Grappling with the complexities of war and suffering
Incessant pinging on my phone. Notifications. Each alert, another image, another headline, another fragment of a story unfolding thousands of miles away. Gaza. Again. Always Gaza. What would Susan have made of all this?
Susan Sontag, piercing gaze, unyielding intellect, had long been a touchstone for me. I grappled with the complexities of war. Of suffering. The human condition. Now, as I scrolled through an endless feed of devastation, I couldn’t help but imagine her voice.
Images. Susan had always been acutely aware of the power of photography in shaping our understanding of conflict.
“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed,” she once wrote.
And here, in the palm of my hand, was an appropriation of Gaza’s pain. Neatly packaged in pixels.
I could hear her cautioning against the numbing effect. This constant barrage of visual horror. How many times can one see a bombed-out building. A child’s tear-streaked face. Before it all becomes a blur? The risk, she would say, is not in feeling too much. But in feeling nothing at all.
Susan understood the necessity of bearing witness. Spending time in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. Refusing to look away from the suffering that engulfed the city.
“I came to Sarajevo,” she wrote, “because I was ashamed of being in Europe and not coming.”
Would she have felt a similar pull towards Gaza? A need to see. To understand. To testify?
She wore her Jewishness lightly
The complexity of her Jewish identity would have colored her perspective. Susan wore her Jewishness lightly. More as a cultural inheritance than a religious conviction. But in the face of such conflict, where does one’s heritage sit? I imagined her grappling with this question. As she had throughout her life.
She might have recalled her visit to Israel in the 1970s. Where she found herself both drawn to and repelled by the nation’s ethos.
“I found it depressing,” she wrote in her journal. “The world of the kibbutz seemed like a world without privacy, without true culture.”
Would she have seen echoes of that same insularity in the current conflict?
I continued to scroll. Pausing on an image of a grieving mother. I thought of Susan’s reflections on war and suffering. She had always been wary of easy explanations. Of reducing complex conflicts to simple narratives of good and evil. In “Regarding the Pain of Others,” she wrote,
“To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames.”
Gaza would have resisted any attempts at simplification. The layers of history, ideology, and trauma that have built up over decades defy easy categorization. Susan would have insisted on acknowledging this complexity. Even as she condemned the violence and suffering.
But what of genocide?
The word hung heavy in the air. Appearing with increasing frequency in discussions about Gaza. Susan had written extensively about genocide. Particularly in the context of the Holocaust. She understood the weight of the term. It’s power to shock and mobilize. I too witnessed genocide. Her words were a comfort when I returned. I wasn’t alone in the horror of the images burned in my mind.
Susan cautioned against its casual use. Genocide. Insisting on the precision of language even in the face of overwhelming emotion. She was acutely aware of the dangers of inaction. Of standing by while atrocities unfold.
“No one who has lived through the last half-century,” she wrote, “could be unaware of the risks of cultural denial or historical amnesia.”
And what of moral seriousness?
Night fell. The stream of notifications finally slowed. I found myself thinking about Susan’s concept of moral seriousness. She had always insisted on the importance of engaging deeply with the world’s complexities. Of refusing to look away from difficult truths.
What would that moral seriousness look like in regard to Gaza? Would it mean resisting the urge to retreat into tribal loyalties? Or ideological certainties. Would it involve acknowledging the suffering on all sides? While still insisting on accountability. It would certainly require a willingness to grapple with uncomfortable questions. Questions about power, history, and the nature of violence itself.
Would it involve acknowledging the suffering on all sides? While still insisting on accountability.
I imagined Susan poring over reports. Analyzing images. Speaking with people on both sides of the conflict. She would have sought to understand the situation in all its nuanced complexity. Refusing to settle for easy answers or comforting platitudes.
Even as she engaged intellectually with the conflict, Susan would have been acutely aware of the limitations of her own perspective. She had always been conscious of the gap between witnessing and understanding. Between seeing and knowing.
In “Regarding the Pain of Others,” she wrote,
“We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels.”
This humility in the face of others’ suffering might have been her starting point in approaching Gaza. A recognition that no matter how much we read — how many images we see — we can never fully grasp the lived reality of those caught in the conflict.
Despair and hope
I finally set my phone aside. My mind still swirling with imagined conversations with Susan. I was struck by a sense of both despair and hope. Despair at the seemingly intractable nature of the conflict, at the cycle of violence that seems to repeat endlessly. But hope, too, in the power of clear-eyed analysis. Of moral seriousness. Of refusing to look away.
Susan Sontag is no longer with us. But her approach to understanding conflict and suffering remains as relevant as ever. In grappling with Gaza, we would do well to emulate her commitment to intellectual rigor. Her refusal to accept easy answers. And her insistence on bearing witness to the full spectrum of human experience — even when that experience is almost too painful to contemplate.
As the night deepened and sleep finally beckoned, I found myself returning to one of Susan’s most resonant observations.
“To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”
In a world that seems increasingly defined by violence and division, perhaps this simple truth is where we must start.
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