Since October 7, Israeli society has been living in a reality unlike anything it has known in recent generations. The loss, the fear, displacement from home, the hostages, the wounded, the reservists, broken families, and an ongoing war that has not truly ended—all of these are not merely a collection of individual harms. They have become a sustained national experience.
It is possible to speak about post-trauma, anxiety, depression, and psychological exhaustion, and it is important to do so. But it seems that what we are experiencing exceeds the limits of the usual therapeutic language.
This is not only the trauma of one person, one family, or one community. It is a trauma that also affects what holds a society together: trust, a sense of security, belonging, mutual responsibility, and the belief that there is a shared future here.
Psychological trauma is created when an extreme event shatters a person’s sense of safety and control. Collective trauma occurs when that rupture moves from the individual level to the societal level, when so many people feel the ground has been pulled from under their feet at the same time, and when the public as a whole struggles to regain trust that the surrounding systems see them, protect them, and tell them the truth.
In Israel after October 7, the question is not only how many people need psychological care, but what kind of society will emerge from this event. Will it be a society that manages to acknowledge pain, give space to those affected, learn from failures, and rebuild trust—or a society that remains trapped in struggles over blame, denial, anger, and internal fragmentation?
This is where the difference between coping and recovery lies.
Coping means continuing to function: going to work, sending children to school, reporting for reserve duty, standing in another line, enduring another siren, listening to another news update. Recovery is something else entirely. Recovery requires acknowledging that something deep has happened here, and that it is not possible to simply “return to normal” as if normal itself has not been fractured.
Recognition is the starting point. Those who have been harmed do not only need technical solutions, but also a sense that society sees them. Displaced residents who do not know when they will return home, families of hostages living in unbearable uncertainty, wounded individuals beginning a long rehabilitation process, and soldiers returning to a civilian reality that struggles to contain what they have experienced, all of them need something very basic: not to be told that everything is fine when nothing is fine.
Alongside recognition, truth is required. Not truth as a political slogan, but as the foundation for rebuilding trust. A society that has gone through a disaster cannot heal when the public feels that information is being withheld, that responsibility is diffused into the air, and that no one is willing to state honestly what happened, what failed, and what must change. Without exposing the truth, pain turns into suspicion. Without accountability, suspicion turns into anger.
The institutions themselves are also part of the recovery process. The mental health system, the welfare system, the education system, the military, local authorities, rehabilitation services, and the National Insurance Institute—all of these are not merely service providers. After an event like this, they become a test of trust. When they function, the public feels there is someone to rely on. When they collapse, ignore, or speak in bureaucratic language to people who are broken, the trauma deepens.
There is also a need to build a shared memory, not merely to observe memorial days.
The memory of October 7 is still taking shape, and it is already clear that it will not be uniform or simple. It will contain stories of heroism, failure, abandonment, rescue, pain, anger, volunteerism, and loss. The question is whether Israeli society will be able to hold all of this complexity without turning it into yet another arena of internal conflict.
A healthy collective memory does not erase disagreements, but it allows a society to agree that pain has a place, that those who have suffered deserve a voice, and that not everything must immediately become a political weapon.
Israel’s greatest challenge is not only to care for the wounded, the displaced, bereaved families, and soldiers, but also to understand that the wound is broader than any one group. Collective trauma that goes unaddressed can become a way of life: a public living with a constant sense of threat, struggling to trust institutions, retreating into separate identities, and searching for blame instead of repair.
In such a reality, even after the war ends militarily, it continues to live on within society.
Social recovery, therefore, is not a soft or secondary issue. It is a national necessity.
It requires accessible mental health care, but also responsible public policy. It requires budgets, but also language. It requires professionals, but also leadership capable of acknowledging pain without exploiting it, and speaking about responsibility without turning it into a personal or partisan battle for survival.
Israel will not emerge from this period as the same society that entered it. The only question is what will be built from the rupture.
One option is to continue managing the trauma through denial, blame, slogans, and fear. Another is to choose the more difficult path: to confront the wound, tell the truth, take responsibility, rebuild institutions, give space to those who have been harmed, and restore the trust that has been broken.
Social recovery does not begin with a ceremonial declaration. It begins at the moment a society stops running from its pain and is willing to ask, honestly, what it must do to make it possible to live here again—not only with security, but also with trust.
— Prof. Roni Strier, trauma and resilience expert, Faculty of Social and Community Sciences, Ruppin Academic Center.
