A video of actor Brian Cox reading the final poem of a Palestinian literature professor who died in Gaza has gone viral after being tweeted by the Palestine Festival of Literature last week.
In the video, which was viewed more than 13 million times, the former star of the critically acclaimed HBO series “Succession” recited Refaat Alareer’s mournful musing on death and legacy, in which he implored readers to keep his memory alive.
Alareer, one of the leaders of a young generation of authors in Gaza who chose to write in English to tell their stories, was killed on December 7 along with his brother, sister and her four children in a strike on their house in Gaza City, where they had stayed despite Israeli military demands that the population evacuate south.
“If I must die, you must live to tell my story,” he wrote in a post on social platform X on November 1, in which he called on those who survive the war to fly a kite so that a child “somewhere in Gaza” can look up and think “for a moment an angel is there bringing back love.”
“If I must die, let it bring hope. Let it be a tale,” Alareer’s poem concluded.
Cox, who was recently nominated for a Golden Globe for his role in “Succession,” was one of nearly 60 A-list Hollywood celebrities who penned a letter to US President Joe Biden in late October, urging him to call for a ceasefire in Israel’s war with Hamas.
A professor of English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he taught Shakespeare among other subjects, Alareer was also one of the co-founders of the “We are not numbers” project, which pairs authors from Gaza with mentors abroad who help them write stories in English about their experiences.
Alareer drew fierce criticism for his rhetorical attacks on Israel, particularly his praise of Hamas’s shock October 7 assault on Israel, in which the terror group killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted some 240 others, manh of them women and children. In an interview with the BBC, he described the rampage as “legitimate and moral” and likened it to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
In a series of posts on social media following the Israeli ground incursion, Alareer repeatedly denied the Hamas atrocities, condemning what he called “bullshit like the beheaded babies and ovened baby,” railing against “zionazi” critics and claiming that “Israel uses rape lies/accusations against native Palestinians to demonize them and justify the Gaza genocide.”
In others posts, he expressed regret that he was not “a freedom fighter so I die fighting back those invading Israeli genocidal maniacs” and asserted that “Zionists [are] more unified in supporting genocide than Germans living under Nazi rule were.”
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza has claimed that more than 18,700 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the war. However, the number cannot be independently verified and is believed to include some 7,000 Hamas and Hamas-affiliated terror operatives as well as civilians killed by misfired Palestinian rockets.