This transcript is from a CSIS podcast published on November 26, 2024. Listen to the podcast here.
Jon Alterman: How long have you been living in conflict zones, and what drew you to them?
Arwa Damon: I started in 2003. So, it's been well over 20 years. And I wasn't necessarily drawn to conflict zones, but I initially got into journalism post-9/11. I was in New York at the time, and obviously lived the same horror and fear that the entire population went through. But then I also lived through and witnessed the dehumanization that happened very, very quickly, and it was absolutely terrifying.
I am Syrian-American. I grew up in a very cross-cultural household, I always like to say our breakfast being both labneh and zaatar and blueberry pancakes. I felt as if I needed to go into journalism to try to explain people to each other. I ended up in Iraq, and I basically almost never left covering conflict, or humanitarian crises, or just people.
Jon Alterman: What's similar between all these different conflict zones, and what do you find is really different?
Arwa Damon: The dynamics of the wars themselves are always very different. The mechanics of the war are always very different. But there are these core similarities that transcend the borders and the regions from Afghanistan to Iraq to Sudan, to you name it, and that is the way that war and violence and loss and pain scars a person—scars a child.
Then we go back to the difference again: what can we actually do about it? But the pain is something that I witnessed over and over and over again.
Jon Alterman: Your charity, INARA, has a real emphasis on mental health and psychosocial support. What are the acute and long-term practices that are involved, and what are the challenges you find delivering that kind of care to these traumatized communities?
Arwa Damon: We very much focus on long-term medical care for kids who have complex injuries, and we also very much focus on mental health for children. We're a very child-oriented charity. That's our core program. But then when we're talking about emergency situations—look, I'm talking to you from Gaza right now. It's very different, especially if we're focusing on the mental health aspect of this among children, what you can do for a child who is outside of the war zone differs greatly to what you can do with a child who is still living the war and is surrounded by the triggers constantly.
And I'll just give you two examples pertaining to Gaza's children. We have a case of a little girl. She is out of Gaza. She got out. She's in Egypt with her aunt. The bomb killed her mother, and she was in her mother's arms when the impact occurred, and her mother's body actually ended up protecting her. And so, the aunt got this little girl and her brother out. When our team first started working with her, she was completely nonverbal. She was non-interactive with other children. She was terrified of everything and everyone around her. But over the course of just a few weeks, she began to come out of her shell a little bit. She began to interact a little bit. You can see the impact that the focus on mental health has had with her.
If we look at the example of children who were inside Gaza, the triggers are still all around them. They're happening daily, and it's not just the bombs or the drone that's constantly buzzing or the sounds of war. It's also the triggers of loss, because loss defines their existence every single day. Loss of home. Loss of security. Loss of food. Loss of water. Loss of parents as a source of protective stability.
When we're talking about what we can do with children in that context, it's actually very superficial and it has to stay very superficial. It mostly centers around distraction and trying to give them very basic tools to be able to cope with panic and fear. The reason why you can't go deeper is because you can't open a child's wounds when the triggers are so constant, and you can't be there to help them cope with that at that specific point in time.
We're talking on World Children's Day. We just had this big event that INARA organized at this camp that we work at, and I remember—and this is what really stayed with me—it was fun; there were clowns; there were acrobats; there were jugglers; there was dancing, and you see the different ways that these kids interact with what's happening around them. Some of them are smiling, and they have this magical laughter, and it just warms your heart. And some of them have this faraway look in their eyes, as if, you know, they're trapped in this nightmarish cage of the trauma and the demons of everything that they've gone through.
Jon Alterman: You've been in a lot of conflict situations. Is Gaza qualitatively different from other places where you've seen this kind of suffering?
Arwa Damon: I get asked that a lot, and on the one hand, I'm loath to compare conflict zones because, as I said earlier, pain is pain. But when it boils down to it, I've never seen anything like Gaza before. I don't think anyone of my generation has, because it's not just about the intensity of what's happening here. It's also about sort of the absurdity of the fact that so many humanitarians, myself included, and organizations are here, but we can't deliver to the people.
