Where Do We Direct Our Misplaced Lebanese Anger?

Having lived all my life in Lebanon, anger became my uninvited friend. I’ve grown angry at my government every single day. It was only natural to grow angry at a country that has been abandoning its people for the past decades, as we witness our generation endure the same history that our parents couldn’t escape. Without much acknowledgement, I left the country a year ago to study in London - after enduring an economic crisis, tamed uprising, the brutal Beirut blast, and October 2023’s war, was an intentional move. It was a decision to leave a place that never embraced those who believe in change’s tangibility.

Even after half a year in London, my body couldn’t comprehend that I’m safe here. Something inside me knew that our country would not be left untouched, as clearly acknowledged and repeated by Israel in the past two and a half years. I was, unfortunately, right.

Today, and as I witness my country’s rape from a distance, of course, my anger peaks to an unprecedented level. But perhaps, this form of anger is existentially different. As we move to other countries, we begin to understand our place, its complexities, and its beauties from a different standpoint. It didn’t take much for my rage to transform from a governmental level to a global one, nor to start reclaiming an Arab identity that I was never necessarily married to. Honestly, all it took was a few questions on whether Lebanon belonged in the Middle East for me to start cooking Lebanese food that I never cooked back home. If I’m being honest, it also took other unpleasant encounters. Like a drunk British stranger kicking me for wearing a Kuffieh in a pub. In his defense, he also had some anger in him. The anger he held after witnessing a 500,000-person protest against Israel’s genocide in Palestine was uncontrollable. He couldn’t comprehend why so many people were wearing what he called a “terrorist” sign. So he directed his anger towards the unfamiliar migrant, me. Not to equate his barbaric anger with mine, but the source of my anger is different.

Instead of stemming from a lack of understanding, it stems from watching your people get divided, erased, and massacred. It stems from observing your homeland and the places you adored and discovered yourself, get destroyed. It comes from seeing the baggy eyes of your loved ones over a screen that I feel like smashing into the wall every morning. It comes from feeling tied up. Unlike his, my anger is not optional, the kind that cripples your hands and haunts you in nightmares of your friends dying under bombardment. It comes from disappointment in the world’s oblivion to injustice. From trying to tame it, only to find your body naturally reacting in the form of panic attacks. From knowing that your parents never experienced the pleasures of reading a slow book in the park, retiring in a home they owned, or touching the small luxuries of life, without being interrupted by violence or instability. It comes from holding this reality while living in contrasting, untouched countries that feed on your destruction, while portraying the opposite context.

Interrupted Romanticization

By the beginning of the year, I was slowly trying to understand why I was transforming into a romanticized version of myself. I was catching myself listening to Arabic music, beautifully describing the country that angers me, and anxiously moving away from conversations that normalize our instability. I knew what I was doing. I knew that I was accommodating my anger to a new environment that shies away from the complexities of our context, and the colonialist realities that made our two worlds so polarized.

Somehow, and like a chameleon, I knew that my tone towards my country must be different here. Mind you, I’m still the same angry woman who witnessed her own government steal from her own people, seize their money, neglect their basic needs, oppress them, and attempt to erase their collective memory in any way possible. But this was not going to be my story at home in the west. Living here, my body transformed its anger towards systemic abandonment of our country, its deliberately weakened system, the continuous bombs, and 10,000 Israeli violations of Southern lands, despite the world’s deception of “ceasefire” this past year. Here, I romanticize Lebanon in a cringy manner, but mostly defend it.

The story I choose to tell is how our own government, the same one I am deeply furious at, had been shaped by colonialist and neo-colonialist frameworks. How international silence for Israel’s human rights and humanitarian law violations must not be normalized. How our country’s placement in the crosshairs of violence must not be the usual. Coming from a small country like Lebanon makes it harder to unpack the complexities of a place that can be so tiny and hold so much violence and anger, so I chose to romanticize it by making an outstanding Bazella w Rezz. I never touched a pan or liked Bazella w Rezz back home. This romanticization, however, did not last.

Anger Amid War Cannot Be Romantic

Since March 2, 2026, and as Israel continues to kill hundreds, destroy Lebanon, and displace more than one million people in just two weeks, my anger grows towards the opposite horizon. In times like these, I would rather be home. I would rather be home, in solidarity with my loved ones, grieving with my people, in support of every aching body, and in respect to those who are losing their homes to Israeli displacement. In times like these, I acknowledge my love towards an unfamiliar home so loudly and fully understand it. In times like these, my understanding of home is not romantic, but deeply political. I want to be in the only place that acknowledges what we’ve been through as the world gaslights its own complicity in creating what we’ve been through. In times like these, I recall that empathy is deeply political. This is exactly when the political world tricks us into believing that empathy and politics are opposing contrasts, as it limits our imagination, dismisses our realities, and gaslights our daily misery. This is exactly when solidarity against aggression becomes an essential form of resistance.

This is also when my anger towards the world doesn’t need to hide behind romance.

Instead, it stands alone as a resistance against a world that normalizes bombardment images and displaced children from the global south. It’s a continuous confrontation that Global North spaces that lack will, information, and understanding of our context are not passive. The systemic construction of our underdevelopment can make us forget that this categorization was never accidental–and forgetting that is dangerous. One simple reminder that mustn’t leave our memory is the League of Nation’s categorization of nations into so-called ‘backward’ and ‘advanced’ societies through its mandate system in 1920. Under this system, former colonies and territories of defeated powers were ranked into three classes based on their perceived level of ‘civilization’ and readiness for self-governance. This framework, widely criticized as a tool of imperialism disguised as humanitarianism, continued to justify European control over colonized people.

While we may have forgotten it, it is essential for our memory as colonized people to recall it today. In times where our country is almost driven into intra-conflict directions, the colonized people who had systematically seen our government repeat the same colonial practices against its people might need to understand that our liberation was never achieved. Instead of directing it towards each other, we, the Lebanese, might need to redirect our anger elsewhere.

We cannot, however, deny our anger towards our government, those who capitalized on us in the name of resistance, and those who are invading our land, especially after witnessing the slow consequences of this denial over the years. As I observe the Lebanese throwing their understandable and misplaced anger towards each other, I fear horrific internal escalations and wonder if directing our anger outwards is more productive. Since its independence, Lebanon has always been afflicted with a slow violence that fuels our anger. As Israel commits its quickest and loudest violence against it, we owe our home a better-placed anger towards an international system that turns a blind eye to this violence; towards international frameworks that were placed for the exact purpose of prohibiting this violence. As we witness a colonizing change in the country’s fabric, and as the west misplaces our country on the map, I wonder why we were never offered space.

Perhaps it’s the fact that Lebanon doesn’t have much to offer to resource extractors, or the fact that Lebanon is insignificantly small and fragmented, never given negotiation space on war tables. Under these hopeless circumstances, reclaiming our narrative and culture is the only response we have left.

I do not claim to know if redirecting this anger can create real impact, but I do know that at the very least, it will create a space for our defying voices, in a world that refuses to listen to them.