Old Wounds, New War: What This War Is Asking of Israel’s Elderly

Picture a man in his late eighties somewhere in Israel. He knows his building’s shelter. He knows the route. He has probably timed it in his head, the way people do when a possibility becomes a recurring reality. He also knows that his knees are not what they were, and that ninety seconds is a different proposition at eighty-seven than it was at forty. He has navigated danger before — not in this country, not in this war, but in the particular experience of threat pressing against a body that cannot fully respond. More than once.

That last phrase is worth staying with. More than once.

Approximately 12.5 percent of Israel’s population is over 65, and that number is growing. Within that population, there were still nearly 147,000 Holocaust survivors as of last year. But the population I want to address is broader: anyone now in their seventies, eighties, or nineties who came to Israel from places where traumatic events were not abstractions — from Hungary, from Yemen, from Iran, from Ethiopia, from the former Soviet Union — people for whom displacement, violence, and persecution were formative experiences rather than history lessons. For this population, what happened on October 7 is not the first trauma. In most cases, it is not even the second.

There is a clinical phenomenon that most people have never heard of, and that I suspect most elderly Israelis have never had named for them. Researchers call it trauma reactivation. The basic finding: people who have previously experienced severe trauma are specifically vulnerable to having that older trauma reawakened — not merely triggered in a surface way, but genuinely reignited — by new events that carry even partial resemblance to the original. The nervous system has its own memory, encoded at a level deeper........

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