The Occupation of Feeling: Grief, Numbness, and the War That Lingers Within"

The past year and a half has carved itself into an irreversible chapter of history. There is a before October 7, and an after. Nothing can return to what it was—not the world, not the region, not me. I don’t even remember who I truly was prior. Memories that resurface on my phone feel ancient. Time, once linear, now feels warped, altered indefinitely. 

Over the past year and a half, I have experienced many emotions: I have felt hope, anger, grief, fear, despair, frustration, and more. But the most haunting feeling of all is not an emotion—it is the absence of one. The numbness.

This numbness started slowly creeping in sometime after December 2023, as the occupation unleashed its brutality on Palestinians for the world to see, streamed into every corner of the globe. And by October 2024, when the occupation had been turning its weapons indiscriminately toward Lebanon, that numbness consumed me entirely. And it did not come alone—it brought with it a heavy, inescapable frustration. A blockade. I could still feel anger. 

Like many others, I became a shell of myself throughout the war. Numbness became my companion. It ordered my feelings into submission and soon engulfed me, suppressing these pent-up emotions, making me believe I could deal with the reality we existed in. This is what the occupation does: it takes aim at the emotional core of a people. It exerts control not only over land and bodies but over our capacity to feel. It invades your psyche. It breaks the body by first breaking the spirit and orchestrates exhaustion so total, fear so constant, that feeling becomes a liability. 

This is not accidental. The strategic use of overwhelming violence—psychological and physical— is a tool of colonial warfare. By normalizing fear, exhaustion, and despair, the occupation aims to strip communities of their ability to grieve and hope communally, and by design, organize. Emotional paralysis becomes a form of control and numbness a desired outcome. 

The colonizer demands that your nervous system adapt to the unbearable until the unbearable becomes normal. During Israel’s war on Lebanon, “evacuation warnings” released by the Israeli army’s Arabic spokesperson became the norm. Posted on X, these warnings often included a map and vague instructions about targeted areas, letting Lebanese folk know where an imminent attack may occur. They would appear at random hours, often in the dead of night as people slept. Over time, people grew accustomed to these extermination notices. So much so that when a strike happened without prior “warning,” the shock was as much about the violence itself as it was about the absence of notice. 

As such, the normalization of terror is, in itself, an act of psychological warfare. It is not just about inflicting damage, it is about conditioning the population to expect and internalize it as routine. How did it become acceptable for extermination warnings to be casually posted on a social media platform–which not everyone has access to—and considered a form of “civility” in war? In this landscape of destruction, numbness can sometimes feel like the only viable survival mechanism. And that in itself is its own form of violence.

One day, the occupation conducted an airstrike on the town across from mine. My house shook violently. It was the second time they had struck that town. My initial reaction was what one would typically experience after an airstrike (typically…experience…after an airstrike— what’s typical about an airstrike?) My heart jumped from my chest, and I ran outside to see the damage. A dark smoke billowed from a collapsing building. My sister’s best friend lives in that town. Several of my siblings’ friends too. I stood, suspended in a daze, watching the structure crumble. The sounds of sirens broke the trance. I turned on my heel and went back into my house. My body moved without instruction, like a machine reverting to protocol or a robot following its own programming. I continued my chore, the feeling of numbness creeping through my extremities. Reality stood inches away, yet I couldn’t touch it. 

Amid the emotional vacuum, one event briefly cracked the shell of numbness: the death of my maternal great aunt in November 2024. My maternal great aunt was from South Lebanon–Nabatieh, and her late husband was from Mashghara, in West Bekaa. At the time, both Nabatieh, Mashghara, and the roads leading to them were under relentless attacks, therefore there was no choice but to have the funeral in Mount Lebanon, far away from her and her husband’s hometowns. Only two people were allowed to accompany her body to her final resting place near her husband in Mashghara, as the road there and presence in the town itself was risky. 

The location of the funeral procession didn’t feel right. It didn’t make sense that my maternal great uncle was mourning his sister in a church in Mount Lebanon. For as long as I could remember, I had never seen my great uncle outside of Nabatieh, with the exception of in other towns in the south. Yet, due to the occupation’s attacks, he was displaced to Mount Lebanon, staying with his daughter and her family. His presence outside of the South felt unnatural. Now, his grief was displaced too.

During mass, my mother, her cousins, and her aunts wept for my great aunt. And that was when my withheld grief—stubborn, submerged, suffocating—finally surfaced. Not in full, but enough to shed a single tear. I grieved my great aunt. I grieved her displacement in death. I grieved for all the people present in this church hall, grieving in borrowed places among crowds who were forced out of their homes.

The rest of the emotions buried themselves back again. 

The numbness and frustration resurfaced. 

The numbness seemed to dissipate at night while asleep. Every single night, I dreamt about the war. The nightmare would either include scenes of a war or would allude to the war and its effects symbolically. A few days after the pager attacks, I dreamt of a pool that was filled with eyes. Another night, I dreamt of olives being pressed into olive oil, but instead of the regular vibrant shades of green-gold; the olive oil was blood red. In the midst of these dreams, I felt. I felt sorrow and fear and despair. I would wake up aching. Only in dreams did my emotions roam free, as though my subconscious seized the night to scream what I couldn’t get myself to express out loud.

The occupation doesn’t just live on the outside. It crawls into the mind. It seeps into the subconscious, colonizing even the spaces that are supposed to be safe; sleep, memory, and imagination. It occupies the self in full, taking root in the most intimate corners of being, until even dreams become terrain of war. 

Sometimes, ever so slightly, I’ll wonder whether there is anything left under the numbing feeling—whether this feeling itself is engulfing a set of other emotions, or whether it has engulfed for far too long, the rest of the feelings have dissipated. 

I’m sure the feelings are there. But I don’t think I, nor anyone, has properly processed what happened  [and is still happening]. We haven’t been afforded the time to do so. A “ceasefire” has been declared, yet this declaration is as void as can be, as the occupation attacks South Lebanon, the Bekaa, Baalbek-Hermel, and Dahye. As we consistently wake up to the news or sounds of attacks in the middle of the night. 

Frantz Fanon once wrote, “In the colonial world, the emotional sensitivity of the native is kept on edge like a running sore.” There is no pause, nor room to absorb. The nervous system is in a state of constant readiness, always expecting the next explosion, the next phone call, the next loss. And that, too, is part of the occupation. It keeps your body hostage in its own fear. 

Numbness feels like the perfect escape. 

And yet—I do not wish to be numb.

Colonialism denies you your grief, your land, and your breath. It robs you of the right to feel, then punishes you when you do. 

Therefore, I want to feel.

I want to feel the grief in its full depth. I want to feel the rage that reminds me I’m alive. I want to feel the flickers of hope, even if they’re faint, and the despair that follows when they’re extinguished. I want to feel it all. Because to feel is to remember. And to feel is to resist the occupation’s plans for us.