Rockets and Revenge

You sit down and watch soldiers talk about killing people they’ve never met, and then mothers trying to explain to children why there’s no electricity and no obvious escape. Danny Gold made a documentary series for VICE News about what it looks like when the killing is happening now, between Israel and Palestine. He goes back and forth between the two sides and just lets people talk—soldiers, residents, doctors working in the dark.

There’s no narrator. Just footage and sound and people’s faces when they’re describing things no one should have to describe about their own lives. The images aren’t sanitized. Bodies. Blood. The kind of things traditional documentaries cut away from.

What gets to you isn’t the shock of it—it’s how flat people sound when they’re talking about catastrophe that’s become daily routine. A doctor explaining triage with no supplies. A soldier who looks barely old enough to be here. A woman whose home is rubble. They speak like they’re talking about anything else, because if they don’t keep some distance from what they’re saying, they’ll break. Or they’re already broken and this is what functioning looks like.

I watched the whole thing at once, which left me in a feeling I don’t have a word for. Not quite helplessness. Closer to something like complicity in the act of watching when they can’t look away. The images don’t fade.