Tiana Reid is an academic, critic, and poet, and a friend to me. I was first introduced to Tiana when I attended a virtual job talk she was giving at my university in undergrad. Even though she didn’t have to, she generously offered her contact information so I could reach out to her with questions while I was applying for grad school. When I did, she was more than helpful and I couldn’t have done a single application without her help. We met IRL this summer and in the brief amount of time we spent together, I was awed by how the attentiveness and conviction displayed in her writing translates to conversation. Tiana is someone I immensely respect and I feel lucky to know her and to read her.
For her guest post today, Tiana traces a timeline of the current crisis in Gaza and Israel through a small collection of quotes and links taken from some of her reading, skimming, and scrolling over the last few weeks. Her post takes on a double function, in that it is at once an aggregate of reports, as well as a thoughtful and constructed essay on the multiple layers of the situation. That it is only shows us a fraction, that it can only be an attempt at neatly organizing what resists easy timelines and summation, speaks to the magnitude of what it addresses. I am so grateful that Tiana took the time to put this together and I hope you take the time to read this post carefully, as well as read the stories linked here. Thank you Tiana.
I have heard that the diary is a mode capable of documenting life as it is. Life as it is, though, is not worthy of the word “life.” I have read, skimmed, and scrolled much more than what I documented, much more than I can even remember. At 12am, 5am, 4pm, my eyes hardening. Nothing began on October 7 but for now, here, dates are simply a way to organize what is ultimately ungovernable.
— Tiana Reid
October 29: “Gaza’s Health Ministry said the death toll among Palestinians has crossed 8,000 – most of them women and minors – as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a ‘second stage’ in the war after tanks and infantry pushed into Gaza over the weekend.”
October 28: "Already plunged in the dark after Israel cut electricity access at the beginning of the onslaught, Gaza has now lost nearly all of its internet connectivity, internet and cybersecurity watchdog Netblocks confirmed on Friday evening, as cell towers for Paltel, the last remaining major operator standing in Gaza, were believed to be hit.”
October 27: “Dionne Brand’s ‘prologue for now - Gaza’ refuses to indulge empire’s relentless present tense, insisting on the now not as a territory cordoned off from what came before, but as an accumulation of persistent pasts that have sedimented into the brutal common sense of our world order.”
October 26: “Right-wing groups lobbying for Israel, as well as donors to prominent institutions and various other wealthy interests, are condemning open letters and using the lists of signatories as blacklists across cultural, professional, and academic spheres.”
October 25: “‘Normal’ in Palestine was a killing a day—yet a killing a day in a decades-old occupation was hardly news; it certainly wasn’t justification for a live interview on a national television network.”
October 24: “Some rest in hallways, others under the rubble. Some have names on their wrists to identify them, others had no such luxury. Some succumb to their wounds, all to Western avarice.”
October 23: “The killing of Labad brings up the number of journalists killed since the start of the Israeli aggression on the Strip to 20.”
October 22: “Editor’s Note: The author of this article requested that their name not be published, fearing for their personal safety due to the intensification of fascist persecutions against critical voices in Israel.”
October 21: “During the ‘normal’ siege of Gaza, 550 trucks daily provide the minimal needs of the Gazans. Now after 2weeks of a genocidal siege w/o water, electricity, fuel, food, medical supplies + carpet bombing killing 4,400 civilians & displacing 1 million, 20 trucks Is a cruel travesty.”
October 20: “I feel as if I’m a delinquent, before anything gets going I am somehow guilty as charged.”
October 19: “That a piece on censorship would get killed in this way—without explanation, but plainly in the interest of political suppression—is, beyond the irony of the matter, a grave indictment of the media response to this critical moment in history.”
October 18: “The U.S. vetoed a U.N. resolution Wednesday to condemn all violence against civilians in the Israel-Hamas war and to urge humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, saying it was too early to craft an appropriate Security Council response to the crisis.”
October 17: “Every place I go, I run away, and I just find bombs and dead people. Maybe one day I will end up like them.”
October 16: “The anti-racist, nonviolent BDS movement, supported by labor and farmers unions, as well as racial, social, gender and climate justice movements that collectively represent tens of millions worldwide, is inspired by the South African anti-apartheid struggle and the US civil rights movement.”
October 15: “As a collective of gay people, we also feel a special obligation to reject the enlisting of gay rights in service of genocide and colonial domination.”
October 14: “All this being said, we do not want to use abstractions to discuss Gaza: every story is one of violence and resistance and beautiful, ordinary life.”
October 13: “The impulse, repeatedly called ‘humane’ over the past week, to find peace by acknowledging equally the losses on all sides rests on a fantasy that mourning can be depoliticized. If only it were so—but this would be the end of Zionism, after all.”
October 12: “The truth is not being said right now.”
October 11: “There was no anti-colonial struggle or struggle for decolonization without violence. Part of the issue here is that it’s really important for us to go back to centering the primary cause in any anti-colonial struggle, which is colonial violence.”
October 10: “I honestly do not know what to tell you. It feels to me as though we are living in the very first few days of an unfolding genocide.”
October 9: “Israel’s defense minister on Monday announced a ‘complete siege’ of Gaza, describing the Palestinian fighters who attacked Israel over the weekend as “human animals.”
October 8: “This isn’t our first experience with Israeli wars on Gaza.”
October 7: “Peaceful resistance has gone nowhere.”
Thank you Tiana. And thank you to everyone for reading.