Many people think of following the news as a responsibility, but this contrasting idea gave me pause, expressed in Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide (2025).
Because priorities shift, during wartime, when your daily life is what other people are consuming as news—on their phones while waiting in line for their morning coffee or on public screens while waiting for their subway—because you have only a few moments of internet connectivity each day.
Caryl Churchill’s introduction to this volume opens with the best statement: “We all know what’s happening in Gaza.” Didn’t I think just that, when I landed on the publisher’s page for this collection?
Her next paragraph reads: “But what very few of us know is what it’s like to be in Gaza.” Ah, that, too, is true.
These diaries (kept by Batool Abu Akleen, Nahil Mohana, Ala’a Obaid, and Sondos Sabra). answer that question in detail, and hint at how differently people there could experience wartime. (A war instigated by an administration, not by a People.)
Each writer’s voice is matter-of-fact, clear, and unsentimental—whether they are describing scrolling through messages or notifications on their devices, or describing a fatal attack on a neighbour’s family. The ordinary detail, about how they spend time or share food, pulls you into their experience.
Even if you have little understanding of the region, there is an outline of key events in the back of the book (beginning with 1948, but then fast-forwarding to 2007 and 2023, before slowing to chronicle individual months). There are also three maps in the back, which are very helpful for following the diarists’ movements.
I’ve arranged these brief excerpts chronologically, even though that’s not how they’re presented in the collection, for just a glimpse of the diarists’ voices.
Nahil Mohana:
If you have a crying child with you, you’re as good as dead. Such is the reality of war.
November 17, 2023
Ala’a Obaid:
In the silence that followed the airstrikes, each of us began to pack our belongings. This time, we packed only essential winter clothes, bedding and blankets. We left our summer clothes behind, we had no need for them. The seasons had changed; the war remained.
December 7, 2023
Nahil Mohana:
After the fire, not a single copy [of her book] remained—not a sentence, not a word, not even a letter.
April 21, 2024
Sondos Sabra:
I remember Gaza as it was: its streets full of life, the little shop on the corner whose owner would expertly fry falafel, its smell stirring the birds in my stomach.
October 31, 2024
Batool Abu Akleen:
I send a revised Arabic version of my first collection of poems to my friend Ruby, in London, so she can publish it if I am killed tonight. Then I provide my editor, Luna, with email addresses of the poets whose work I have been compiling. If I die, I don’t want anything left unfinished.
January 18, 2025
Caryl Churchill ends by saying “Does it seem ridiculous to say your diaries are enjoyable? They’re painful and make me angry but it’s still a pleasure to know something of your lives. And your history.”
Upon publication, all four of these diarists remain alive. As difficult as their wartime lives have been, it seems like they have more resources than some in Gaza have—one can go to a café to study/write, another can make a cake for a celebration (though without eggs), for instance—and one wonders (as do some of the diarists) what it’s like for those who make brief appearances on the margins of what’s described in these diaries—those who are poorer or have no family members for support or physical defense.
But it is a wonder that these chronicles exist and I feel grateful for so many things, including the ability to sit and read these diaries.
Would anything have changed if Anne Frank’s diaries had been published during her lifetime? I’d like to think so.
Omar El Akkad writes about the genocide in Gaza too, in One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025), but ‘This’ also represents other reporting he’s done—say, on social justice and terrorism and the climate crisis—writing that exposes the gap between values espoused in the west and whether they are pursued authentically or nominally.
We all recognise that “relentless parachuting of virtue. It’s these speeches and statements of eloquently stated concern for human rights and freedom and the demand that those who abuse human rights or withhold freedom be held to account. And it’s the way every ideal turns vaporous the moment it threatens to move beyond the confines of the speeches and statements, the moment it threatens even the most frivolous parcel of self-interest.”
He poses hard questions and exposes uncomfortable truths: “The argument in favor of voting for the lesser evil is frequently made in good faith, by people who have plenty to lose should the greater evil win. But it also establishes the lowest of benchmarks. Want my vote? Be less monstrous than the monsters.”
Anyone with an element of social justice in their reading will find many familiar ideas, expressed with notable clarity. I particularly appreciate the way he describes one simple historiographical concept:
“Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because under those narrative conditions, the colonist’s every action is one of self-defense. The story begins not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled.”
But, really, the reason that I was inspired to write about Omar El Akkad’s book is for this aspect of his work:
“The obvious charge of hypocrisy looms over this work, always. Refrain from engaging with one organization becaus3e of its ties to a genocide but not the uncountable number of other organizations who do as well? Call for divestment from fossil fuel companies and yet still use electricity? Agitate for a better world in any way and yet continue to exist within it?”
