Nobody wins: watching a war from afar

It’s easy to dabble in issues we see online just after seeing a small part of the whole. We were trained to be quick to respond to breaking news without stepping back and thinking deeply about the deeper whys.

In 2023, while I was still glowing from being newlywed—married just four months—news broke out about a coordinated and unprecedented attack that was launched in Israel, claiming thousands of lives. The contrast felt jarring: my personal joy colliding with unimaginable tragedy unfolding in real time. Tensions between Israel and Gaza were what mostly filled the news even in the years that followed.

I can remember how people from my network started to take sides and boycott businesses and cancel people who are not on their side. Their campaigns are still active today. They made it clear how choosing a side was non-negotiable and how silence was tantamount to complicity. And yet, I hesitated. Perhaps it’s my training as a researcher which makes it difficult for me to come to a conclusion without thoroughly analyzing the data.

But because my human mind is incapable of paying attention to every breaking news and caring deeply about everything simultaneously while still functioning as I am supposed to daily, I succumbed to my human limits. I was with people who, for most of human history, could only care deeply about their immediate community, and they were okay about having limited awareness of distant events. However, with social media and our constant connectivity, it’s still hard not to be oblivious about what’s going on in other parts of the world. I felt guilty for not knowing enough but who has the time to know everything while still being good at what they are supposed to do? But I also admit that snap judgements weren’t serving anyone—least of all the people actually living through it.

One night, I stumbled across a documentary about Israel vs Gaza, which led to another and then another. They allowed me to see a more comprehensive view of what really happened and is still happening, compensating for my limited capacity to make sense of the whole, rather than just focusing on a part that would deem the story incomplete.

I can’t help but feel grateful for the people who take time and allocate resources to provide free resources like this, with compelling storytelling. What I learned from watching all three episodes is that nobody wins in a war. I saw parents on both sides losing children. I heard stories of terror and trauma that made them all human and not just faces on the news. I thought about how history, religion, land, and survival intertwined in ways that made “right” and “wrong” feel impossibly inadequate.

While it’s easy to pick a side while you are watching from afar, being on the ground is much more complicated, especially when lives are at stake. As the documentary series posed, central questions remain:

• Can hostages be freed without further escalation?
• Can armed groups be dismantled without endangering civilians?
• And what future lies ahead for those caught between retaliation and resistance?

And these aren’t questions with straightforward answers.

Maybe the most honest response isn’t choosing a side hastily. Maybe it’s admitting that we are watching something heartbreaking and complex from a distance and that our discomfort with ambiguity does not and can not justify oversimplifying other people’s suffering? Is one suffering on one side less than the other? Maybe caring deeply means resisting the pressure to perform, because we don’t have certainty, as we are only watching from our screens which separates us from their experienced reality.

The ongoing war feels like a statement: We are a force to be reckoned with. But at what cost? And who has to pay?

After watching these documentaries, I am more convinced than ever that war doesn’t run out of appetite, only lives.