September 10, 2005

Alison on Aliyah:  Resilience and Healing in a Traumatized World

            I have officially begun my Master’s and Ph.D. thesis research in earnest, and last week I conducted my first in-depth interview with a bus driver from Jerusalem, who survived the bus #19 bombing in January of 2004.  He talked about being on the bus when the bomb exploded, and about what he saw and how he lived through it.  Over a year and a half later, he is still fairly traumatized, unable to work or to even look at a bus.  He cried as he described the experience, and mentioned that he still has recurrent nightmares, with the images seared into his waking and non-waking consciousness.  I also was near tears as I listened to him describe the terrible things he went through.

            And then this week, some friends of mine from school decided to take a “field trip” to the Paradise Negev Hotel in downtown Be’er Sheva, which is packed to the gills with Jewish Gaza refugees.  They urged me to come, and I excitedly accepted the invitation, as I had been meaning to make a visit for weeks.  As the day approached, however, I became more and more apprehensive, fearing that I wouldn’t be able to handle what I would see and hear.  I had heard stories of depressed families languishing on couches in hotel lobbies, of children with no schools to attend, of parents with no means to support each other or their kids.

I simply didn’t know what I would say, what I could say, to these people.  These days I find myself wanting so badly to ease their pain, to tell them that their country will take care of them, that “we” will find a way for them to live and support themselves and flourish as they did in their old homes.  But the sad reality is quite the opposite.  The promised government checks, which are still nothing close to “enough,” remain unpaid.  The hotels and trailer parks remain full of people with nowhere else to go and no means with which to get there.  And most of the Israeli population continues to turn their heads away in a desperate attempt to pretend the situation has officially ceased to exist.

And this week, America, and the world, commemorated the passing of four years since the September 11 terror attacks, and simultaneously watched the wrenching and tragic scenes left behind by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.  Hundreds of thousands of people are now left without homes and without their worldly possessions and without much hope that their government will be able to restore their lives to some level of normalcy.  Everyone is being criticized for not doing enough, soon enough, with enough foresight and enough insight.  It seems utterly clear that America is fully incapable of efficiently and sufficiently dealing with a national disaster such as this.  Let’s face it, she isn’t much more capable of dealing with international disasters either.

And now, today, we are watching news footage of the Gaza floodgates being opened and the Palestinians rushing in to claim “their” land and whatever else they can get their hands on.  Four synagogues are in flames as I write this, and the rest will probably have met the same fate by the time you read this.  More Hamas flags than Palestinian flags are currently waving from rooftops in the Gush, and the anarchy we all feared would take over seems to be knocking on our doors.  We here in Israel are watching and waiting, crossing our fingers and deciding not to take the bus tomorrow.

            It’s been a busy week.  With all of this happening in the world these days, sometimes I can’t help but feel discouraged and actually quite fearful about what the future holds for us—for Israel, for America, for the world, for me.  The one thing in which I do feel a great deal of faith, however, is the extraordinary resilience of the human spirit.  The bus driver who was willing to talk to me intimately about some of his deepest traumas; the displaced settler who still seems to believe in the ultimate good of humans and in his ability to get through his current situation; those thousands of people who lost loved ones on September 11; those who have lost everything else in New Orleans; and the minority of reasonable Palestinians who may be able to set things right, who truly want peace and will fight to create order in what is rapidly becoming an unruly place.

I want to believe that all of us will be able to harness our own resilience in order to wade through these trying times in our world today.  I can see now that, when I came to Israel nearly two years ago, in part to study trauma, coping, and psychological resilience, I was only at the beginning.  The individual, national, and collective trauma I have witnessed over the past two years has been staggering, and yet the individual, national, and collective resilience I have seen is even more powerful and awe-inspiring.  Living here in Israel has made me truly believe that there is hope for our international consciousness and our global ability to clean up the mess we have made of the world.  I do believe we are all tremendously resilient in our own way, and that this will heal us.  Please, let the healing begin.