Why I’m no longer “anti-violence” - Part 1
On power dynamics, Western myths of nonviolence, and violent erasure.
It took me thirty-four years to acknowledge that my entire existence has been shaped by violence. Cold-blooded, premeditated, systemic violence.
Let’s start with the simple part first.
I’m a woman living in the patriarchy, where one in three women experiences physical or sexual violence worldwide. I’m one of those three women, and yet somehow, whenever I’m in the company of two other women, we often find out that we’ve all experienced some form of male violence. Do with that information what you will.
Now, let’s move on to the more complicated part.
I’m also from the Global South, the Middle East, to be exact. This means that the Global North determined how I move in the world long before I was born. It turned my nationality, something beyond my control, into a leash, which has restricted and obstructed my options and choices.
And yes, I have risen above those options, but that is purely due to a combination of luck and merit. I’ve recently been bestowed the privilege of EU citizenship, but I still can’t fully step out of this cage of visas and visa requirements I’ve been pacing my entire life—my mind continues to live in captivity.
That is the nature of violence: it deforms you.
Why a series about violence?
For the last year and a half, I’ve been reexamining my relationship with the world and renegotiating all the contracts signed on my behalf.
It has become clear that the lives and well-being of Arabs are not important. We are expected to sit out the unspeakable violence committed against our families and kin while performing normalcy. Long ago, the West authored a book of castes and tiers, and it was just a matter of time before the colonial blade was aimed towards our jugular.
Many things were signed on my behalf. In that same book, the West has decided that my home is not safe because my safety didn’t align with its interests. Someone else, a different Tania across the Southern Lebanese border, was more worthy of safety and protection.
From the age of seven, I had to learn how to coexist with massacres past and horrors present. I grew up with stories of people in my community losing their lives and limbs stepping on Israeli landmines in agricultural lands, many of whom were children, mistaking landmines for toys. Sometimes, they would even end up on my dad’s operating table.
I still remember one of his depressive episodes after a twelve-hour operation on a young farmer, where he had to perform a four-limb amputation. I watched him navigate the dichotomy of saving someone’s life while permanently disabling them.
I watched him internalize and bear the weight of the violence that he didn’t inflict.
Violence graced our TV every night, not in the form of entertainment, but as evening news on stations like Al Jazeera that don’t censor gore in the Middle East. Blown-up and bloody Arab bodies were left on full display or laid side by side like rag dolls of white cloth, objectified even in their death.
Every Arab child from my generation shares this one core memory, our own 911; the cold-blooded and televised murder of Muhammad al-Durrah, a twelve-year-old Gazan boy. We all watched and thought: “This could’ve been me”.
Of course, we have moved beyond that and have stepped into a new era of violence. As I write this, Rafah has been completely wiped out, and videos of people flying in the air from airstrikes are normal. We’ve seen everything, from Palestinian people carrying their loved ones in plastic bags, to burning patients on hospital beds hooked to IVs, to lines of tiny dead bodies wrapped in white, bloodied clothes.
But at that point in collective history, this was a new low, the first time the murder of a child was televised and broadcast for the world to see. And because no one was held accountable and the event was branded as “controversial” and “complicated”, the world just moved on, while the bar for permissible violence continued to rise.
Before my burnout and a long process of grief, reckoning, and acceptance, I used to say I moved to Europe for economic opportunity. But looking back, it was a trauma response; I wanted to distance myself from violence, to believe that I had more in common with the French expat in Amsterdam than with the Syrian refugee at Ter Apel. But I moved for safety, to escape a cycle of violence that has been holding my people captive since the inception of Israel, and even before that.
These days, I experience a different type of violence, a silent and invisible one, of exile and cognitive dissonance, where my emotions of panic and terror, and images and news of war and destruction from Lebanon and Palestine, have to coexist alongside normalcy and privilege in a society that refuses to hold itself accountable for anything.
And since it won’t, I will.
Silence is another form of violence. And I can’t afford to be silent, after all, violence is in my DNA, passed down through generations that survived it.
My series on violence will explore the contrasts, hypocrisies, and inaccuracies in popular narratives surrounding violence, and how aversion to violence in civilian populations is one-sided and has been carefully crafted and designed.
Think of this article as an intro; if it leaves you with more questions than answers, it’s doing its job.