day. We were thanked and blessed by passersby; a few swore under their breath. “It’s Sunday,” said one woman, “have some respect.”
It was getting dark; three of us huddled on the sidewalk around a solar lantern, contemplating my commitment to stay overnight. I’d declared a 24-hour action out of my deep emotional desire to DO SOMETHING. Now, in light of the hassling, the reality of a cold night, alone on Main Street didn’t seem like a great idea. And anyway my comrades reminded me… today is Mother’s Day, tomorrow is “only” another Monday. So, we abandoned the vigil at 10:00 pm, heading home to our respective warm houses and beds.
I wanted you to know Refaat that although we have no kite, we do have a tale, and now we’ve told it. We promise more will come. As per your wishes we’re striving to live—hopefully a deeper and more reflective life, including a life of action against the genocide in Palestine. We’re grateful for your poems, for your tales, for your inspiration and advice.
The compass remains: a commitment to stop this war through deeds, actions, and words, and then to work toward rebuilding Gaza and healing the wounds of our people.
When I saw the news of the October 7 events a year ago, I wasn’t surprised. I had spent the past decade writing about and advocating for an end to Gaza’s isolation. I was among the small number of people who consistently warned that if the policies and measures taken by Israel and its allies against Gaza were not addressed, an explosion would be inevitable. It wasn’t a question of if this explosion would happen, but rather a matter of scale, intensity, nature, and direction.
It is impossible to treat the events of the past year as “history” or something that we might reflect on, because the genocide in Gaza continues. Every day, Palestinians in Gaza bury dozens of their relatives and neighbors. Much of the Gaza Strip still lies in ruins. Most of Gaza’s population remains displaced, living in temporary shelters and encampments that continue to be bombed and attacked by Israel.
At the beginning of this war, I was somewhat hopeful that it would stop, that genocide on the scale and intensity we’ve witnessed wouldn’t unfold. I don’t know if this was wishful thinking, given Israel’s brutality and its deep-rooted dehumanization of Palestinians, especially in Gaza. I understood early on that this war, this battle, this confrontation, was bigger than Gaza. It would expand and extend not only beyond the geography of the Palestine question and its century-long conflict with Zionism, but it would also become a battlefield for a clash of values and visions concerning the fate, existence, and collective dignity of the people of the region as a whole.
Do you know what it took to build that hospital? That university? Do you know what it took for someone like Refaat Alareer to become who he was?
It is utterly painful to search for meaning amid such massive loss. I lost friends and mentors. I witnessed the annihilation of Gaza as a place and as a memory. Streets I walked, places where I studied and worked, restaurants and cafés where my friends and I sat, chatted, and claimed brief moments of joy amid years of blockade and repeated aggressions—all gone. As a student of history, I used to marvel at places in Gaza that stood as evidence of the continuation of human existence and civilization for thousands of years, representing the diversity, richness, and transformations of a country and its people. I saw these structures, with all the deep meanings they carried, destroyed, bombed, and flattened by Israel’s bombs.
The scale of our loss as Palestinians from Gaza is unfathomable, even for us who come from there. What is especially painful about this loss is that life in Gaza was itself a fight. These semblances of life weren’t easily built; they were fiercely fought for, wrested from the grip of hardship despite the relentless challenges of making life happen in an isolated, impoverished, and de-developed place like the Gaza Strip.
Do you know what it took to build that hospital? That university? Do you know what it took for someone like Refaat Alareer to become who he was? It wasn’t easy. Gaza was all about attempts—repeated attempts—in the face of recurring aggression, destruction, and the nuclear-state-sanctioned sadism of “mowing the lawn.” So, when we mourn Gaza, life in Gaza, and those who lived in Gaza, we also think about these attempts at establishing and maintaining life against impossible odds, which makes the loss all the more painful.
Pain was synonymous with life in Gaza, as it continues to be. Most people knew that an explosion on an apocalyptic scale was only a matter of time, because even though they lived day to day, they were always troubled and burdened by the future—not in the long run, but in the immediate term. Questions about water and food security, Gaza’s population density and growth, and of course, the major issues of political exclusion and erasure faced by Palestinians in Gaza. Most importantly, there were constant questions about the future of Gaza amid a larger Palestinian future that was already being destroyed before our eyes.
