Ending violence demands we refuse to move on

It was twilight on Pride night as I sat by the river in the suburbs of Berlin; the quiet of the broken only now and again by revellers on party boats cruising by. I was sitting with friends of friends, discussing the war in Ukraine with a person from Crimea, and in particular how our physical or sociological closeness to others determines the extent to which we can experience them as fully alive or to experience their deaths as something to mourn.

To illustrate my point, I said, “God forbid a bomb should go off in a café in Berlin. A few deaths would make headlines across Germany and all over the West, because we are—or feel ourselves to be—close to those who died. But if an apartment block in Beirut is levelled by an Israeli missile, it gets a single paragraph in the news, and then we all move on.” And as I uttered those words, I felt a superstitious chill.

That was around 10 p.m. Later, I would learn that this was the precise moment that a man drove a van into the Berlin Pride march and then continued his attack with a knife, after smashing the van into a tree (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/26/berlin-pride-attack-suspect-arrested-after-van-knife-assault): a cruel, devastating act of violence.

This morning, after processing the attack with friends and fielding calls from distant family, I did something without even realizing: I turned the page on the carnage. I sat at my desk and I got back to work on a documentary I’m pursuing about the lie of denazification.

It was only when I messaged a friend about filming dates that I realized I was quite out of sync with those around me. She wrote back, and said she were reeling from the attack and unable to talk about work. And suddenly, I felt insensitive, reptilian even—cold.

So I had to ask myself: What was wrong with me? How could I already be back at my desk, catching up on work? Then I remembered: that’s exactly what I’ve been doing every single day for the past two and a half years at least, since Israel escalated its genocide against the Palestinians.

No one deserves to die because they chose to go out into the street and affirm that their life has value—that they refuse to be silence or forced to hide who they are, by law, hate or violence.

Just as no-one deserves to die at a Pride march, no one deserves to die because they live in an apartment building selected seemingly at random by IDF high command, on the pretence that they shared their domestic space with “the enemy” (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/09/lebanon-beirut-israel-strikes-hundreds-killed).

Likewise, no one deserves to be turned into red mist because they’re sheltering in a tent in Gaza or Beirut when Israeli artillery drops (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_refugee_camps_in_the_Gaza_war).

120 schoolgirls do not deserve to die screaming in their school auditorium in Minab, Iran, in the opening act of the USA’s latest imperialist adventure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack).

A patient, lying in bed at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza does not deserve be set on fire, when Israel carries out an air strike on a space that should be a safe haven (https://x.com/Timesofgaza/status/1845600669232988190).

None of these people deserved to die.

Yet time and again, after each slaughter is blotted out by yet another slaughter—even with the the image of a patient thrashing about in the midst of an inferno still burned into my retinas—I just move on.

As I sit at my desk this evening, watching the footage from Al-Aqsa Hospital once again, I wonder: Was this person alive? Or was it simply the force of the heat from the explosion caused by the Israeli airstrike that made their body move as if they were?

I feel sick, I physically recoil, as part of my mind tries to merge with the experience of this person, tries to imagine what it would mean to have your skin burn away and still somehow be conscious. And yet, even after this gruesome exercise, I will move on. I know I will. This is what I do. And this is what disgusts me about myself.

I can only live this so-called life—go to work, pay taxes, dance, treat myself to a coffee, breathe the air, tell a joke, wonder if I should put grapes in my salad this evening—by pushing these memories away and welcoming the numb detachment that separates the functionally “normal” from the insane.

When did I decide that I wanted to be normal?

Pride exists because queer people—trans, lesbian, gay, intersex—have not always been seen as fully human. Yet when I look at the scores of daily deaths of brown people in the so-called Middle East, at the indifference to suffering when it occurs on bodies coded as “Muslim” or “Arab,” I see that the dehumanization runs far deeper for these communities than the violence and threats I experience as a trans woman in Berlin.

In the midst of this rising tide of imperial violence, Pride has lost its meaning. Proud of what? What is the goal? To assimilate into a nation state that exports deadly bombs to a warzone? (https://www.justsecurity.org/114479/german-arms-exports-israel-icj/). And are we supposed to somehow take succour from the fact that the murderers who helm the German regime offer us their solidarity; are willing to light a candle for us sexual and gender deviants in this, our dark night?

Pride draws the lens of our awareness into a small, proximate circle—those around us, those who look like us, who think alike—and at best struggles to achieve access to an unjust power, while failing to speak to those killed or forced into unlivable lives by a bloodthirsty empire and its many, many tentacles.

I don’t want to move on when a woman dies in Tiergarten, or when a child dies in Gaza, but I can’t think clearly anymore. I can’t feel freely. Because to feel the burden of these cruel days would mean to stop—completely—any exertion of energy, any movement within a single fibre of my being, unless that spark is an act of resistance to a world that normalizes the humiliation, degradation, herding, and slaughter of those whose lives are deemed to not matter.

But can I? Will I? Will you?

Proximity and Grievability are concepts we explore on the HYENAZ album Foreign Bodies.