A couple who was on a commercial flight to Tel Aviv early Sunday morning had to return to Manila after their flight landed in Dubai. All plans to visit Jerusalem canceled, they could only thank the heavens they had not reached Israel yet when Hamas attacked.

During the moments they were awaiting their flight back home, blood was running in the streets of Israel. Hundreds were killed at a music festival. Grenades were hurled into bomb shelters. Guns were pointed at vehicles and persons. Though we could hardly imagine such events happening before our eyes, we know some semblance of the rage and distress that flow freely in that part of the world.

At this point, we don't know when Israel will be able to take tourists again. War has flared up anew in this world, and though it is taking place thousands of kilometers from our islands, we shall surely feel the effects of it somehow.

Those seeking to flee the war zone have one way out, said a report on CNN, a passage through Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. Yet even that, we imagine, may be compromised as the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas' cause receives the support of countries like Iran. Movements certainty will be disrupted, if not halted. It is a world gone mad once more.

So this generation will have the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to leave scars on the human psyche. And even then, our experience hereabouts would not even come close to what people in those war-torn countries are going through, have gone through or will go through.

It is, however, the sense of escalating conflicts around the world that is causing ripples of dismay in our part of the world.

While some of our politicians are wrangling about confidential funds, or worse, angling for the next election without having achieved anything substantial — there are races that are being obliterated, countries that are on fire from either climate-related reasons or human-induced ones like bombings, and hate breeding hate till the world implodes.

If we have homeless people wandering the streets, begging for food, there are countless displaced refugees crossing oceans and straits, hoping for a space to call their own.

For as long as international conflicts have gone on — and we have had wars in every decade since the last century — we have not learned enough to make a true transformation.

The pandemic no longer seems to be the catalyst that would have overturned old ways of thinking or healed old wounds. It appears to have made the world not a safer, friendlier place, but one where opportunists grab harder, and where — as one news outlet put it — "the future lies in the past." Referring, of course, to the Israel-Palestine conflict that has lasted for over a century and which has been described as "intractable, complicated and deadlocked" by experts and world leaders.

The conflict that began in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration is about mass migration — of Jewish people into the country occupied mostly by Palestinians. Much like the movement of different races across the world — Asians in America, for example — there was resistance.

Those "tensions" never let up, as we can see to this day. The question now is will all these differences ever end?