The Drone Eats with Me: The Violent Intimacy of Life under Drones in Atef Abu Saif’s Gaza Diary

Abstract

This article analyses The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary (2015) by Atef Abu Saif, which documents Israel's military offensive against Gaza in 2014. It argues that the aesthetic choices Abu Saif makes are indicative of his status as a Palestinian author producing a work of testimony for a non-Palestinian readership. Written in English, the text clearly aims to persuade its readers of the challenges of life under the surveillance and targeting of drones, and the long-standing nature of Palestinian subjugation, especially in Gaza. By focusing on this mediation of Abu Saif's testimony – by both author and publisher – the article reflects on what is at stake when Palestinian narratives are produced for an Anglophone readership. It also demonstrates that Palestine's historical and socio-cultural context generates its own particular narration of drone warfare, conversant with other works of Palestinian literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Gaza
• Palestine
• drones
• life writing
• testimony
• readership
• bibliography

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Beryl Pong for her insightful feedback and suggestions, as well as the anonymous reviewer for their similarly helpful comments. This work was supported by a Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 When referring to mainstream media or the dominant media discourse, I mean a UK/US context of widely disseminated outputs which are seen to express or confirm the dominant political discourse and influence public debate, even while there is variation in the stances taken. This is media coverage connected to policymakers, politicians and other elites and therefore has access to those in power, as well as an incentive to acknowledge, if not substantiate, their approach to matters such as Israel/Palestine. Examples include the BBC, The Times, Telegraph, The Guardian, The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN. 

2 Chloe Skinner (2019) includes a detailed overview of Israeli drones sales. For information on Elbit Systems, Israel's largest manufacturer of weapons, see: https://whoprofits.org/company/elbit-systems/. On BAE Systems, a UK defence company that has heavily invested in Israeli drones, see: https://investigate.afsc.org/company/bae-systems.

3 See Maha Nasser's (2020) article on US media coverage of Palestinians over fifty years, which includes statistics on the near total lack of Palestinian voices.

4 The US edition published by Beacon Press, which followed the original UK publication, converted the footnotes to endnotes, a decision that in hindsight Page wishes he had also made for the Comma Press edition, acknowledging that the footnotes distracted from Abu Saif's prose. Email correspondence from Page, 30/06/2020.

5 Email correspondence from Page, 30/06/2020.

6 These statistics are taken from an Al Mezan report, Operation Protective Edge in Numbers (2015) and an Al Haq report, Divide and Conquer (2015). Both are Palestinian human rights organisations experienced in documenting the Israeli occupation and its human rights abuses.