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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
Comment
Paul Daley

No matter how far removed from the world’s pain and peril Australians feel, we must not look away

PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT<br>A Palestinian man reacts as injured people are brought to the Baptistic hospital in Gaza City following an Israeli strike in the central Gaza Strip, on July 2, 2025, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas militant group. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP) (Photo by OMAR AL-QATTAA/AFP via Getty Images)
A Palestinian man reacts as injured people are brought to a hospital in Gaza City following an Israeli strike on 2 July, 2025. ‘There’s a sense of powerlessness to change the world so that the men responsible for the inhumanity and pain might be reined in or ousted.’ Photograph: Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP/Getty Images

A few weeks ago, just as the leader of the supposedly free world was doing his best gameshow host will-he-won’t-he? routine on whether he’d bomb Iran, I was on a plane home from Europe while my partner and our child were mid-air on two other flights.

This felt surreal and dangerously uncertain. International aeroplane travel messes with your head at the best of times, warping the clock and largely cocooning you from earthly happenings. But taking off into that communications black hole with my family in other parts of the air amid atmospherics that seemed decidedly pre-possible global conflagration was especially discombobulating.

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