FUTURE OF JEWISH
The Gaza War Everyone Thinks They Understand
Lucy
August 16, 2026

One of the most common things I still hear about Gaza sounds something like this: “We watched the first live-streamed genocide with our own eyes.” How’s that for the ultimate conversation-ender? Before we get to what people think they saw, there is a more obvious question that almost nobody deploying this phrase is willing to answer: Why did you see this particular war so relentlessly in the first place? Let’s assume that every image and video you encountered was accurately captioned and authentically from Gaza. (It wasn’t, and we’ll come back to that. But for now, let’s give the internet the benefit of the doubt.) Dozens of armed conflicts have raged across the Middle East and North Africa in recent years — most notably in places like Syria, Yemen, and Sudan, all of which have produced comparatively higher cumulative death tolls, mass displacement, and catastrophic hunger — yet none have achieved even a fraction of Gaza’s near-permanent residency on the Instagram feed. Why has no one been “live-streaming” these, I wonder? READ MORE