It's the way that sort of everything that is remotely life-sustaining is on life support itself. You can take that from the lack of access to food—and it's not just that we can't bring in enough food parcels. We can't properly purchase on the market because Israel also controls what comes in commercially. We're in a situation right now where we're, again, facing another flour shortage. People have already started demonstrating in front of the bakeries because there isn't enough bread.
The vast majority of people here are barely eating one meal a day, and that includes the internationals, like myself, because how much food can you actually bring in with you when you're limited in what you can carry, and there's nothing that you can purchase on the market? There also isn't enough drinking water. We're expecting rains to come. With the rains, flooding is going to come, except the sewage dumping sites are also going to flood. And so, we need to fortify people's tents.
We need to move the sewage dumping sites, but Israel keeps rejecting the new sites that are being proposed, and we're not allowed to bring in sandbags. It just goes on and on. I went to the ICUs at Aqsa and Nasser Hospital. They don't have enough pediatric tracheostomy tubes, which means that children aren't stabilizing, and they're not able to be taken off of ventilators. They don't even have enough paper for the doctors to write their notes on. They're using scraps from here and there.
No matter which way you look at it, it's this ridiculously absurd situation. It's been called apocalyptic, it's been called post-apocalyptic, it's been called these things, but none of these words encompass what it is that we actually see and experience every single day.
Jon Alterman: You've spent a lot of time with people who have emerged from the acute trauma moments, whether it's in Syria or elsewhere. You've spent a lot of time and effort in Lebanon, which had its own civil war that lasted for 15 years. As you've engaged with those communities, what do you see are the long-term effects of prolonged conflict? The acute conflict is one thing, but a conflict that goes on one year, two years, three years. What kind of effects do you see 10 years, 15 years after the fact?
Arwa Damon: It's very hard for a society to function healthfully when the vast majority of its citizens are deeply scarred by unresolved and untreated traumas. The trauma calcifies. The trauma ends up having a lasting impact, and there's been a series of fascinating studies into epigenetics and the way that trauma actually doesn't necessarily change our DNA but changes the way that our DNA reacts with itself, and that that can be passed down generation to generation. We're not born as these emotionally wiped hard drives.
We're born with the traumas of our parents, our grandparents, and our great-grandparents, and you see the difference in the individuals that have received a certain level of mental health support versus those who have not. When we talk about trauma, it's not about getting over it. Nobody gets over this level of pain and hurt and loss. It's about learning how to function while you're still carrying it so that it no longer paralyzes you, so that you're no longer misassigning emotions and your reactions to your family, your community, your society.
Yes, people always constantly are able to somehow keep going forward because they don't have a choice. But when trauma remains unresolved, you are ultimately building a society that is fundamentally unhealthy, and I go back to these cycles of violence that we keep seeing repeating themselves within certain countries, or communities, or societies. One of the core reasons why these cycles of violence are unable to be broken is because so much trauma has been passed down and has remained unresolved.
Jon Alterman: How does this trauma work in this environment where you have arguably two traumatized populations: Israel and Palestine?
Arwa Damon: You have two very deeply historically traumatized populations, where both Israelis and Palestinians carry generations of trauma that has been passed on along with fear that is constantly and consistently getting manipulated. If you close your eyes and listen to a Palestinian and an Israeli talking, and you don’t know who’s who, you will actually hear the same things being repeated: “They want to kill us. They want to get rid of us. They don’t want us to exist. They hate us. They don’t view us as having a right to be here.” These two societies, communities, nations, people carry with them unaddressed intergenerational traumas. A lot of that fuels into the actions and reactions that we’re seeing today. That trauma and the fear is so easily manipulated, and we’re seeing it manipulated by all sides. We’re basically all just being played.
Jon Alterman: Had you been to Gaza before the war that started in 2023?
Arwa Damon: Yes. I had been to Gaza before in my capacity as a CNN correspondent on a number of occasions before, but always when something was going on, always when there was some sort of bombing that was happening.
Jon Alterman: But you got a sense for the accumulated trauma in Gaza, and now you have a sense for how it's a different scale?
