To those who say we have no choice

If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
–Refaat Alareer (1979-2023), poet and professor of world literature and creative writing
at the Islamic University of Gaza, killed by an IDF airstrike on December 6, 2023

you say
if we don’t kill
we will
die
but I
would rather take the chance
of dying at the hands
of another
than ensure
my self-slaughter

we
are not entitled to anything more
than anyone else
we cannot ensure
our safety
we cannot ensure
our survival
on other people’s backs
and we know this
because we have been those backs
of course we don’t want to go back
to being those backs
but being the killers rather than the killed
kills us too

because if we kill
if we slaughter by the thousands
by the tens of thousands
if we stop counting
because they don’t count
if we count ourselves
beyond accountability
we become the very thing
that threatened our being

when we threaten another people’s being
we are our own undoing
we are our own unbeing
our own un-Jewing
we become what we hate the most
we are lost
when we annihilate
we multiply our own annihilation
we are finishing the work of our old enemy

there will
be a reckoning
what is already done is already done
but it is still
not too late
to reckon now
to begin at least
to unbecome
to disavow
what we have become
we can –
have we not innumerably proven it already –
survive this
too

you say
if we don’t kill
we will
die
but if we do kill
we also die
so if I
must die
let me die a mensch
and not comply

.

Poet and educator Anita Gallers is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and the great-granddaughter of writer, educator, and Bundist/Labor leader Jacob (Yankev) Pat. Her English translation of his last book, Khanke, about family members in the Bialystok Ghetto resistance, is forthcoming in 2025 from Kinder-Loshn in a bilingual edition. Anita lives in Western Massachusetts with her partner and two cats, works as an academic advisor at UMass Amherst, and is on the Editorial Board of Silkworm, the annual anthology of The Florence Poets Society.