Personal Info
- Country of residence: Portugal
Information
Rifat Rafiq Saeed Al-Arair was born in the Shuja'iyya neighborhood, east of Gaza City, on September 23, 1979. He is married and has six children. He completed his primary and secondary education in Gaza schools,
graduating high school in 1997. He earned a bachelor's degree in English from the Islamic University of Gaza in 2001, a master's degree in English Literature from University College London in London, UK in 2007 (his thesis was on "Comparative Literature between Palestinian and Zionist Literature"), and a doctorate in English Literature from Universiti Putra Malaysia in 2017.
He worked as a professor of world literature and creative writing at the Islamic University in Gaza since 2007, where he distinguished himself by integrating English literature with the Palestinian cause, using language as a tool for liberating thought and confronting the siege. Al-Arair wrote poetry in English, expressing in his poems the suffering of the Palestinian people and the brutality of the occupation. Among his most prominent works are his famous poem "If I Must Die," written in 2011, which gained international acclaim after his assassination, having been translated into more than 250 languages and becoming a symbol of literary and cultural resistance worldwide, as well as his poems " I Am You " and " And We Live On ."
Al-Arair edited a number of books, including:
Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine.
“Gaza Responds with Writing: Short Stories by Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine” (2014). The book consists of twenty-three true stories written by young Gazans who lived through the Al-Furqan War (2008-2009) and its horrors, and experienced the brutality of the occupation. The book was first published in English and then translated into Italian, Arabic, Malay, and three other languages. He also co-edited with Leila Haddad the book “ Gaza Unsilenced ” (2015), in which a group of Palestinian and foreign writers participated in writing about the Palestinian cause and the crimes of the occupation against the Palestinians during the 2014 Al-Asf Al-Ma’kul War. He also co-authored the book “Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire” (2022).
He gave numerous interviews and press appearances to various Western media outlets, continuing this practice until his martyrdom. He also published articles in international newspapers such as The New York Times, where he discussed Palestinian issues and the impact of the occupation on cultural and social life in Palestine. One of his articles in The New York Times, published on May 13, 2021, was titled: “My child asks: Can Israel destroy our building if the electricity is cut off?”
He co-founded the “We Are Not Numbers” project in 2014, a media and literary initiative that aims to document the suffering of Gazans after wars, especially in the aftermath of the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip in 2013. The project brought together young writers from Gaza with professional mentors from around the world to help them write their personal stories in English. The project aims to present the Palestinian narrative to the world in a humanistic way, away from numbers and statistics, with a focus on conveying the daily living reality of young people in Gaza and amplifying their voices on the international stage.
Al-Arair contributed to the establishment of the “Gaza Martyrs” page, which documents the pictures and stories of the martyrs. He was one of the founders of the social media department at the Palestinian Media Center, and he participated in the English section of the center. He also founded his blog under the name “This is Gaza.” Throughout the previous period, he refused to leave the Gaza Strip and remained steadfast in the north.
Al-Arair suffered throughout his life. His father was shot by the occupation in 1985, and he was hit in the head by a stone thrown at him by a Zionist soldier while he was playing with his classmates in the schoolyard in 1989. He was hit by rubber bullets three times, the last of which was in 1993. The occupation killed his cousin Taysir Al-Arair during the Second Intifada in 2001. Occupation soldiers tried to assassinate him during the Al-Furqan War, when they shot at him while he was on the roof of his house two hours after the ceasefire was announced. The occupation assassinated his brother Muhammad in an air raid during the Al-Asf Al-Ma’kul War in 2014. His family home and his office at the Islamic University (along with other offices) were destroyed in the same war. He suffered from persecution and cultural and media siege, as his Twitter account was closed on the pretext of violating standards in December 2018, even though the number of his followers reached 90,000.
On October 19, 2023, the occupation forces destroyed his home and library. He took refuge in a school and received phone calls from the occupation intelligence services containing death threats. However, he refused to leave Gaza, which prompted him to leave the school and move to his sister's house. The occupation forces assassinated him with an air strike that targeted his sister's house in the Al-Daraj neighborhood in the northern Gaza Strip on December 6, 2023. His brother, son, sister, and her four children were martyred along with him. His daughter, Shaima, was also martyred with her husband and their child four months after her father's martyrdom.
Some of his poems and creative essays were collected in an English book published in 2024 entitled: “ If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose ”. The texts of the book were collected by the writer and translator Youssef Al-Jamal, who also wrote an introductory introduction. Novelist Susan Abulhawa also contributed to the publication with an introduction.
Source
Achievements and Awards
- Years in active
: From
To