Published: 16 January 2025
Last updated: 16 January 2025
During the outbreak of the Lebanon War last year, I was walking through Berlin-Schöneberg when I encountered an Israeli activist and academic who had also immigrated to Berlin. I asked her how she was coping. She responded, "I feel terrible. I can't face my Lebanese friends."
Standing out in the cold autumn air, I admitted to similar feelings. "I avoid the news. Every time I check it, I struggle to keep writing or working."
She gazed down, then back at me, saying, "We're lucky to have left Israel and settled here. I no longer feel connected to them (to the Israeli people)."
But are we really disconnected from our homeland? Is it that simple? After she left, I felt lost.
My wife has noticed that during past wars, I’d get angry and curse the Israeli government. But since the incursion into Lebanon, I just keep repeating, "There’s nothing I can do." I hadn’t even noticed this mantra, but now it feels stuck in my throat.
What do we do with feelings of helplessness, alienation, and shame? How do we process the grief, anger, and betrayal? Watching from afar as the place where we were born descends into endless violence, we are caught in a vortex of emotions.
My back aches with the weight of these moral questions, as if my body is manifesting the emotional weight of my mixed feelings about Israel.
The day I met my friend, September 23 2024, at least 558 people were killed in Lebanon by Israeli attacks, including 50 children and 94 women. Over 1,800 were injured, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry. Israeli officials justify these actions as necessary to bring back the 60,000 residents of northern Israel who fled after Hezbollah threats. But I wonder if Israel exhaused its diplomatic options.
Comments2
AZ16 May at 07:48 pm
Shalom and salam. I’m a devout Muslim Arab who comes in peace and would like to say I appreciated your article because it was very human, real and different from most war-related discourse, which is a much-needed change.
You are certainly not alone in experiencing such conflicting emotions that come from war. Shame and pride, fear and anger, mercy and revenge, questioning our worldview and doubling down. We all ride this wartime cognitive dissonance emotional rollercoaster to varying degrees.
Viktor Frankl in his Holocaust memoir wrote “an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is a normal reaction.”
This certainly applies now as well for all of us – the amount of horrific footage and news we all see is highly abnormal for a human mind to handle. Unsurprisingly, we react in abnormal ways against our better rational judgment and even against our morality unfortunately.
We may disagree on many things but one thing that we share is virtually everyone on each side is an emotional wreck, traumatized and none of us are as super smart as we think we are otherwise we would have found a decent-ish solution decades ago to this nightmare.
None of us have all the answers, but I’d bet the start of the path to one is if there’s more mindsets like yours who focus first on the human experiences, psychological impact and emotional fallout of war rather than just the political element. If we understand that we are all humans who have the same human emotions and not an unfamiliar alien species, we can start getting somewhere I hope.
Michael Jaku19 January at 10:29 pm
Ironic he chose to make his home in Germany, of all places!