Kris Van der Bijl

Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide by Atef Abu Saif is an autobiography of a Palestinian man enduring life in the Gaza Strip after Israel seized the city following the events of October 7th, 2023.

Saif, born in the Gaza Strip and living in the West Bank, was visiting his family with his teenage son Yasser. He was there to participate in a National Heritage Day event in Khan Younis. He had gone swimming in the ocean that morning with his brother-in-law.

While none of them knew that morning’s swim would be their last bit of peace, Saif is used to Israel’s bombs. He writes plainly that “when the bombing starts—and there’s bombing almost every month—you move to the middle of the building, usually a corridor or a stairwell.”

Sections of Don’t Look Left have been published in the New York Times and Slate magazine. The complete, published text begins with the Israeli bombing on October 7th and ends with Saif fleeing with his son Yasser to neighboring Egypt. It is written in English,  and has been published by Comma Press, a not-for-profit publisher based in the United Kingdom. Proceeds from the book sale go towards Palestinian charities. 

About Don’t Look Left: A Diary of a Genocide

Saif’s diary describes his and his family’s attempts, at times unsuccessful, to survive. Don’t Look Left is not Saif’s first published diary about surviving under Israeli occupation. In 2014, Saif wrote The Drone Eats with Me: Diaries from a City Under Fire about the 2014 seizure by Israeli forces. Both diaries provide first hand accounts of what life is like in Gaza during attacks by the Israeli Defense Force. 

The reader experiences the inner world of a narrative “I” as they record the world around them. This creates both an intimate and nuanced reading experience, where the people of war are made whole and complex in the portrayal of their myriad ways of surviving.

This is arguably more important when it comes to this current war. While social media provides a myriad of digital archives on what’s happening on the ground, Saif’s text provides a certain sanctity in the written word: it shows that literary reflections can capture hardship and humanness  in ways that short videos cannot. Saif’s firsthand experiences explores life in Gaza under Israeli siege in a way that social media cannot. 

Daily life in both texts are full of violence and the trauma that accompanies it. In their article “Digital War Diaries: Witnessing the 2022 Russian War against Ukraine,” Kot, Mozolevska & Polishchuk connect trauma as “one of the key categories of war diaries.” This comes from their book Digital War Diaries. While their text explores the current Ukrainian invasion, it’s difficult to ignore its applicability to the current conflict between Israel and Hamas. Additionally, trauma is a difficult category to ignore in Don’t Look Left; it’s subtitle “a diary of genocide” should make this plain, for what can be more traumatic than the complete destruction of your nation state.

The diary becomes the form through which Saif expresses himself and the plight of Palestinian survival. Following in the tradition of Philippe Lejeune, a specialist in autobiographical writing, Saif’s diary remains “a wager on the future … [an] … abstract commitment to remain faithful to oneself.” Throughout the destruction, Saif sees hope, such as when he sees a child in a spiderman costume walking through the rubble of his home, he asks if he can take “a selfie ‘with the Spiderman of Gaza’.”

While Don’t Look Left explores the 2023 siege on Gaza, it is still a strong literary text. Saif finds artistry amongst the hardship and destruction. Gazan’s become a people with complex stories attached to their everyday survival. 

Memory to Rebuild the Future

Saif uses memory to highlight that this current siege does not exist in a vacuum. “Most Gazans experience the status of being a refugee many times over,” Saif writes, “historically, many of them will be from refugee families from 1948.”

Historical memory is used to articulate what Gazans have been expressing for years: they lost their homes in 1948 – and many times before this –  and have been trying to rebuild in the tiny space that Israel squeezes them into. On the one hand, the past is present because it is alive in the memories of Gazans. On the other hand, the past is present because the same things that happened then are happening again.

These memories sometimes serve as practical tools for survival. Saif notes that it is a rule that Gazan families try to sleep in separate houses. That way, if your family home is bombed, some of your family might survive. The cruel benefit of this war-time logic plays out in Saif’s own extended family. When their house was bombed, everyone but Saif’s niece, Wissam, was killed. 21 years old and a recent art school graduate, Wissam’s broken body was pulled from the rubble.

She now must spend the rest of her life with two amputated legs and one amputated hands. While distressing – and certainly distressing to read outside of Gaza – Wissam’s trauma is the present and the past of life in Gaza. Her story becomes representative of what Palestinians have been screaming for years. 

This was just day 10, less than two weeks into the war. By the end of the first month, survival becomes nearly impossible. Saif’s days are spent finding food and water for him and his fifteen-year-old son. He spends the time in between phoning family and friends, hoping they will pick up their cell phones.

