Gaza, Grief, and the Ghosts of Our Wars

Lex E Santi, LCSW, MFA

In the days after 9/11, there was a feeling in the United States that something irreversible had cracked open, not just buildings, not just lives, but the idea that war could ever be clean, swift, or justified by pain alone. We have been collectively fighting that system of fear and terror ever since. What followed: Afghanistan, Iraq, drone strikes, proxy wars, black sites, enhanced interrogations, the blank check of homeland security — taught us that violence metastasizes. That vengeance becomes policy at all costs. That terror, once named, becomes a lens through which everything — even dissent — is suspect.

And now, Gaza.

In our places.

It is hard to speak when your words may slice across friendships or family histories. I have friends who were born in Israel, whose lives have been shaped by the generational trauma of antisemitism, whose families fled or survived pogroms and genocide, whose belief in a homeland for Jewish people is not abstract but personal — vital, even holy. As I will tell you later, I get it.

And still, I write this in anguish.

Because to acknowledge the pain of one people should not require the erasure of another.

Because what is happening in Gaza is not defense. It is not healing. It is not justice. It is retribution dragged past the point of recognition. Children are starving. Families are crushed beneath rubble. Aid workers are killed for delivering food. Members of the press killed. And this is being done with the justification of national security — the same justification we used, disastrously, for decades.

Israel has been promised the right to exist, and it has existed — not just as a nation, but as a miracle of cultural revival, of language, of survival against centuries of exile and annihilation. But that miracle cannot continue to be underwritten by dehumanizing the people of Gaza — or dismissing their own right to exist, to live, to dream, to stay.

The October 7 attacks by Hamas were horrific. Civilians slaughtered. Families ripped apart. Hostages taken. The trauma is real, and it echoes loudly. But even real trauma cannot excuse ongoing siege warfare. It cannot justify mass displacement and famine. The scale, the force, the relentlessness — it begins to echo the same logic that guided the United States through its most ruinous chapters of the “War on Terror.”

They used to say we were fighting a war on drugs. But David Simon, in The Wire, gave that line its funeral: “The war on drugs is not a war,” says Carver. “Why not?” asks Herc. “Because wars end,” Carver replies.

That line has lived with me ever since. The war on terror is the same.

The war on terror, like the war on drugs, is not a war. It is a performance of war — one that requires permanent machinery: occupation, surveillance, special forces, drone strikes, proxy regimes, broken states, and broken people. You do not win this kind of war. You just make it bigger. You radicalize more. You flatten one enemy and midwife three more.

I remember, early in this most recent devastation in Gaza, speaking with a dear friend — someone I love, someone thoughtful. He told me, sincerely, that he was fine with Hamas being wiped off the earth. I asked him, gently, “But how can that be? Hamas is an idea. And when you bomb an idea, you don’t kill it. You force it to evolve.” He never responded.

I look at what’s left of our legacy in the war on terror: Iraq’s political vacuum now filled by sectarian militias and Iranian influence. Afghanistan, again governed by the Taliban. Syria, fractured beyond recognition. Trillions of dollars later, countless lives lost, and what has it amounted to?

We declared war on a tactic — terror — and in doing so, we ensured it would never end. And now, with Gaza, we watch it replay: not as tragedy, not even as farce, but as muscle memory.

We know now what that logic produces: endless war, destabilized regions, displaced populations, radicalization, grief without outlet, and a moral authority so frayed that even the architects of these wars begin to denounce their own designs. There’s a reason Donald Trump, of all people, rose to power partly by criticizing the wars that the political establishment had long defended. Even the architects of empire eventually choke on their own blueprints.

We must see that Israel is standing at the same precipice — repeating the same errors, building a graveyard under the banner of deterrence, forsaking not only Gaza, but its own moral center.

I visited Israel once, and I was deeply moved — by the complexity, the beauty, the sense of being at the crossroads of something ancient and something unfinished. I saw displaced peoples. I heard echoes of my own family’s exile from Cuba. I know what it is to have no home to return to, to live in the long shadow of dislocation.

And I also know that to ignore the suffering of Palestinian children is to abandon the very ethics that bind us as human beings. It is to look away from famine and say, “Not my fight.” It is to bless the ruins with our silence.

There is no clean side here. No narrative without contradiction. But there is a call — urgent, rising — to speak, to refuse complicity, to look beyond the binaries that war insists upon.

To those unsure, to those afraid to speak: I urge you, do your research. Talk to people. Read widely. Mourn honestly. Ask what it means to be born on one side of the fence — and whether, by silence or design, you are urging children to starve on the other.

The suffering is total. The grief is complete. Whatever grows from these ashes will not be peace — not unless we, the world, choose to interrupt this pattern. Not unless we remember that every war plants the seeds of its next, and every silence fertilizes the soil.