I used to avoid documentaries about the Arab and Muslim world.
Partly because I felt I already knew the struggles too well. But mostly because I knew what they would do to me emotionally. There are only so many times one can watch one’s people bleed before “awareness” begins to feel like self-inflicted pain.
The last one I watched was Four Daughters, the award-winning 2023 documentary that somehow managed to gather so many of the Arab world’s wounds into the story of a single family. I had to walk out of the theater several times just to compose myself.
Then came the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the devastation in Lebanon.
Something changed.
A new layer of trauma was added—not only to the Arab collective consciousness, but to the individual Arab psyche. We have watched too much. Buried too many. Argued with too much indifference. Explained too many obvious things to people determined not to understand them.
Yesterday, for the first time since the genocide began, I watched another documentary about an Arab struggle: Who Killed Alex Odeh?
This time, I didn’t walk out.
I didn’t cry.
I didn’t get angry.
I had no questions.
I was simply numb.
The documentary did a remarkable job answering the question in its title:
Who killed Alex Odeh?
But somewhere along the way, it left me with a question far more frightening:
Who killed me?
Who killed the part of me that used to ache, rage, weep, and still be shocked?
Perhaps that is another casualty of all this violence—one that never appears in the death toll.
Photo credit: @pixelsprostudio
Wissam Charafeddine 