Israel’s New Common Language: We Are All Post-Traumatic

Take the case of a young reservist — let’s call him Daniel R. — who fought in Operation Defensive Shield more than two decades ago. In recent months, he has begun to speak publicly about the psychic pain that has shadowed him ever since. His story is not unique, yet it resonates far beyond his own life. He is not merely recounting a private wound; he is voicing the language that Israeli society, since October 7, has increasingly spoken: we are all post-traumatic now.

That phrase is not simply a clinical diagnosis. It has become a public idiom — a way to describe the rupture of a nation, and the gulf between the state’s mythology and its present reality.

At Israel’s founding, the Israel Defense Forces embodied an ethos of survival and victory. The young state was taught that strength and sacrifice guaranteed safety, that “it is good to die for our country.” But over time — after the conquest of the West Bank in 1967 and especially after the Yom Kippur War — the grammar of defense began to erode. Why occupation? Why by force? Why should the freedom of another people be denied? Those questions dismantled the old ideal, piece by piece.

Post-trauma, once a psychiatric label, seeped into that vacuum. It became not only a medical condition but also a form of civic recognition. In the wake of the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and Operation Protective Edge in 2014, the number of soldiers seeking psychological help soared, and veterans’ groups demanded acknowledgment of their suffering. Post-trauma became a kind of social credential: a wound that could secure rights, a pain that meant the state “counted” you. Daniel’s story, though personal, is emblematic of this larger shift.

I was reminded of this while sitting in a café in Tel Aviv, where the clink of coffee cups competes with news alerts flashing across phone screens. The setting is ordinary, but the atmosphere is not. Nearly every table has its own Daniel — someone who served, someone who has lost, someone who cannot quite return to normal life. The city hums, yet beneath the surface the conversation is the same: trauma is no longer exceptional; it is the air we breathe.

The data confirm what the cafés reveal. The Knesset Research and Information Center found that requests for official recognition of psychological injury rose from 3,844 before the war to more than 6,400 by December — a two-thirds increase in just four months. The army recorded 21 suicides in 2024, the highest in years, and thousands of soldiers reassigned from combat roles because of mental strain. Israel’s health funds report more than double the annual PTSD diagnoses of previous years. The NGO NATAL says its trauma helpline took 50,000 calls in 2023, nearly twice as many as in 2022, and its clinics are overwhelmed.

Daniel’s story could be read as one among many, but its resonance lies in what it says about the country as a whole. When citizens declare themselves “post-traumatic,” they are not only describing private pain. They are voicing the bleeding wounds of society itself — its injuries, its actions, its choices toward another people. The phrase functions both as a symbol — resistance to government policies, refusal of endless war — and as a lived, bodily protest against what Freud once called the death drive.

The danger is that a nation begins to narrate itself only through injury, turning trauma into its dominant idiom. But there is also possibility here. If this resonance is heard rather than silenced, it may become a brake on the state’s unending survival drama. It may suggest that there are other ways to live besides permanent mobilization.

Back in the Tel Aviv café, the hum continues. People sip coffee, refresh their screens, trade worried jokes. On the surface, it could be anywhere. But beneath it runs Daniel’s wound — and the wounds of thousands like him. The challenge for Israel is whether it can carry those wounds into something more than survival: a future in which pain is counted, but also transformed into the possibility of life beyond war.