Israel, as a state, was formed as a Jewish state. As such it was formed with the collective generational traumas that Jewish people have experienced over centuries, and in particular it carries the trauma of what happened during the Holocaust. To be clear, Israel was hardly welcomed by its neighbours when it was created in 1948, and it has existed in more or less a state of siege ever since.
However, I want to introduce this as an example of continuous collective trauma, and I think this collective trauma concept goes a long ways to explaining Israel’s response to the events of October 7, 2023. To be clear, this is not intended to justify the excesses of that response, but rather to serve as a framework within which to understand the nature of the response.
Collective Trauma is simply defined as the shared experience by a group when they are affected by a common set of traumatic events. In Canada, there has been much discussion of the collective trauma inflicted upon the First Nations as a result of policies ranging from the Reservation System to the Residential Schools system (and many others). It becomes “continuous collective trauma” when the circumstances that created the trauma continue beyond a singular event. The policy and political environment related to indigenous peoples in Canada is a good example of something that creates an environment for repeated traumatic experiences to the affected people.
History is filled with examples of Jewish people being persecuted, and for the purposes of this essay, I think it is more than adequate to demonstrate that there is a valid argument that Jewish people have experienced collective trauma not merely over years or decades, but literally over centuries and millennia. There can be little doubt that over time, these experiences have formed a collective sense of "existential dread". After all, one cannot be forcibly detained, marginalized, or murdered repeatedly without there being an impact on the survivors and their descendants. This is what is known in psychology as "transgenerational trauma", and it generally describes how the impacts of trauma are passed through generations, even if the specific traumatic events have long since ended, impacting people even in times of relative peace and stability.
Fast forward to the formation of modern-day Israel in 1948, and its creation was perhaps the "last gasp" of the European colonial era. Put kindly, the formation of Israel was not greeted with open arms by its neighbours or by the Palestinian people who were displaced by the creation of Israel. Numerous insurgent groups formed that made "erasing Israel from the map" their stated goal, and the Arab and Persian powers in the region certainly played their role in numerous military conflicts with Israel. It is understandable that since 1948, the people of Israel would perceive their existence as a nation-state as one of being under nearly perpetual attack, from forces both outside and inside the territory of Israel.
These events combine collectively to foster a general sense that Israel's citizens are constantly exposed to traumatic events, both directly and indirectly. This creates a general condition of ongoing, collective trauma in the population.
People who are traumatized individually will experience a wide range of symptoms. A society that is subject to constant traumas is eventually going to express that in its politics, government, and approach to its neighbours and rivals. Over the course of my lifetime, I have watched Israel shift from a combative, expansionist orientation to one of peace-seeking, and more recently to one where the government has become increasingly belligerent again. In its politics, there has been a steady rise of increasingly militant religious parties, and that has ultimately forced the current Prime Minister into making common cause with them in order to maintain power.
From a trauma perspective, none of this is entirely surprising. The traumatized party wants to make their world safer, and in terms of collective action, that often means becoming increasingly hardline and militant. More or less, the reasoning goes "well, our enemies are still there, so we have to become more difficult for them to attack. The natural consequence is that when there is an attack (intifada, uprising, lobbing of missiles into Israel, etc.), the response is to become ever more controlling of the situation.
Over the last 15 years, we have watched Israel increasingly make itself difficult to deal with. Netanyahu deliberately fed Hamas to sow divisions within the Palestinian people so he could claim that there was nobody to talk peace with; "settlements" throughout the West Bank territories have been used as a form of ethnic cleansing to push the Palestinian peoples out of the region, Israel has seldom hesitated to respond with bombs and artillery the moment someone even positions a unit within firing range of Israel's borders, and so on.
So, when October 7 occurred, it really came as no particular surprise that Israel's response has basically been to level the urban development of the Gaza Strip. The pattern of escalation exhibited over the last 15 years or so supports that notion. In some fundamental way, Hamas basically poked Israel's government "in the eye with a stick" - saying in essence "you can lock Gaza down, but you can't stop us". Israel's reaction was to lash out as violently as possible - exactly what I would expect given the long history of trauma in the society.
If, as I postulate here, Israel's response is best understood as being driven by collective trauma, we have a framework within which to understand how Israel arrived at "flatten Gaza" as a response. Basically, they're lashing out, reacting more to their own internal traumas than anything else.
This gives some sense as to why the Israel / Palestine fight is so intractable. Both of the parties have been mutually traumatizing each other for years now (and yes, Israel's actions towards the Palestinians can be framed equally as traumatizing too). You literally have two belligerent parties who are mutually traumatizing each other. I don't know what the solution is, but I think we can guarantee that the next steps will be escalation of violence.
Ultimately, it's going to require getting both parties to a table, and acknowledging the harm that each has done to the other - and that event is a loooong ways away.
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