The horror does not cease for a single moment. Evil goes beyond all limits. The Angel of Death stretches out his hand over Gaza. It is a demonic angel that sows death and destruction, leaving the ground strewn with corpses and rubble in its wake. Nothing can quench its thirst for vengeance. Fierce and relentless, he rages against the helpless and the unarmed. His child-slaying army spills innocent blood, bombs and riddles without mercy.
Israel’s war against the Palestinian people is a war of terror, a genocidal war. Not only is there daily carnage being perpetrated in plain sight, but also cultural genocide.
Israel’s war against the Palestinian people is a war of terror, a genocidal war. Not only is there daily carnage being perpetrated in plain sight, but also cultural genocide. It is not just a question of exterminating a civilian population: it is above all a question of erasing their identity, wiping out any trace of them, any presence of them. It is about denying the other until they are wiped off the face of the earth. That is why Israel bombs everything: houses, flats, schools, hospitals, shelters, mosques, universities. This is a war expressly against civilians. The targets of the attacks are civilians, no matter their age or status: villagers, UN employees, doctors, journalists, academics, teachers, students; men, women, children, the elderly. Among the victims are also poets. Poets also die in wars.
Just in these terrible days of so many innocent deaths, days of murdered poets, I seek solace in poetry. I share three poems from Gaza by deceased Palestinian authors. The first two were written while the Zionist bombs were falling relentlessly and their authors fell soon after; the last one is from
Hiba Kamal Abu Nada
Hiba Kamal Abu Nada, a 32-year-old Gazan poet and novelist, died in the midst of the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza town of Khan Younis. She was educated at the Islamic University of Gaza, now destroyed by the Israeli army, like all other Gazan universities. She was a biochemist and nutritionist by profession. One day before her death she wrote: ‘If we die, know that we are satisfied and firm, and tell the world, on our behalf, that we are righteous people/on the side of truth’. Her last text, written on the same day, reads:
Gaza’s night is dark apart from the glow of rockets,
quiet apart from the sound of the bombs,
terrifying apart from the comfort of prayer,
black apart from the light of the martyrs.
Good night, Gaza.
Refaat Alareer
Refaat Alareer, a renowned Palestinian poet and academic, aged 44, was killed in December 2023, along with other members of his family, in the Israeli airstrike on the house where he was sheltering in the southern Gaza Strip. He was a professor of English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza. He was also a co-founder of the academic-cultural project ‘We are not numbers’, an initiative that links young writers from Gaza with foreign authors to learn to write in English about their environment and their lives.
In one of his last interviews, at the beginning of the war, Alareer denounced: ‘We know it’s very dark. Very dark. There is no way out. What should we do? Drown? Commit mass suicide? Is this what Israel wants? And we are not going to do that. I was telling someone the other day, a friend, that I am an academic. Probably the toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade, if they barge at us, charge at us open 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 would be able to do. And this is the feeling of everybody. We are helpless. We have nothing to lose.’
If I must die was his last poem, written under relentless and ferocious Israeli bombardment. Actor Brian Cox recites it admirably in a video circulating on social media.
“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 be bring hope
let it be a tale”
Mahmud Darwish
Confession of a Terrorist is a poem by Mahmud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet, who died in 2008.
They occupied my homeland
Expelled my town
Annulled my identity
And they called me a terrorist
They confiscated my property
Plucked my fruit trees
Demolished my house
And they called me a terrorist
They passed fascist laws
Practiced the hated apartheid
Destroyed, divided, humiliated
And they called me a terrorist
They killed my joys
Hijacked my hopes
Handcuffed my dreams
When I rejected all the barbarities
They… they killed a terrorist!
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