Arwa Damon: Oh, absolutely. You saw trauma in Gaza before October 7. I think it was Save The Children that put out a report that said that somewhere around roughly 85 percent of children in Gaza were experiencing anxiety and depression. What you see now in Gaza is the complete and total evisceration of a person's soul. The light in people's eyes, that energy that we all emit, it's gone. It feels gone, and it doesn't matter if it's a child or an adult. You feel as if their eyes are completely deadened.
It is one of the most heartbreaking things to witness. I remember there was one mother I spoke to, she had come up to me hearing that we work in mental health for children, and she was telling me about her little boy who was about six years old. When the bomb went off, his sister, who was right next to him, was decapitated by the forces of the explosion.
Since that moment, her little boy has not been the same. Every night, he goes into near hysterics and he's rocking back and forth and shrieking, and she feels as if he's on the verge of going into convulsions or a meltdown. She was saying all of this to me in a very monotone tone of voice. I must have looked rather startled because she then said, "Yes, I know, but my other children need me." In that moment, I realized that she had also seen this.
She had also seen her daughter's head being blown off. But she could not even allow that emotion to come up as she's retelling the story. She could not even allow her voice to crack because, if she cracked in the slightest, she would just break open completely and would not be able to put herself back together again. So, when you're out on the street here, you realize that people have had to shove down so much just to be able to survive.
Jon Alterman: You've spent a lot of time in the Arab world, and you know that psychology and psychiatry are considered shameful in many places. There's not a lot of resources. What kinds of resources have there been for Gazans? What kinds of resources are there now? It strikes me from what you're saying that the need is absolutely profound, but it also must be affecting a society where the number of people who can provide that service are very, very few and far between.
Arwa Damon: That's part of the challenge. Obviously, all of Gaza's mental health professionals need support as well. Every single person here needs support. I think there is a recognition now among the population about this, and I hear it more frequently than I've heard it anywhere else, given the stigma around simply stating that you need help. But more and more people are very openly saying, “I'm going to need help. My kids are going to need help."
We are beginning to see a slight shift in the attitude towards the need for psychological support. But it's not where it needs to be. There is still a lot of stigma and shame that is attached to it. The other dynamic, specifically when we're talking about Gaza and Palestine, was something that I hadn't quite realized up until I was speaking to one of our young volunteers in Egypt.
She's from Gaza. She's in her early twenties, and she's a medical student. She managed to get out before the Rafah border closed, and she had this hushed conversation with me, and she was trying to ask me about how I had coped over the years with everything that I had seen and witnessed.
Then she said, “I know I need help, and I want to get help, but if I get help, that means that I'm not strong enough. It means that I haven't been able to stand steadfast against what is being done to us.” That is a huge center of Palestinian identity, this idea of no matter what Israel and the world do to us, we will not break. In her mind, reaching out and seeking professional help meant that she had broken, and that she had failed.
Jon Alterman: One of the things Palestinians are doing, and you've seen this evolve from your time in journalism, is that the role of citizen journalism has really taken off, that people are recording things. Sometimes when I'm watching Arab television, it feels like it's a lot of curated clips. Whenever I see emergency response moments, you can always see people in the frame who were filming it for submission.
You started doing journalism in conflict areas 20 years ago. How have you seen the citizen journalism piece evolving, and to what impact?
Arwa Damon: I think we really saw it jump to the fore in Syria. Back then, it was YouTube, and we actually called Syria “the YouTube war”. Then obviously, platforms like TikTok and Instagram grew exponentially since then. What we've seen with Gaza specifically is, for the first time, because of these social media platforms, Gazans have had, and still have, agency over how their story is being told.
It's the first time that they've really been able to tell the world, “This is our story, and this is how we see what's happening to us through our eyes," versus especially if we're a Western audience, it always being through the lens of the Western media, which at times can sanitize the horrors of war out of concerns for viewer sensitivities and whatnot.
I think it has made a massive impact on people's perspectives and understanding of what it really means to be Palestinian, but more specifically, what it really means to live in a place like Gaza.
Jon Alterman: One of the reasons you said you left television journalism is because you wanted to tell these stories in a different way and have more impact. Certainly, one of the challenges is audiences can just become numb when they've seen so many of these. As a former journalist, as somebody who lives with this, how do you get around that challenge of people just saying, "Oh, I can't feel anymore"?