Thoughts about the future do occur to Saif. But they are marred by the destruction and devastation caused by the Israeli forces all around him. As he moves around Gaza, trying to find food, water, and a safe space to sleep for the night, he notes the IDF’s military logic. Saif states that the IDF’s “aim is always to send us back in time, to make the city look poor and ugly again.” The attacks over the years have crippled Gaza’s ability to grow, prosper, and function. 

About Atef Abu Saif

Atef Abu Saif’s life is entwined with the modern story of Gaza. He was born just two months before the 1973 war. Israeli soldiers shot him during the first intifada when he was 15. He still has bullet fragments in his liver. Fighting for Palestinians is, in many ways, his life, and like most freedom fighters it is arguably one that was thrust upon him.

He uses his writing to try and capture the hardships faced by the people of Gaza. As a Palestinian politician and essay writer, his career has become one of expressing what life is really like in the region. He hopes that through writing, “we can put down our memories of the streets that are now rubble, the homes that have now been flattened.”  

Saif uses the first person plural, “we,” to include both the reader and the narrator. We are part of this war memory project. This memory is at the crux of destruction, glimmers with the future possibility that these lives will not be forgotten.

The memory we share, Saif suggests, is both this destruction and the hope that we can return and rebuild. The memories that fill his diary are at once his and our own. The reader is personified alongside the writer in this project, but the ‘we’ can be complicated further still.

War Texts in the Twenty First Century

It’s worth considering the novel role that stories, images, and articles online are playing, especially with regards to Saif’s more traditional, written account. Many of the horrors of the current Israeli assault are being shared through the internet. Social media has become a frequent way for people outside of Gaza to see what Israel is doing.

Think, for instance, of one of the many videos that show people rummaging through the wreckage of their homes, searching for the bodies of family and friends. These videos and images, while capable of telling the story of how Gazan citizens are fighting for their lives, still lack the clarity and humanness that Saif’s diary provides. 

Saif shares one story of a group of young people that highlights how social media is used amongst those living in Gaza. He writes, speaking of social media posting:

“Some kids have invented a new, clever way of making sure their story is told, or at least recorded, even after they’ve been torn to pieces by an Israeli missile. To make sure their bodies are recognised, they have taken to writing their names, with markers, on their hands and legs.”

Notice how the nameless children of Gaza are more than sufferers: they are also creators. This devastating and violent image expresses ingenuity and resilience, but there’s an absurdity that cannot be ignored, that we must remember. Saif gives them a story tinged with horror and a macabre type of humour.

The young people are joking, but simultaneously aware that they might be lost to memory. This image speaks to their need to record their body so that it can, like Gaza, be reassembled, if only so that a real grave might one day stand in its memory.

This “new, clever way of making sure their story is told” enshrines a kind of future for Gaza. It’s a move away from the traditional survival tactic that Saif adopts on day one when he talks of moving “to the middle of the building, usually a corridor or a stairwell” and waiting for the bombing to stop. Towards the end of the diary, Saif stops seeing this as viable, evident by his decision to flee to Port Said, Egypt, with his injured niece Wissam and his son Yasser. 

Saif records other kinds of decisions people make as well. His elder parents are not willing to leave Gaza, partly because of their age and health makes the walk to the border unfeasible. Their fate remains undisclosed and stands as a reminder that Saif’s past is still in Gaza even if he decides to leave. There’s a hope here that one day families might be reunited. Unfortunately Saif is not writing a novel. His diary ends when he leaves Gaza. The genocide rages on. 

Saif’s journey south takes him and his son through destroyed cities where dead bodies lie to rot. Saif calls walking through these bodies “the hardest part”: a description as hauntingly devoid of life as the streets they walk through. This is the climax of their journey out of Gaza and the diary.

He tells Yasser not to look as they walk through streets strewn with headless bodies, severed heads, limbs—“precious body parts just thrown away and left to fester.” It’s heartbreaking that he tells his son to turn away from the violence around him, as if he can still shield him from the horror that they experienced throughout the past months. In the end, Saif is still a father and an uncle. Like anyone, he wishes to protect those closest to him from the suffering that is impossible to escape.

Atef Abu Saif’s Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide will stand as an exemplary book of survival in the face of suffering. His diary provides a nuanced and intimate portrayal of memory and its connection with words and storytelling. It records more than the current Israeli siege of Gaza. Within his diary lives the hope for a return to Palestine and some kind of future, however torn apart it might become.

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