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Eight months ago, Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran, marking the start of what was later dubbed the “12-Day War.” When it ended, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a historic victory. “We removed two existential threats: the threat of annihilation by nuclear weapons and the threat of annihilation by 20,000 ballistic missiles,” he affirmed. “Had we not acted now, the State of Israel would have soon faced the danger of annihilation.”
The war unfolded amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza — less than two years after Hamas’ October 7 attack on southern Israel, and as Israel was simultaneously exchanging fire with Hezbollah and the Houthis. For many Israelis, it marked the peak of a two-year period defined by anxiety, helplessness, and uncertainty. But this past Saturday, the joint Israeli-U.S. launch of a new war against Iran shattered Netanyahu’s promises, along with any illusion of respite from a constant state of emergency.
As always, the experience of war itself is shaped by Israeli apartheid across the land between the river and the sea. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have no shelters to escape bombardment, while Palestinian citizens of Israel have far less stable infrastructure to protect them from ballistic missiles. At times it seems as if Netanyahu and his government are committed to a state of permanent war and instability in the region, one in which all human beings are forced to live with constant vulnerability and precarity.
Since Saturday morning, between running to the safe room and trying to think about the short- and medium-term future, I have been reflecting on the psychological consequences of this situation. To better understand the personal and political implications of living in a state of perpetual war, I spoke with Dr. Dana Amir, a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, author, and poet.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Before Israelis had time to mourn those killed in the October 7 attacks, the government began massacring Palestinian civilians in Gaza, with the Israeli mainstream media justifying this genocidal violence by claiming it would “prevent the next October 7.” In your view, what psychological price are Israelis paying for living in this cycle of fear and violence for more than two years?
When events of such overwhelming intensity — October 7, the subsequent Israeli massacre in Gaza, and the wars with Iran and Hezbollah — occur in such close succession, the first thing that collapses is the ability to mourn, which is one of the most essential processes for the human psyche. We must mourn in order to move on. When that possibility is denied, the psyche essentially freezes in place.
The result is that we Israelis are effectively stuck in a primitive psychological state in terms of the work needed to process traumatic events. We have no way of doing what must be done in order to move forward. Instead, we engage in a highly dangerous form of compulsive repetition: an unconscious drive to relive the event again and again, to reinscribe the pain both personally and collectively.
What we are witnessing is a society that cannot mourn, and therefore cannot conduct any meaningful self-examination — either internally or in relation to others. The result is a kind of burrowing into pain, where the only points of departure are acts of revenge that discharge this pain onto the other and reproduce it within them.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s contradictory messaging ahead of the war with Iran — suggesting a possible agreement while simultaneously threatening military force — created an ongoing sense of helplessness among the public that culminated Saturday morning with the attack on the Islamic Republic. How does one cope with such levels of uncertainty?
There is indeed a profound sense of helplessness, accompanied by a constant state of readiness to absorb pain. That readiness continues during the war itself, because we remain in absolute uncertainty about what is happening. As a result, we live in relentless, exhausting, nerve-racking alertness.
On the surface, this readiness provides an illusory sense of potency: Readiness ostensibly leads to action — for example, running to the safe room. But the readiness we are in has no horizon. Very little of what is happening actually depends on what we do, and there is a growing sense that none of it is connected to our interests. We are pawns on a board controlled by political forces whose only horizon is themselves.
This situation offers an opportunity to reflect on the nature of anxiety. I understand psychological anxiety as the equivalent of body temperature — a kind of signaling mechanism. When body temperature rises, our immediate impulse is to lower it. But fever is actually an important signal that the immune system is fighting something. It is a natural alarm mechanism that also attempts to deal with what is attacking the body.
Anxiety functions in a similar way. In a normal state of anxiety — not pathological anxiety, which is a signaling mechanism that has broken down — anxiety intensifies when there is a threat to the psychic system and subsides once the psychological immune system manages to cope with it.
In the current situation, however, the thermometer is completely malfunctioning. We are constantly anxious, and as a result anxiety becomes a fixed state. Only the reasons change.
