This War Is Wrought With Historical Trauma

Let’s start with Israelis, of which I am one. For many of us, the first reports of the slaughter taking place near the Gaza border on the morning of Oct. 7 came from Israelis barricaded in their rooms with their children. One mother phoned a television anchor and pleaded for help on a live broadcast. Others made similar appeals on social media. Many of these conversations were played and replayed on television and radio in the hours and days to come, as the death toll rose: first to scores and then hundreds.

Pundits quickly dubbed the Hamas attack Israel’s 9/11. The total number killed, more than 1,300, is the population equivalent of more than 40,000 Americans. Israelis have our own library of trauma: the battles near those same kibbutzim around Gaza during the 1948 war; the tense weeks leading up to the 1967 war; the surprise attack in the 1973 war.

But for many Israelis, the Hamas attack evoked the most chilling memory of all: the Holocaust. It was reflected in the images of armed men going door to door to kill Jews, of parents cowering over their children to keep them silent, of families pleading for help and getting no response. Part of Israel’s creation story is the idea that Jews would no longer find themselves defenseless, that a modern state and a strong military would act as a guarantee against further exterminations. For many long hours on Oct. 7, the guarantor seemed to be missing in action.

To be sure, historical analogies are risky. Plenty of Israelis leaders have invoked the Holocaust to justify misplaced political goals, cheapening its significance. But Israelis weren’t the only ones to see parallels. A few days after the Hamas attack, U.S. President Joe Biden said: “This attack has brought to the surface painful memories and the scars left by a millennia of antisemitism and genocide of the Jewish people.”

Palestinians have their own trauma, beginning with the Nakba—the catastrophe that coincided with Israel’s founding in 1948 and was intertwined with it. Approximately 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes and became refugees, many forcibly displaced by the nascent Israeli army. Most Palestinians in Gaza today are the descendants of those refugees.

Last week, when Israel ordered more than 1 million Palestinians to move to the southern part of Gaza ahead of an Israeli invasion, what the world saw was a humanitarian crisis in the making. But for Palestinians, it was also an echo of that historical trauma—and, quite possibly, the harbinger of a new Nakba. Israel pledged to allow Palestinians to return to their homes once troops routed Hamas in the north. (Already, some 3,000 Palestinians have died in bombardments.) But the promise would surely have rung false to anyone steeped in the memory of 1948.

I’ve witnessed the way in which the Nakba is a live issue in the Palestinian consciousness—not just a historical event—while working for years to prevent the eviction of Palestinian refugee families from Sheikh Jarrah and other neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, by government-backed settlers. Initially, individual families were targeted. More recently, entire communities with hundreds of families have become at risk of displacement.

The issue came to a head in 2021, after Itamar Ben-Gvir, then a lawmaker from Israel’s far-right (and currently minister of national security), opened a parliamentary office in the neighborhood. That May, violence erupted between Israel and Gaza, spreading to East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Israel itself, where Palestinian citizens of Israel clashed with Jewish neighbors in several cities and towns.

The force of the Palestinian reaction surprised me. Never before had pending evictions in East Jerusalem sparked violence. Why had the issue of Sheikh Jarrah suddenly become so pivotal?

The answer quickly became evident. When individual Palestinian families were targeted for eviction, it was perceived as a violation of international law and a humanitarian outrage. But when an entire Palestinian community was targeted, as in the case of Sheikh Jarrah, it reopened the most painful wounds in the Palestinian consciousness.

Sheikh Jarrah is not an isolated case. Palestinians are facing forced displacement in other parts of East Jerusalem and in a growing number of communities in the occupied West Bank.

For years I had been told by Palestinian colleagues that the Nakba was not just an event but an ongoing process. It took the convulsive violence of 2021, and the increasingly blatant expulsions in the West Bank, for me to realize how close to the surface it was for many Palestinians. The Nakba is not the exclusive trauma of the 1948 refugees and their descendants. Like the Holocaust for Jews, it is the emotional inheritance of all Palestinians.

On the morning of Oct. 7, many Israelis, briefly but powerfully, came face to face with the unspeakable horrors endured by their parents and grandparents in the Holocaust. Days later, Palestinians in Gaza packed their most precious belongings and fled their homes, much as an earlier generation fled the war in 1948 that started all this.

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Can either side recognize the other’s historical trauma? Even in ordinary times, Israelis and Palestinians have found it excruciatingly difficult.

For years, it was virtually a consensus in Israel that the Nakba never took place. Israelis accused the Palestinians of weaponizing this fiction in order to delegitimize Israel. Only recently has mainstream Israel begun to acknowledge the incontrovertible facts of the Nakba. This latest war will surely set back the effort.

Among some Palestinians, there is a trend to deny the historicity of the Holocaust, to claim that it never happened. For those Palestinians who acknowledge the horrific crimes of the Nazis, many feel that the creation of Israel was an attempt to redress those crimes at their expense. Israelis largely view these claims as a polemical construct designed to delegitimize Israel and a manifestation of Palestinian antisemitism.

So that’s where Israelis and Palestinians are as this war enters another week—triggered by our own traumas and reluctant to recognize the other side’s. When this war comes to an end, the chasm of mutual denial between us will be wider than ever.