Arwa Damon: Yeah. It's one of the hardest parts. I think I've always tried to, throughout the course of my career at CNN, look for what I call “points of relatability” because even though people might at some point turn away from the horrible images of the bombings and the aftermath and the injuries and the blood, there are always these points of relatability.
I remember going into Syria, into the province, and the bombs were falling down, and we had done that story over and over again. We always tried to look for something a little bit different. On this particular trip, people were fleeing, and we caught that moment as they were fleeing from their towns and villages. They were exhausted, and they had walked all night, and the kids were just freezing cold and hungry and thirsty. Then it dawned on us. These kids should be crying.
Any other child who was cold, hungry, or thirsty would be crying. Only they weren't. For that report, we kind of focused in on that point because a lot of people can relate to that. One of the reasons that I left CNN was to work on this documentary that actually hopefully does just that. It sort of frames the story of war and what it means to survive war against this epic adventure backdrop of four young strangers coming together to go on a week-long expedition to get to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro.
One's in a wheelchair, and they're from Syria, Ukraine, and Afghanistan. Then as they're going up the mountain, which obviously a mountain like that will push you to the limit and beyond your physical and psychological boundaries, they are forced to address their past experiences and their past traumas.
That is perhaps a way of reaching a broader audience, but at the same time, hopefully, showing them a side of what war does that will surprise them. The documentary takes you also on this, epic emotional journey, where there's laughter, there's this visceral quest for joy among all of the climbers, and this desire to tell the world, "Even though we survived war, even though now we're labeled refugees, we still want to live and we're going to do whatever it takes to keep living our life."
Jon Alterman: Because it does seem that one of the challenges of keeping people focused on the consequences of war, is it's the same narrative, the same story every day. It's a building being bombed, it's people not having enough to eat. It seems to be a limited number of narratives, a limited number of stories, multiplied over millions of people.
As a storyteller, it seems to me, it's hard to keep it fresh.
Arwa Damon: Yeah. It is, except every single person's experience with that is a story in and of itself; it's when you really get into who these people are, that we just see in these clips being pulled out from underneath the rubble or in the hospital. When we start to understand that one was a young violinist who picked up the instrument at just nine years old, and one used to love swimming and wanted to be an Olympic swimmer, or the mother who just lost five out of her six children, but she's still cradling and holding on to the one that she has left.
That's why we talk all the time about the importance of telling the human story, the importance of fighting against the desensitization by continuously reminding the audience of who these people are, and that's how you fight back against the dehumanization in this constant attempt to remind people that anyone who you see in any of these clips, they live, love, and laugh exactly the same way you do.
This is, again, what I try to do in the documentary, which, by the way, is called Seize the Summit, and is actually now available on Amazon and Apple and a couple of other platforms. I do hope people recognize that when they're looking at these scenes, every single person who they see inside, at their core, carries the same emotions that they do.
Jon Alterman: Let me end on a more optimistic note, which is, at some point, conflict ends, and people rebuild their lives. What are the seeds you think are important to plant now to maximize the benefit that people feel when we get into the end of this conflict? You have seen communities in Syria that experienced conflict years ago and are now coming out the other side in many ways.
As you look around people in Gaza now, what makes you say, “We really have to do this now, because in 10 years, that's going to pay off”?
Arwa Damon: We need to not abandon Gaza. The level of work that needs to be done here, and you can take it from physical reconstruction of buildings to physical reconstruction of people to emotional reconstruction, is going to be monumental.
There is this deep-seated real fear, and I was actually just talking to a friend of mine about this, and he was saying, "I'm kind of afraid of the moment when the bombs stop falling because when that fear is gone, I'm going to have to deal with everything and the fear within me, and I'm afraid of how much I'm going to have to feel and confront."
We really need to recognize that even when the physical war stops, the war for survival—it doesn't. That's when the second war actually begins, and it's won within each individual, each community, each family, each facet of society.
Jon Alterman: Arwa Damon, thank you for joining us on Babel.
Arwa Damon: Thank you for having me.