Shattered

Peloni: This is excellent!

There is no word in the psychological lexicon for what happened on Oct. 7 or the new world in which Israelis now live. But “shattered” comes closer than “trauma.”

Pamela Paresky | Jewish Journal | March, 2024

Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

When Israelis speak about Oct. 7, they frequently say “there are no words.” But one word they consistently use is “shattered.”

Israeli psychologists have been treating severe trauma, complex trauma and collective trauma. The word “trauma,” however, fails to convey the scale, the savagery or the sadism of events that day. The term does not encompass the complex mix of disorientation, anguish, emotional overload and the experience of utter brokenness after the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

There is no word for the shock felt by Jews around the world when Israel was suddenly and without warning attacked by thousands of rockets targeting civilians from the north to the south and from the river to the sea. There is no word to describe what it is like to be a Jew kidnapped by terrorists indoctrinated since early childhood to believe that murdering Jews is rewarded in the afterlife. Or to know that the people you love are in the hands of terrorists who delight in rape, torture and slaughter; who enjoy forcing parents and children to watch as they inflict horrors on loved ones.

There is no word to convey the terrifying ordeal suffered by survivors of the attempted genocide that Hamas perpetrated on Oct. 7. There is no word that communicates the panic, betrayal, horror and distress of those who hid for hours waiting for help to come, reading WhatsApp messages about terrorists inside their neighbors’ houses. Hearing terrorists break into their own homes. Hearing the screams of injured and dying friends and relatives. Hearing sounds of gunfire and exploding RPGs punctuated by ecstatic shouts of “Allahu Akbar.” All the while knowing they were being hunted.

Everyone in Israel is just one or two degrees of separation from someone who was murdered, injured or kidnapped on Oct. 7. And everyone knows someone who sped to the rescue that day, many of whom never returned.

There is no word to describe the grief of a country still holding its breath while more than a hundred hostages remain in Gaza, and while hundreds of thousands of soldiers, many in their teens and early 20s, go to battle. Some returning badly injured. Some returning to be buried.

Israel, which in the 20th century absorbed hundreds of thousands of displaced Holocaust survivors as well as nearly 900,000 Jewish refugees fleeing antisemitism and violence in neighboring Arab countries, is now temporarily housing about 200,000 displaced Israelis — refugees in their own country — some in hotels and even dormitories.

This includes not only those evacuated from areas near the Gaza border, but also from the north, as confrontations with terrorists in Lebanon escalate. Many displaced families are unsure how long it will take before they can return home. Some refugees from the south have already returned. Some don’t have homes to return to. Some don’t know if they want to return.

There is no word in the psychological lexicon for what happened on Oct. 7 or the new world in which Israelis now live. But “shattered” comes closer than “trauma.”

A Shattered Paradigm

Jews are the only indigenous people who lived in one region for thousands of years, and then, when the majority were dispersed across the globe to be a tiny minority wherever they lived, managed to retain the same religion, rituals, language and attachment to their ancient land for 2,000 years — even as they believed themselves to be full members of their new host countries.

Jews have been unable to spend even one century without being ethnically cleansed, violently persecuted, or massacred somewhere — whether in the Diaspora or the land of Israel.

But Jews have also been unable to spend even one century without being ethnically cleansed, violently persecuted or massacred somewhere — whether in the Diaspora or the land of Israel. And since the newest iteration of Jewish control of the land in 1948, Israelis have existed under a threat to which there has been no real solution.

During the Second Intifada, roughly 1,000 Israelis were killed by Palestinian terrorists. There were stabbings, shootings, suicide bombings and beginning in 2001, mortar and rocket attacks launched from Gaza. In response, Israel increased security. Terrorists from the Palestinian Territories became less able to penetrate Israel’s borders and the number of injuries and deaths decreased. And of course, from the time they are little, Israeli children are aware that they will be required to serve in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

One of the most surprising things I learned during my time in Israel is that for decades, new parents have believed — or at least hoped hard enough to almost believe — that by the time their children are old enough to serve, defending the country from terrorism will no longer be necessary.

