Living in Other People's Trauma: Observations of an Outsider in Israel

reprinted with permission from the author (that would be me).

One of the things we forget when we’re learning is the learning process itself. When I embarked on my excursion to Israel, I knew that there was much for me to learn; I had little background knowledge about the country or its history or politics, I barely spoke the language and the culture itself was a mystery. Then there was my research project, looking at the effects of trauma on the deaf population, which would entail not only learning yet another language but also an additional culture and community.

When setting off into the unknown it’s always expected that new things will pop up and surprise you; elements of a situation or a people or a culture that you didn’t know existed suddenly present themselves and you have something new to learn. In studying trauma, not just within the deaf population but within the greater Israeli population, I learned something even more: I learned how other people learn.

The history of Israel and the Jewish people is rife with trauma: hundreds of years of persecution culminated in the Holocaust which claimed the lives of approximately 6 million Jews, the violence that came with the founding of the State of Israel, the multiple armed conflicts in the following years and the ensuing intifadas (Palestinian uprisings /lit. “shaking off”), as well as the ongoing threat from hostile countries such as Iran and Syria and the daily rocket-fire it receives from militants in the Gaza Strip. With the continual aggression shown against it diplomatically, militarily and ideologically, how is it that the population is not overwhelmed with trauma-related disorders?

One of the criteria for PTSD and ASD is experiencing an event which is or appears to be greatly threatening to one’s self or to others (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). So what happens when threatening events become more normalized? What happens if a culture incorporates trauma into it, into its holidays and religion, and into its national consciousness? Does it blunt the effects of these threats?

When I came to Israel, I knew next to nothing about Judaism and nothing about Israeli culture. I had of course heard all the warnings given to me by well-meaning and concerned friends and family members before my departure from the States. And while the major news networks seem to have a love affair of showing exploded buses or rocket attacks or Israeli military incursions, I knew there had to be more to the country than just that. However, I also knew that all those other things were also part of Israel, and should not be discounted.

My arrival was easy and relatively painless. I began learning: learning Hebrew and Israeli Sign Language, learning about Israel, learning which buses went downtown and when the grocery stores closed for Shabbat. I learned about the political situation in Israel and the history of the State (both of which changed depending on with whom I talked). I learned what the holidays were and why, I learned about the balance between secular law and Jewish holy law and how the two were intertwined.

But my curiosity extended beyond the current situation. The more I learned about the history of the Jewish people and their need for a Jewish state, the more curious I became about this culture of trauma and its manifestations. The need for me to do active research on the subject, though, was minimal. The incorporation of trauma and the Jewish people’s history of persecution is well-visible within Israeli and Jewish culture in a way that I have not experienced elsewhere.

One of the benefits and complaints I hear about being Jewish is the plethora of holidays that crowd the calendar. While some of these holidays I was familiar with due to their counterparts in Christianity (e.g. Simchat Torah and the Feast of Christ the King) and from a general knowledge of Judaism, others are entirely unique to the Jewish faith or to Israel as a country.

What was interesting to me was the connection to trauma so many of these holidays have. For instance, Tisha B’Av is a fasting holiday that not only commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Jewish Temples, but also other various tragedies that befell the Jewish people (Taanit 4:6). Purim is a celebratory holiday that involves dressing up in costumes to commemorate the almost slaughter of the Jewish people by Haman, an advisor to the then Persian King, but which was averted by Queen Esther (Esther 1-10). Even holidays like Sukkot and Passover, which don’t directly involve trauma, still have ties to the exile and persecution of the Jewish people and others (Leviticus 23:42-43; Deuteronomy 16:12; Exodus 11:1-12:36).

National holidays have similarly strong ties to this history of trauma. Memorial Day, as well as Holocaust Memorial Day, is celebrated with the closing of stores and the sounding of an air raid siren during which everyone comes to a stand-still; cars pull over, people stop in the middle of whatever they’re doing, everyone stands at attention for two minutes and remembers the people who have died. This is not the American-style holiday with parades and “50% off!!” sales; this is a day purely of solemn remembrance and memorial.

Other non-religious and non-historical factors play a central role in Jewish-Israeli society as well. Military service is required of all Jewish-Israelis beginning at age 18; three years for males and two years for females. For many men this involves service in a combat unit and, given the usage of military force in the West Bank and Gaza, active military duties. I have friends who did their military service in Hebron (a flash-point of settler/Palestinian violence) or who assisted with Israel’s withdraw from the Gaza, and their experiences are by no means rarities.

There are even high school programs that allow the students to volunteer with Magen David Adom (the Israeli Red Cross) and assist paramedics and other professionals. While these under-18s are barred from responding to mass casualty incidents, they still regularly respond to car accidents and various other types of trauma which high-schoolers in other countries may not be. There are also programs for high school students to be involved in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) before starting their required service. While the point isn’t to purposefully expose these students to trauma, there is also less shying away from it.

And this isn’t the only exposure to violence Israelis are receiving. The First and Second Intifada’s involved suicide-bombings on public buses, in nightclubs, and in crowded public places. Continued rocket fire into Israeli towns such as Sderot and Ashkelon affects not only the population of those areas but also feature prominently in the daily news media. These, combined with threats of violence from militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah as well as nuclear threats from Iran, create an underlying feeling of threat of which one is constantly aware.