In a way, there were those in Gaza who “found their answers” and decided to direct that explosion toward Israel, to bring the clash back to its origin, and to put an end to decades of dancing around the truth. After all, the schemes of population and crisis management were never meant to resolve the fundamental clash between Palestinians and Zionism, but to postpone it.
How can one see meaning through piles of corpses and rubble? The search for hope becomes almost shameful. How can you speak of hope if you haven’t experienced sheltering in a school for a year or had to look your children in the eyes, unable to protect them as Israel’s bombs fell around you? How do you make sense of it all when you are consumed by survivor’s guilt, knowing that while you sleep in a bed under a roof, eat a hot meal, and take a warm shower, your friends, neighbors, relatives, and community are deprived of all these things?
The past year has been a daily struggle between all these thoughts and feelings, yet the compass remains: a commitment to stop this war through deeds, actions, and words, and then to work toward rebuilding Gaza and healing the wounds of our people.
I recently had the honor of meeting several genocide survivors—young people who were injured or accompanied their injured relatives outside Gaza. It was my first time meeting people who had experienced the genocide for months and then managed to evacuate. They had different opinions about what had unfolded and what they had experienced, and in their Gazan way, they made sure to share and share, in ways that made me feel like I was finally home—sitting at the barber shop or with my friends in one of the cafés in Gaza City, where people would loudly complain about politics, the economy, and everything else, making sure everyone could hear them.
Meeting these survivors filled me with enough inspiration and determination to work for Gaza for years to come. It was a reminder that the battle for Gaza is far from over. Despite the profound loss Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere are experiencing, they continue to fight for life and dignity. We must aid them in their fight, which began long before this genocide unfolded. It continues today in spite of the ongoing devastation.
"I have beautiful news for you. I wish I could tell you in person. Do you know you have just become a grandfather?" Shaima Alareer wrote to her slain father before she, her baby, and her husband were killed.
The daughter, infant grandson, and son-in-law of Refaat Alareer—the renowned Palestinian poet assassinated last year in an Israeli airstrike—were killed Friday in another Israel Defense Forces bombing, this one reportedly targeting a building hosting an international relief charity in Gaza City.
Shaima Alareer, her husband Muhammad Abd al-Aziz Siyam, and their 3-month-old son Abd al-Rahman were killed in the strike on a home where they were sheltering in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, Anadolu Agency reported.
Siyam was an engineer. Alareer was an accomplished illustrator and the eldest daughter of Refaat Alareer—one of Palestine's most famous poets and professors—who was slain in a December 6 Israeli strike on Shejaiya that also killed his brother, sister, and her four children.
A month before his killing, Alareer posted his now-famous poem, "If I Must Die," on social media. The poem was written for Shaima.
"I want my children to plan, rather than worry about, their future, and to draw beaches or fields or blue skies and a sun in the corner, not warships, pillars of smoke, warplanes, and guns," Refaat Alareer explained a decade ago.
After giving birth, Shaima Alareer wrote to her slain father: "I have beautiful news for you. I wish I could tell you in person. Do you know you have just become a grandfather? Yes, dad. This is your first grandchild. He's more than a month old now. This is your grandchild Abdul Rahman whom I always imagined you would carry. I never imagined I'd lose you so soon before you got to meet him."
The Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor found that the strike that killed Refaat Alareer and his relatives was "apparently deliberate" and followed "weeks of death threats" that came after Alareer—co-founder of the Palestinian writers' group We Are Not Numbers—called the Hamas-led October 7 attacks on Israel "legitimate" and mocked uncorroborated reports that Hamas militants baked an Israeli infant in an oven.
Friday's strike came amid relentless Israel attacks on Gaza by air, land, and sea, including a bombing of the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza that killed at least 15 people on Saturday. Monday airstrikes targeting three homes killed at least 20 people including numerous children in the southern city of Rafah—where around 1.5 million Palestinians, most of them refugees forced from other parts of Gaza, are bracing for an expected full-scale Israeli invasion.