No Safe Distance

There’s a particular dishonesty to watching war on a laptop. You tell yourself you’re bearing witness, staying informed, refusing to look away—but you’re also on your couch, and the fridge is eight feet behind you, and nothing about your day will change because you watched this. The gap between seeing and being there has never been wider, or more comfortable.

Danny Gold and his crew at VICE News spent weeks moving between Israel and Gaza during the ground offensive in summer 2014, and the resulting series Rockets and Revenge is the kind of journalism that makes you feel the inadequacy of your own position pretty directly. They interview twenty-year-old soldiers who have already stopped flinching. They find residents on both sides who have nowhere to go and have made some kind of accommodation with that fact, which is its own form of devastation. Doctors in overwhelmed hospitals describe injuries with a flat clinical precision that hits harder than any image.

The footage is uncensored, and you feel it—not in a sensationalist way, but in the way that the absence of the usual editorial buffer forces you to stay present with what you’re seeing rather than retreating into analysis. The Israel-Palestine conflict exists in a strange place in the Western imagination: so heavily narrativized, so thoroughly filtered through whichever political framework the outlet is working from, that the actual human cost tends to get processed rather than felt. Gold’s series does something different. It shows you people caught inside something that will still be happening long after the cameras leave.

Watch it in one sitting if you can. Not because it resolves anything—it doesn’t—but because it refuses to let you file it away neatly.