Recently, I’ve fallen away from reading his journalism, but his open acknowledgment that perhaps his way of addressing these problems is not the only way to address them (perhaps not even the best way) reminds me just how many people are actually trying, day by day, to improve horrifying situations, in different ways, in small ways, even in ways that others might consider useless or meaningless—in the face of uncertainty and despair .
In this way, his book is both devastating but also inspiring: each extreme accentuating the other.
“That just as it has always been possible to look away, it is always possible to stop looking away.”
Both these books are ways of looking, bringing that possibility into readers’ hands.
(Diaires: print and epub. El Akkad: print, epub, and audio.)
Akkad is one of our best writers today, I think. His way with words is just so spare, yet pierces you directly where its needed. I haven’t read this latest one because I’m ashamed to say, I’m almost afraid to. I’m worried that his very poignant writing will make it difficult for me to continue on as usual, because he just forces us to face things, even when we don’t want to. I’m embarrassed to even write this, but it’s so true
I appreciate your honest response; you’re not alone in this feeling. Sometimes shame can be a powerful motivator; when we don’t like the way we feel about inaction, we can be inspired to see how much less unhappy we are with ourselves when we act. However, I think you might be surprised about his new book; it’s more accessible (and shorter, even) than I was expecting, and the writing is more journalistic than poignant. If you end up trying it, I’d love to know how you find it.
“If I die, I don’t want anything left unfinished.” That was a real punch in the gut.
El Akkad’s book is so good. He let’s us know we are all complicit in all the things and it is a very uncomfortable thing to sit withIf you haven’t already, listen to his interview on the Between the Covers podcast.
Y’know, I started to listen to it awhile ago and just…stopped. Just timing (i.e. overwhelmedness at that juncture)? Probably. I’ll resume. (I did hear him in interview twice about the book when it was new, but short, not DN style. heh)
Such powerful quotes. Thank you for alerting me to both of these.
Thanks for reading!
I read Gaza and Palestine endlessly, on all my feeds, but not it seems, as you have done here, deeply. This a wonderful, badly needed, account of what sound like two wonderful and important books. But Anne Frank, would her diary have made a difference in 1945? I think not, the whole world was already fighting the Germans, whereas today they are arming the Israelis.
I am reminded that an Dutch-Australian Holocaust survivor, Hetty E Verolme, was in Belsen when a group of women suffering from typhoid were transferred from another camp late in the war. There was no room for them and they were left to die outside in the rain. One of them was Anne Frank.
I think there is a psychological term for the way that people can more easily dismiss cruel and devastating situations when they don’t actually know someone who is experiencing them directly (I have the opposite problem and am over-empathetic to the point of near/paralysis, which is no help at all either). I feel as though published diaries could overcome that, by allowing readers to feel as though they actually know people who are coping with this situation. But, I can also hear Emma interrupting to say that only a few people are going to pick up these diaries to read, and not the politicians.
Maybe it only looks that way now, that the whole world was fighting the Germans back then? Surely there was a segment of the population that was, if not in support, apathetic? Or am I being too cynical? Somewhere in my viewing queues, I have a French documentary film made shortly after WWII that was extremely controversial because it revealed that the idea of there being a massive throng of French resisters was just that, an idea, that plenty of people just got along to get along. I think I came across it via Timothy Snyder’s reportage.
I won’t read Hist Fic for lots of reasons, but WWII Hist.Fic. in particular everyone is anti-Nazi and as you say, that was clearly not the case. I’m sure the apathetic knew Jews were being disappeared, and I’m not sure Anne Frank’s diary would have made a difference to them. The film of British troops arriving at Belsen made a big difference to British understanding I think, but they were already anti_Nazi. What bothers me is that people, the apathetic middle, in pro-Israel countries – the US and its (remaining) allies – do not seem to be swayed by all the vision of the destruction of Gaza on the internet.
I’d like to think it, but I’m not convinced of it either. Because if one has already made the decision to either dehumanise someone else (or a group of someones) out of aparthy or made the decisiion to hold them in contempt out of fear/anger, then one is not likely to think “but maybe their diaries would be good reading”.
Film should help faraway situations be brought into reality but, in this case, perhaps the conflict has been ongoing for so many years that it feels like the status quo? I don’t think that’s it, I think El Akkad’s point is valid: people are choosing to look away and don’t seem to think that, were they in that situation themselves, they would feel desperate to be seen, to have their pain acknowledged at the very least–if not abated.