How can Israel treat a whole nation in trauma? Experts weigh in

If, in the past few months, Israel has often been described as a nation in trauma, no words can adequately encapsulate what the nation has been going through since the horrific Hamas attack that left over 1,200 people killed, hundreds brutally kidnapped, and thousands wounded.

According to Prof. Shlomo Noy, President of Ono Academic College and former director of the Rehabilitation Hospital at the Sheba Medical Center, “The events of October 7 and their aftermath have changed the entire concept of trauma therapy.”

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Noy delivered these remarks in a panel discussion held on the subject of trauma as part of Ono’s Conversation Corner, a series about the issues that the State of Israel will be grappling with the day after the war. Other participants in the panel included psychologist Pamela Paresky, an advisor at New York University’s Mindful Education Lab, a senior fellow at the Network Contagion Research Institute, and a writer for Psychology Today, and Sharon Sharabi, whose brothers Eli and Yossi were both kidnapped by Hamas on October 7. The panel was moderated by Maayan Hoffman, Deputy CEO - Strategy & Innovation for the Jerusalem Post.

He stated that while Israel has had a great deal of experience in individual trauma, the events of October 7 and their aftermath, which affected a vast number of Israelis, have changed the entire concept of the therapy of trauma. “No nation in the world will be able to treat so many trauma victims individually.”

In order to deal with the level of trauma in Israel, Noy said that new strategies for conducting group therapy in other settings need to be considered, as well as a community approach to trauma therapy. Ono’s Trauma Center, he explained, is implementing both of these features in the therapy that it is providing for evacuees from Israel’s south who are staying at hotels near the Dead Sea. “We want to go and reach out to the communities at their places and reach many people together,” he said. 

Expanding on Ono’s trauma training, Noy added that students in Ono’s art therapy and behavioral science programs can currently receive a specialization in trauma within these programs. In the coming year, other faculties within the college will be adding courses in trauma specialization. The college has also added basic tools for dealing with student trauma for its 1,200 teachers in its master’s degree programs in education. 

Finally, Ono will be opening a clinic on campus for the treatment of trauma, as well as a traveling trauma clinic that will treat patients in various cities and locations in Israel, such as Sderot, Ofakim, and other communities in the Gaza Envelope.  Noy added that Ono is seeking partnerships with other organizations in its activities in the treatment of trauma. 

Sharon Sharabi’s brother Eli, a resident of Kibbutz Be’eri, remains in captivity in Gaza, and his brother Yossi, an Ono alumnus, also from Be’eri, was killed in Gaza. Eli’s wife Lianne, and two daughters, Noiya and Yahel, were murdered by Hamas terrorists on October 7. “My family is broken and shattered,” said Sharon, who states that the struggle to free the hostages has helped him deal with the trauma that he has experienced. 

Commenting on Sharabi’s reply, Paresky pointed out that what he and others have undergone is a type of ‘shattering,’ which conveys a stronger meaning than the use of the word trauma. “The word we have in our toolkit is trauma, but I’ll be interested to see whether something new emerges,” she said. Paresky added that accompanying the trauma that people have suffered is a resolve not to allow the terrorists to rob them of their joy in life, calling it “a firm determination to cherish life and live life to its fullest.”

 She concurred with Noy’s analysis of the unique nature of the current trauma in Israel, saying, “There isn’t an adequate word in the psychological lexicon for what happened on October 7, or for the ongoing experience of Israelis and Jews around the world.”

Paresky noted Ono’s extensive work in this field and said she has seen a tremendous commitment to helping people rehabilitate and move forward. “I’ll be really interested to see the results of the teacher training, the mobile clinic, the research, and everything that they’re doing,” she stated.  Paresky added that programs that focus on positive psychology, art therapy, and play are also essential tools in rehabilitation from trauma. 

She added that healing trauma can go beyond the concept of resilience to post-traumatic growth, pointing out that historically, this type of positive growth has long been an important component of Jewish national behavior. Addressing how this type of positive growth can lead to antisemitism, she said, “We’re also in a strange moment, in which our refusal to be victimized turns us into an oppressor in the critical imagination. Israel is precisely where Jews are strongest after antisemites try to break us, and in the critical social justice paradigm, that strength and the ability to overcome being victimized is not tolerated. This is one of the aspects of antisemitism. The other aspect is that antisemitism requires a kind of suspension of critical thinking. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the liberal, anti-democratic dominant narrative on American college campuses does. It replaces critical thinking with critical theories that rely on a set of moral and logical inversions and on seeing the world in terms of us and them in terms of oppressors and victims. Whenever we’re in a moment in which people predominantly see the world in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ Jews become ‘them.’”

Concluding the panel discussion, Prof. Noy reflected that another reason behind the creation of the trauma program at Ono is that additional traumas in Israeli society are likely to occur in the future, either in the context of national events or environmental disasters, such as earthquakes. Noting that Ono’s student body is a microcosm of Israeli society, he said, “We need also to do something for the future. We need to think how to lower the trauma of our internal society in Israel.”

This article was written in cooperation with Ono Academic College.