Gaza: “Land For Peace”

Gaza was home to Jews for over 2,000 years, beginning in at least the second century BCE and ending in 1929, when Arabs in the region once known as Judea killed more than 65 Jews in Hebron and around 135 Jews in Gaza. These pogroms came after a decade of similar antisemitic violence in the British Mandate of Palestine. A British commission referred to the pogroms as “racial animosity on the part of the Arabs.”

In part to protect Jews and in part to appease the forebears of the Arabs who in the 1960s would come to be called Palestinians, British colonial forces expelled the Jews from Hebron and Gaza, and restricted Jewish immigration to the region.

After the Six-Day War in 1967, Jews returned to live in Gaza. In 2005, in the hope of securing both peace and international goodwill, the Israeli government led by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally withdrew its forces from Gaza and forcibly removed the 9,000-plus Jews who lived there, as well as disinterring those buried in Gaza.

Referencing the long history of Jewish expulsions by colonial forces and antisemitic governments, Gazan Jews’ protest slogan was “Jews don’t expel Jews.” The IDF physically carried many of them out of their homes and across the newly designated border.

Hours after the finalization of the historic 2005 withdrawal, Palestinian terrorists in Gaza fired rockets at Israeli civilians. In 2007, the year Hamas took over as Gaza’s government and murdered its political rivals, terrorists in Gaza launched more than 2,800 rockets and mortars at Israel.

Hours after the finalization of the historic 2005 withdrawal, Palestinian terrorists in Gaza fired rockets at Israeli civilians. In 2007, the year Hamas took over as Gaza’s government and murdered its political rivals, terrorists in Gaza launched more than 2,800 rockets and mortars at Israel. By then, the staunch international support for demolishing Gaza’s terrorist infrastructure, which Sharon expected would last a decade, had already evaporated.

Instead, between then and Oct. 7, with backing from Iran along with appropriated international aid controlled by UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (which has been revealed to be both a terrorist-training system and an internationally funded source of income for Hamas terrorists and supporters), Hamas significantly expanded its terrorist capabilities and vastly increased its stockpile of weapons.

Without the international support necessary to destroy Gaza’s terrorist capabilities, in order to keep Israelis safe, Israel had to rely on defensive strategies. Israelis’ famous technological ingenuity resulted in an increasingly sophisticated rocket-alert system that now includes smartphone apps, and the “Iron Dome,” a highly advanced technological system that intercepts terrorists’ rockets, neutralizing the vast majority that don’t fall within Gaza.

Nonetheless, bomb shelters are still necessary. They appeared across Israel’s roadways as well as in Israeli homes and businesses. The fortified room in a home is called a “mamad,” an acronym for “merkhav mugan dirati” which means “apartment protected space.” The door to a mamad doesn’t lock. If a home is damaged, first responders need to be able to open it in order to extract the people inside.

Life in Israel, and especially the otef (the Gaza envelope), can be hard for those outside of Israel to truly grasp. Imagine needing constant protection from terrorist rocket attacks, and trying to prevent your children from developing anxiety, panic disorders and PTSD. Israel’s creative solution was to turn children’s bedrooms into bomb shelters. In newer homes, when rocket attacks happen at night, instead of awakening children to take them to a shelter, Israeli parents calmly visit their children’s bedrooms until the danger has passed. Sometimes children don’t even wake up.

This all had the effect of transforming something life-threatening into something more like a nuisance. On Jan. 29, I experienced this myself when air raid sirens sounded in Tel Aviv and my cell phone app blasted a “critical alert.” Hamas rockets aimed at the city came close enough that from the bomb shelter, I could hear them exploding when Iron Dome missiles destroyed them in the air.

In a tacit contract between Israeli citizens and their government, Israelis have come to tolerate a certain level of antisemitic terrorist violence as the price of Jewish self-determination in the historical, biblical, and continuous homeland of the Jews. In return, Israeli homes — or at least, the mamads — were thought to be as safe as if covered by an iron dome.

On Oct. 7, that contract was shattered.

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