Soon after Oct. 7 someone asked an Israeli relative how he’d describe what Israel was going through in one word. “Loss,” he answered.
As a psychologist, I have learned what loss does — not only to those who grieve but to everyone else affected.
What Israelis lost on Oct. 7 went beyond life and limb. They lost their sense of safety, of trust in their military to protect them. And they lost the illusion that Israel could be a modern Western democracy without resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Many Israelis are grieving. But as a whole, as it emerged from the initial shock, Israel was engulfed by fear and rage, the kind of fight or flight emotions that are associated not with loss but with threat. But the fact is that Hamas, in and of itself, is not an existential threat to Israel in the near future. Right now, the main challenge for Israel is not the threat, but rather the loss, or more accurately, its inability to process it.
For the Jewish state to accept the irreversible losses of Oct. 7 would require tolerating feelings of helplessness — the antithesis of the central building block of the Israeli character.
When Israel gained independence, a full third of its Jewish population consisted of Holocaust survivors only a few years away from the trauma. The state was founded on a determination never again to “walk like lamb to the slaughter house,” an idea now instilled in the mind of every Israeli child from a very young age.
So Israel’s immediate aerial bombardment of Gaza and the subsequent all-out war is no mere overreaction akin to that of the U.S. after 9/11. Rather, it was a reflexive leap into action, or to use the psychological term, a defence against feelings of helplessness.
The cost of this escape from helplessness is enormous not only for Palestinian lives and rights but also for Israel’s strategic interests. Imagine what Israel might have done differently had its people been able to experience, tolerate and contain the losses inflicted by Hamas. Absent a rush to psychologically corrective action, a more sober assessment could have contemplated a more effective, long-term, strategy.
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Amassing its army on the Gaza border, Israel could have given Hamas and the international community — including Saudi Arabia, with whom Israel was then negotiating peace — a three-month deadline to release all the hostages, remove Hamas’ top echelon from Gaza, surrender all weapons, seal all the tunnels and establish an alternative government in a demilitarized Gaza.
During that time, the only stories to populate the world media would have been those of the murdered, mutilated, tortured, raped and kidnapped Israelis. Were the ultimatum defied, Israel would have had a much stronger and longer-lasting international support, especially if it undertook a more targeted ground war against the Hamas terrorists and its infrastructure. And as an important side benefit, worldwide antisemitism would have decreased rather than explode.
Instead, Israel aimed, in the words of psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, to “turn trauma into triumph.” It is thus writing one more chapter in its tragic conflict with the Palestinians, a dialectic cycle of violence where victim becomes perpetrator and perpetrator victim, forever.
Finding hope for peace now will require, on the Israeli side, shattering the illusion that a single warrior state can protect the world’s Jews from a second Holocaust. Only by accepting what it lost on Oct. 7 can Israel correct this overcorrection.
Of course, Israel may not have a current partner for peace on the Palestinian side, but the only way to find one is to return to the path of a two-state solution and put on the table a genuine, Saudi-backed and internationally sponsored proposal for a Palestinian state.