When anxiety becomes a constant parameter, it resembles a sick person whose illness is renamed every day. Yesterday he was dying of the flu; today he is dying of cancer. The illnesses themselves lose their meaning because they all lead to the same outcome. As a result, no real forces are mobilized to confront them.
In the language of cognitive psychology, this is called learned helplessness. It is a phenomenon observed in laboratory mice that stop pressing the pedals that provide them with food. They can no longer link a specific action to a specific outcome, and so they give up.
Israelis have long been those mice. We have stopped pressing the pedals. Our level of anxiety and helplessness is so high that most of us have abandoned the attempt to understand the connection between action or inaction and its outcome. It seems as if all outcomes are identical. In a certain sense, this is the great victory of the government: it has succeeded in turning active, thinking citizens into helpless laboratory mice.
This situation is precisely why a group of psychological societies and civil society organizations published a letter in November calling on the prime minister to declare a state of emergency in the field of mental health.
In her bestselling book “The Shock Doctrine,” Naomi Klein argues that governments and corporations exploit extreme crises — wars, disasters, or economic collapse — to push through far-reaching political and economic agendas. In Israel’s case, the government appears to be using the accumulation of so many anxiety-producing factors to suppress dissent, and deepen militarism and the continued dehumanization of Palestinians. How can people cope psychologically and maintain collective resistance in such conditions?
Collective states of emergency are situations that governments themselves produce. Their use is tied to the declaration of a state of emergency, which only the sovereign has the authority to proclaim. From the outset, then, it is a condition imposed by power upon those living under it.
The moment a state of emergency is declared, we enter a kind of [blast-proof] safe room — not only physically, but psychologically. It is a state in which we are surrounded by thick walls, with no cellphone reception, cut off from the outside world. The meaning of this condition is the thinning out, or even the nullification, of independent and critical thinking. In a state of emergency, someone else thinks for us. The emergency itself renders individual thinking redundant.
If we imagine the psychic system as a digestive system, healthy digestion involves taking in what is needed and expelling what is not. There is a constant negotiation over what becomes internalized and what is rejected.
In this state of emergency, there is no such digestion. One either swallows the messages injected into us whole, spits them out entirely, or leaves them stuck in the throat.
This is why so much force can be exercised over us in states of emergency. It is also why the sovereign has an interest in producing more and more emergencies. The most difficult task in such circumstances is to reclaim plurality, doubt, and thought itself.
Now, as we run back and forth to shelters as Iran responds to ongoing U.S.-Israeli bombardment, our lives have once again changed. The frequency of attacks, and the rapid regionalization of the war, have created multiple layers of uncertainty. How do the last few days relate to the past two years?
I think these last few days are simply a concentration of what has been happening continuously for more than two years: peak anxiety, peak exhaustion, nerves completely frayed. And on top of all of this come messages framing this war as a war of liberation, even as the possible foundation for a new world peace.
The degree to which these messages are detached from the deliberate destruction being wrought produces a profound disconnection between cause and effect — a disconnection that, as I said earlier, creates fertile ground for learned helplessness.
In recent days it feels as though we are no longer surprised when new disasters occur. One catastrophe follows another. How does this affect our ability to imagine a different horizon — to live our lives with a broader perspective and envision a future not saturated with violence?
Resistance is built precisely on the capacity to imagine — to move beyond what is immediately real and actual. The ability to hold onto the possibility of a horizon depends on a kind of individual and collective lyricism of the soul.
It is not a single act of deviation from reality. It is an ongoing effort to allow reality to be transformed within us again and again, so that ultimately it can also be transformed outside us.
In 1920, Paul Klee painted the Angel of History [“Angelus Novus”], depicting an angel staring at something from which he seems to be trying to escape. His face is turned toward the past while his back faces the future. In recent days I have often been reminded of this image — of a person whose gaze is fixed on what is being destroyed rather than on what might be built; someone trying to escape something but ultimately trapped within it.
The power of human lyricism lies in the ability to turn the face of the angel of history forward. It is the power to reclaim for ourselves not only the right but also the obligation to choose life over death, to choose the future rather than endlessly reenacting the past in a compulsive and futile way.
A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.