All this is on top of the fall-out from Israel’s six armed conflicts, incidents like the killing of Israelis at the Munich Olympics in 1972, SCUD missile bombing during the Gulf War and the effects of intergenerational trauma from the Jews who came en mass to Israel during or following the Holocaust (Lev-Weisel, 2007; Kellerman, 2001). This Jewish trauma has become part of some people’s identity, an inescapable part of their past and present as Jews and as people of Israel.

So what are the effects of this trauma, both historical and on-going? In Israel the rate of PTSD is approximately 6% for the Jewish population (Hobfoll et al., 2008). However, the trauma of immigration to Israel has proven stressful for multiple groups (e.g. Ritsner, 1997; Ritsner, 1996) and presents itself differently than traditional PTSD symptoms (Grisaru, 2003; Daie, 1994; Schreiber, 1995). In a country that has seen over 3 million immigrants in the past 90 years (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2007a) this is a sizeable number of people who may have trauma-related disorders but are yet undiagnosed.

The Israeli-Arab population rate of trauma is much higher, about three-times the rate of the Jewish Israeli community (Hobfoll et al., 2008; Gelkopf, 2008). I don't discuss the Israeli-Arab community in this article not to minimize their experiences, but simply because of my own lack of knowledge about this community and their experiences of trauma. However this population is still highly relevant to any discussion of trauma in Israel, as they compose approximately 20% of the Israeli population (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2007b).

The overall response I get in regards to the volatility here is usually the same: a shrug of the shoulders and “אין מה לעשות" (ein mah lah-ah-soht/“nothing to be done”). I think it’s best summed up in the over-arching theme of Jewish holidays, as described to me by a friend: “they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat”. In other words: regardless of what happens, life goes on and we’ll get used to it. Whether it’s a faith in God that comforts them or simply the acceptance of the unpredictable nature of life here, it seems to be an effective strategy (Somer et al., 2005).

My learning about trauma in Israel, which I originally thought would be mostly academic, has turned out to be completely the opposite. By living here among Israelis and within the Jewish-Israeli culture, I’ve learned how people deal with trauma on a daily basis. These are obviously not the same traumas as experienced by people in places such as Baghdad or Darfur. But the daily, mini-traumas of Israeli life are constant: walking onto a public bus, passing a restaurant which had been bombed, hearing a sudden loud noise outside. These I’ve learned to deal with this in a very Israeli way, with “אין מה לעשות” and a quiet prayer.


References

American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, fourth edition, text revision. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association.

Central Bureau of Statistics, (2007a). Immigrants, by period of immigration, country of birth and last country of residence. Retrieved from http://www.cbs.gov.il/shnaton58/download/st04_04.xls on 9 December 2008.

Central Bureau of Statistics, (2007b). Demographic situation in Israel. Retrieved from http://www.cbs.gov.il/reader/newhodaot/hodaa_template.html?hodaa=200801252 on 9 December 2008.

Daie, N., & Witztum, E. (1994). A case of posttraumatic stress disorder masked by pseudoseizures in a jewish iranian immigrant in israel. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 182(4), 244-245.

Gelkopf, M., Solomon, Z., Berger, R., & Bleich, A. (2008). The mental health impact of terrorism in Israel: A repeat cross-sectional study of Arabs and Jews. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 117(5), 369-380.

Grisaru, N., Irwin, M., & Kaplan, Z. (2003). Acute psychotic episodes as a reaction to severe trauma in a population of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel. Stress and Health, 19(4), 241-247.

Hobfoll, S. E., Canetti-Nisim, D., Johnson, R. J., Palmieri, P. A., Varley, J. D., & Galea, S. (2008). The association of exposure, risk, and resiliency factors with PTSD among Jews and Arabs exposed to repeated acts of terrorism in Israel. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 21(1), 9-21.

Kellermann, N. P. F. (2001). Transmission of holocaust trauma -- an integrative view. Psychiatry, 64(3), 256-267.

Lev-Wiesel, R. (2007). Intergenerational transmission of trauma across three generations: A preliminary study. Qualitative Social Work, 6(1), 75-94.

Ritsner, M., Ponizovsky, A., Chemelevsky, M., Zetser, F., Durst, R., & Ginath, Y. (1996). Effects of immigration on the mentally ill -- does it produce psychological distress? Comprehensive Psychiatry, 37(1), 17-22.

Ritsner, M., Ponizovsky, A., & Ginath, Y. (1997). Changing patterns of distress during the adjustment of recent immigrants: A 1-year follow-up study. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 95(6), 494-499.

Schreiber, S. (1995). Migration, traumatic bereavement and transcultural aspects of psychological healing: Loss and grief of a refugee woman from Begameder County in Ethiopia. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 68(2), 135-142.

Somer, E., Ruvio, A., Soref, E. & Sever, I. (2005). Terrorism, distress and coping: High versus low impact regions and direct versus indirect civilian exposure. Anxiety, Stress & Coping, 18(3), 165-182.

Teichman, E., Zafrir, H. (2003). Images Held by Jewish and Arab Children in Israel of People Representing Their Own and the Other Group. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 34(6), 658-676.