TEL AVIV
The terrorist attacks by the extremist organization Hamas in October stopped Israelis’ everyday life and caused collective grief.
A significant number of Israelis know someone who was brutally murdered or who was saved from a massacre at the last minute.
– Everyone is depressed or anxious. Feels like you can’t breathe, Telavivian Noa Malca crystallize.
He is with his family in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square, whose fountain is lined with pictures of those killed or kidnapped, memorial candles and posters of those killed. The square is full of mourners.
– This is different. This pain is different. I can’t explain it, appearing only by his first name Rachel says.
“This was not terrorism but something completely different”
The Israelis are obviously in shock. For them, Hamas attacks mean much more than ordinary terror, where terrorists detonate a bomb in a city or a lone fighter shoots civilians.
– We know what terror is. This wasn’t it. It was something else entirely.
This is what an Israeli psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist says Sharon Shitrit.
As a professional helper, he spent a week with survivors of the attacks in the town of Ofakim, where Hamas killed 50 people.
Psychologist Shitrit does not call the events of the seventh day of October terror. In his opinion, it is a more mythical matter for the Jews.
He says that the basic security of Israelis has been shaken. They feel for the first time that they are not safe in their homeland.
– Survivors of mass murders feel that they were saved from the Holocaust.
The Holocaust refers to the genocide of the Jews by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The Nazis killed six million Jews in their extermination camps.
The Holocaust entered everyday speech
New trauma triggers old traumas, says psychoanalyst Sharon Shitrit. That’s what happened in this case too.
Reuniting the collective Holocaust memory with the present is new for Israelis and Jews around the world.
For Jews, the Holocaust is a matter that strongly defines their identity. Everyone has a relative who lived through a concentration camp or otherwise suffered persecution by Nazi Germany.
– This is also the first time that Israelis feel spiritually and personally connected to the Holocaust.
Israelis and Jews around the world now use the term Holocaust in everyday language.
– It’s because of the barbarism, brutality, satanism of Hamas’ actions… I don’t really know what word to use, says Shitrit.
It is essential for Israelis and Palestinians to live together, how their relationship will be defined in the future. Having lost their sense of security, Israelis wonder if coexistence is even possible.
– I have many Christian and Muslim friends. We want to live together, but this situation is too much for us now, we have to spend our days in Dizengoff square Lorna Hansberger says.
Noa Malca also says that now it is difficult to believe in peace with the Palestinians, even though she herself has wanted to live side by side.
– In one country or in two countries. Whatever. It’s sad that it can’t come true. It was naive to believe that, says Noa Malca.
More than 1,400 Israelis died in Hamas attacks. The extremist organization also took 242 hostages. Since then, more than 10,000 Palestinians have died in Israeli attacks on Gaza.
“Hamas is a destructive force”
Psychologist Shitrit reminds us that Hamas does not mean all Palestinians, and Hamas does not represent Palestinians.
– Hamas is a destructive force. It’s not about the freedom struggle.
He points out that just as Hamas is ideologically an extremist Islamic movement, there is also extremist thinking among Israeli Jews.
– They are a minority in Israel in the same way that Hamas is a minority among the Palestinians.
In Shitrit’s opinion, Israelis and Palestinians must not give in to the idea that they cannot live side by side.
– That thought means the end of us. A solution must be found. Extremism on both sides must end.
Sharon Shitrit resembles an Israeli historian Yuval Hararin thank you for the magazine interview you gave a while back.
Harari pointed out that who would have ever thought that the German state would now stand by Israel as its friend. Germany, which carried out the genocide of the Jews.
Quoting Harari, Shitrit says that if friendship is possible between Germany and Israel, then it must also be possible between Israel and the Palestinians.
– We have no other option.