Drone Eats With Me

Abu Saif Atef

Description

On 7 July 2014, in an apparent response to the murder of three teenagers, Israel launched a major offensive against the Gaza Strip, lasting 51 days, killing 2145 Palestinians (578 of them children), injuring over 11,000, and demolishing 17,200 homes. The global outcry at this collective punishment of an already persecuted people was followed by widespread astonishment at the pro-Israeli bias of Western media coverage. The usual news machine rolled up, and the same distressing images and entrenched political rhetoric were broadcast, yet almost nothing was reported of the on-going lives of ordinary Gazans - the real victims of the war. One of the few voices to make it out was that of Atef Abu Saif, a writer and teacher from Jabalia Refugee Camp, whose eye-witness accounts (published in The Guardian, The New York Times, and elsewhere) offered a rare window into the conflict for Western readers. Here, Atef's complete diaries of the war allow us to witness the full extent of last summer's atrocities from the most humble of perspectives: that of a young father, fearing for his family's safety, trying to stay sane in an insanely one-sided war.

Sujets

• Diaries
• Palestine

Informations

• Publié par: Comma Press
• Date de parution: 31 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781910974704
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Fasila,
a non-fiction imprint of Comma Press
www.commapress.co.uk

Copyright © remains with the author 2014
This collection copyright © Comma Press 2014
All rights reserved.

Sixteen of these diary entries originally appeared in newspapers and websites during the summer of 2014. ‘Day Seven’ (12 July) appeared in Guernica Magazine as ‘The Chidren Have Barely Slept’ (guernicamag.com, 31 July). ‘I Do Not Want to be a Number’ (22 July) first appeared in Slate (slate.com, 23 July). ‘We Wait Each Night for Death to Knock at the Door’ (24 July) first appeared in The Sunday Times (27 July). The entries for 23-26 July appeared in an edited form as ‘Life Under Fire: The Diary of a Palestinian’ in The Guardian (28 July), and for 27 July to 3 Aug as ‘Eight Days in Gaza: A Wartime Diary’ (Op-Ed) in The New York Times (4 August).
Part of the Afterword was also published in The Guardian (17 December).

The moral right of the contributor to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.


This book was financed independently of Comma’s other projects, and was developed by Comma’s Publisher outside of normal office hours. However Comma gratefully acknowledges assistance from Arts Council England in the delivery of all of its other work.
Contents
Foreword
By Noam Chomsky
It Begins
The Beat of Drums and Bombs
Feeding Times
A Ghost of a City
Watching the Game
Floodlit City
Day Seven
Guarding the Darkness
The Scent of Sycamore
A Change of Schedule
A Game of Football
The First Truce
Dredging the Well
A Birthday on the Stairwell
Who Will Convince Them?
An Interview with Myself
I Do Not Want to Be a Number
This is Day 17
We Wait Each Night for Death to Knock at the Door
Dateless in Gaza
The Two-Day Blackout
The Shuja’iyya Massacre
Today is Eid
Day 23
Day 23: Part 2
A Piece of Shrapnel
Morning
Evening
The Logic of Distribution
Death in Rafah
The Normality
A New Truce
The Traces of Death
A Mattress in the Rubble
Unknown Soldier Square
A Nationalist Song
Crossing the Road
This is Fame
An Ever-Changing Geography
The Tyranny of Water
A Patch of Wifi
A New Exodus
Back Home
A Game of Cards
A Strange Breed
A Day on the Beach
The Tunnel
The Worst of Days
The Hissing of Snakes
A Quarrel with a Girlfriend
Zafir Four
Dressing for the Worst
The War on Beauty
This is the Day
Afterword
By Atef Abu Saif
Editor’s Note
By Ra Page
Special Thanks
About the Author
Foreword

I was invited to write a few words of introduction to the diaries of Atef Abu Saif, and agreed, thinking that it should not be difficult to sketch once again some of the historical background and political context for the terrible events that shamed the human race in the summer of 2014, the options available and the opportunities lost.
I have tried, and failed. It is not because sources are lacking about Israel’s murderous Operation Protective Edge, which killed 2,100 Palestinians, including 500 children, and wounded 11,000 others, while causing vast destruction with unrestrained savagery. It is not because the facts are elusive or obscure. They are not. The background is outlined clearly by Nathan Thrall, senior Middle East analyst of the International Crisis Group. In brief summary, Israeli intelligence recognized that Hamas was observing the terms of the ceasefire established in November 2012 after Israel’s previous exercise of ‘mowing the lawn’ – Israel’s elegant term for teaching the natives who holds the whip. ‘Israel therefore saw little incentive in upholding its end of the deal,’ Thrall continued, instead intensifying its violence and strangulation of imprisoned Gaza in violation of the ceasefire agreement. 1 So matters continued for 18 months, until a sharp escalation of Israeli violence elicited a Hamas response, providing the occasion for the brutal and sadistic operation described in the pages below from the perspective of the victims.
Furthermore, this pattern has been repeated over and over again. The picture becomes even more ugly when the details are filled in, the pretexts subjected to inspection, and the documentary record reviewed.
But as I read and re-read these evocative vignettes of people trying to survive in a prison camp under remorseless, relentless assault by the most advanced technology of killing and destruction that the ingenuity of modern civilization has devised, as I recall what I have seen with my own eyes and try to picture what is recounted so vividly here, words fail. The descriptive and analytic prose is too cold, too remote from the human tragedy that is depicted in these diary entries — a tragedy heightened by the recognition that it is not a force of nature that must simply be endured, a conflict so complex that no escape can be found. Those who wish to know understand well how the horrors can be ended, how Gaza can become a flourishing seaside region of a land at peace, its courageous people free to live their lives as they have every right to do with the prison walls shattered. Further explanation seems only to sully what Atef Abu Saif conveys with such simple dignity and eloquence.

