When war is the background of your life stories: What it means to be Arab

Something weird about being an Arab and the Arab experience is how normalized war and violence are in your life. I mean I’m pretty privileged all things considered because I didn’t grow up in Palestine or Iraq or Libya or Syria or Yemen. I grew up in a fairly safe environment. And yet stories of my childhood are punctuated with war stories. War is a constant theme and setting in my childhood stories. When I was growing up, stories that my parents and aunts told me about myself and about themselves had soldiers and tanks and air-raid sirens. Stories that my friends and classmates shared were stories of war, of torture, of violence. I remember my best friend sharing a story about his uncle being tied up and tortured, and a story a classmate shared about how her father was killed by soldiers.

And as an adolescent I experienced the same thing firsthand. Some of my memories as a teenager are punctuated with war like it’s so normal—like it’s just a background setting. Do you remember when you were a kid and you misbehaved and your parents told you to go to your room? What I remember is that I misbehaved and my dad told me to go to my room and me being terrified because I was stuck in my room and the air-raid sirens going off and me thinking I wanted to be with my parents because if our house came crashing down at least I wanted to die with my parents. What I remember is crying in the corner not because I was being punished but because I was afraid I was going to die alone.

You know how you text your friends to make sure they got home safely? What I remember is texting my friend to make sure he made it out safely when his hometown was bombed.

I tend to tell myself that I’m relatively privileged because I am, all things considered. I mean I can only imagine what Palestinians go through on a daily basis. But I’ve also had school cancelled because of war, and when we went back to school, it wasn’t because the war was over, but because life had to go on. My middle school years were punctuated with missile siren drills and missile attacks.

And now, several decades later, my parents and family are fasting Ramadan under air-raid sirens in yet another war. And it’s become so blasé that we don’t even talk about it anymore.

When you’re an Arab, your perspective of what’s normal violence is so skewed that you need an outside perspective to realize how messed up it is.

In one of my first years of living in Toronto, I went to a Middle Eastern restaurant with a white friend of mine. We were standing in line waiting to order when she suddenly rushed outside the restaurant. I followed her. “What’s wrong?” I asked. She told me that she couldn’t stand what was on the TV. “Oh, that,” I said. “Honestly, it didn’t even register to me. I guess we’re so used to it.” We had been watching the news on the TV while in line and it didn’t even occur to me that someone might feel uncomfortable watching footage of a child crushed under rubble.

When the war started a couple of weeks ago, Western countries advised their citizens to evacuate our countries. When I found out about it, my first thought was, “Why are they making such a big deal out of this?” It took me a few seconds to process that if many countries are telling their citizens to leave, then it must really be a big deal. But when you’re an Arab, your scope of what’s safe is so messed up. Because your scope stops being “This country is under attack, it must be unsafe,” or even “This city is under attack, it must be unsafe.” It becomes more like, “I heard an explosion, but I’m okay, so it must be safe.”

I remember once hearing an explosion at night and wondering what it was. I looked up the news and there was nothing. I woke up the next day and it was life as usual and I completely forgot about it. Later during the day, I remembered what had happened and looked up the news again and found a short article about a bomb that went off.

Imagine if a bomb had gone off in Toronto, or whichever Western city you live in. Would no one have spoken about it? Would life have gone as usual? Would it have been barely mentioned in the news?

And yet I’m still privileged. Because I’ve lived through war and violence throughout my life, but have I really?

A while ago, I was watching a video by a Palestinian vlogger documenting his life in Gaza. He, a literal child, was talking about how he’d walk for hours to go to the supermarket looking for whatever food he could get, then looking for water, then going to his neighbour’s house to get his phone charged to stay connected to the outside world, and how a building next to his home got destroyed by a missile but he’s safe and life goes on. And I was just… so overwhelmed by the existential absurdity of it all. Why do I get to move ten thousand kilometres away and tell my story like a story to be told, and he has to live his story as his everyday life?

When the war started, the first thought I had was that I wanted to move back to be with my parents. But then I pulled myself back and told myself that it wouldn’t make sense for me to waste the opportunity I’ve been given in life out of survivor’s guilt. And my parents would’ve thought it would be silly for me to do so. “We’re safe,” they would’ve told me. “Alhamdulillah.”

I was actually hesitant to even write this story. I felt like, “Oh yeah, you’ve been through war a couple of times, you’ve been under air-raid sirens a few times, big fucking whoop.” But this—and even much less—is what Israel is constantly selling the West as a massive threat to Israeli lives. I mean, Israeli TV even ran a story about a little girl who lost her hamster from air-raid sirens like it was a big fucking tragedy. And they’re able to sell this bullshit because they know what tugs at the heartstrings of a Western audience because they know white people have empathy towards them but little to no empathy towards Arabs. And the truth of the matter is that as an Arab, one of the things you learn is the exact same thing: we have little empathy towards ourselves. War and violence become so normalized that we dismiss or minimize our experiences of it. “Trauma? Haha, nah, this isn’t trauma; it’s just a story. Don’t make a big deal out of it.”