Noam Chomsky




Sunday 6 th July
It Begins

When it comes, it brings with it a smell, a fragrance even. You learn to recognise it as a kid growing up in these narrow streets. You develop a knack for detecting it, tasting it in the air. You can almost see it. Like a witch’s familiar, it lurks in the shadows, follows you at a distance wherever you go. If you retain this skill, you can tell that it’s coming – hours, sometimes days, before it actually arrives. You don’t mistake it. Harb. War.

I’m sitting in front of Abu Annas’ house with three of our friends – Tarik, Sohail and Abdallah. Abu Annas has been a headmaster for 15 years now at the camp’s Ahmad al-Shokairi High School, although I’ve known him since the First Intifada. 2 He lives just a two-minute walk from my father’s place, in the same refugee camp I grew up in. The night is warm. Two shade trees stand in front of the house.

Abu Annas and Tarik are playing backgammon, from time to time breaking away from their game to contribute to the wider conversation. The sound of the dice rattling against the wooden board always mesmerizes me slightly. I’ve never played backgammon. I merely love the spectacle of dice bouncing along the wood and ricocheting off the back board. An aging blue Sony radio sits between us, playing a classic Fayza Ahmad 3 song. ‘Oh Mother, the moon is at the door, lighting candles. Shall I lock the door or open it?’ Abu Annas has kept the radio in good condition since the 1970s; still wrapped in a brown leather casing it came with.

All five of us around the table were born in wartime – as Gazans, you don’t get much choice about it. The crowded refugee camp we grew up in, known to Gazans as ‘Jabalia’ 4 – once a field of tents, then a forest of shacks, now a jungle of high-rise apartment blocks crammed tightly together – has been beset by wars for as long as we’ve all been alive. Since 1948 – before that in fact, since the British mandate began in 1917 – Gaza has barely gone ten years without a war; sometimes it’s as little as two between each one. So everyone carries their own memories of conflict: wars stand as markers in a Gazan’s life: there’s one planted firmly in your childhood, one or two more in your adolescence, and so on… they toll the passing of time as you grow older like rings in a tree trunk. Sadly, for many Gazans, one of these wars will also mark life’s end. Life is what we have in between these wars.
Tonight, another one is starting. SMS news updates interrupt the evening’s conversation, with innocent little pings, more and more and more frequently as the night progresses, as we flinch to read them, more and more nervously. The last sustained attack on the Strip was back in November 2012 and lasted for eight days. The one before that – dubbed ‘Cast Lead’ by the Israelis – ran from December 2008 to January 2009 and lasted for 23 days. How many days will this one last? How will it compare to previous assaults? These are the questions I want us to be discussing, but for Abu Annas, at least, it isn’t even certain that war is coming. ‘It will only be a small incursion,’ he says, ‘a limited one.’
Zohdi, Abu Annas’ second son, who is also my barber, prepares the shisha for all of us. When I see him I reach up out of habit and feel my hair and stubble: it’s only been three days since they were last trimmed. Zohdi’s shop is right beside Abu Annas’ house and seeing him appear in the doorway with a flash of steel in his hand makes me think I’m about to feel razor against skin. Then I see that it’s just the steel tongs for the charcoal.
Tarik, a veteran workers’ rights activist, leans over the shisha to blow on the coals, saying that all indicators point to war. Sohail is more sceptical about it. Sohail spent much of his early life in Israeli prisons, having been a local PLO leader in the camp, and served in Fatah’s secret militia during the ’80s. He insists that we are already in the holy month of Ramadan and that full-on war, at least, will have to be delayed until the end of the month, although a controlled ‘escalation of tension’ may be a feature of the next few weeks. Abdallah, who holds a PhD in psychology, shares this reading.
Me?
Well, I tell them, I can smell it. I sense it drawing in.
As it turns out, it has arrived already, before we even started this conversation.
At around 9pm this evening, a drone attacked a group of people near Beit Hanoun, two miles north of Jabalia Camp. No one was injured. Half an hour later another drone fired on three people on the street in the western side of Gaza City. At the time, the