Everyone knows someone who has died. (Amir Levy/Getty Images)
By choice, I’ve worked with victims of war and atrocity. During my lengthy career as a psychologist, I’ve cried with scores of Holocaust survivors and their children. I’ve visited the killing fields of Poland and written extensively on the psychological impact of genocide on survivors and their children. I experienced the rage, guilt and terror of traumatised Vietnam vets, abandoned by their country, left alone to battle the demons of a brutal war. One learns that the human heart was not constructed to comprehend loss on an industrial scale, so it compartmentalises and focuses forward.
I travelled to Beirut, Lebanon in 1980, five years after the civil war was presumed over. It wasn’t. The remnants of a once beautiful city lay scattered among mounds of rubble and ash. I heard harrowing accounts of torture, beheadings, and rape. And by the seventh day, when I thought I was beyond shock, I watched, horrified, as two children in a Beirut refugee camp kicked a human skull back and forth like it was a soccer ball.
I’ve lived in Israel for 37 years. Like many Israelis, I’m no stranger to rocks, bullets, suicide bombers, and the blast of missiles fired from Gaza and Lebanon. Confronted with these things, I was never confused about what I felt. I can recognise fight, flight, and freeze from the pumping of adrenalin, a racing heart, and a closed fist. Sadly, with enough experience, you learn your instinctive responses to danger.
But nothing prepared me — nor my fellow Israelis — for October 7.
October 7 was Simchat Torah, a holiday of love, joy, and gratitude. On Simchat Torah, we dance seven times around the Torah. Seven symbolises a cycle, a completion — both an end and a beginning. Time and growth are cyclical, according to Jewish tradition. Every seven days — on Shabbat — we read a portion of the Torah (The Old Testament) and on Simchat Torah we read the last parsha (portion). Completions deserve a day of joy. So we dance, sing, and eat.
Or run into bomb shelters.
On the morning of Simchat Torah, we heard booms from the Iron Dome shooting down missiles fired from Gaza. Because I don’t use devices on Shabbat and holidays, I asked Diana, my wife’s Filipino caretaker, what was going on.
“Doc,” she said, without her constant smile, “my best friend from childhood has been kidnapped and taken to Gaza along with her Alzheimer’s patient [an 81-year-old woman]. They dragged them into the trunk of a car.”
My wife has Alzheimer’s. I envisioned her being kidnapped and thrown into a cell in Gaza. Trapped in a locked room without her medicine, her family, her security, her TV, her multiple walks per day, her diapers, she would descend into a dark and terrifying place. Without a kiss from me, without a smile and hug from her grandchildren, without routine and care, I can’t imagine what form of hell would invade her empty mind.
*On 8th October, I wrote:
We are in a time of trouble — deep trouble. We’re one day into the war and I know of three dead soldiers, their three widows, and their eight children. I’m not alone. Today, on Isru Chag — the day after Simchat Torah, a day of lingering joy — every Israeli mourns a loved one, murdered or kidnapped.
My son calls me to tell me that his friend Nati was killed at the Nova Festival. They found his mutilated body near the multi-million dollar fence designed to protect us. My daughter tells me her close friend’s husband, a colonel, was killed defending the Kibbutzim.
Yet, this is only the beginning. Every man under 40 has been called up — our son, his friends, and the sons of my friends. Every former soldier over 40 is volunteering. Today, this fractured country feels whole. Right, Left, religious, secular, Ashkenazi or Sephardi, pro judicial reform or anti — Hamas makes no distinction. Right now — “thanks to Hamas” — neither do we.
My family from the States calls. Everyone wants to know how we feel. Mad, sad, glad, scared?
For now, none of the above. Purposeful, determined, unified.
*
More than 100 days into the war, we Israelis grieve as a nation and wage war with purpose.
My son’s commander was shot in the leg. One week later, he left the hospital and rejoined his unit. His story is ubiquitous. A young man, a medic in an elite combat unit fighting in Gaza, attempted to save the lives of two soldiers hit by an rocket-propelled grenade. He directed one soldier to put his finger on a hole spurting blood while he placed torniquets on the two shattered bodies. He told me this story with tears pouring down his cheeks. One of the soldiers died in the hospital. I held him and said, “It’s not your fault. You did what you could.” That was on a Sunday. On the Monday, he was back in Gaza, and he sent me a smiley with this message: “I’m good. I did my best. Thanks.”
I speak to my 37-year-old son, Aaron, daily. He’s a commander in a special forces unit. In our post-Freudian world, in which we idolise personal feelings at the expense of national purpose, he doesn’t speak the language of emotions, except for this: “I hate war. But it’s what we have to do.” I’m in contact with soldiers on the front multiple times per day. They speak like my son: “It’s what we have to do.”
Last week I took my three married daughters and my daughter-in-law out to a restaurant. I wanted to spoil them. Their husbands are in the reserves; they’re keeping the home front functioning. Several of their friends’ husbands have died in combat. My daughters and daughter-in-law often have tears in their eyes. No one speaks the language of revenge or hate. We speak the language of necessity, of history, of homeland.
That evening, I learned something obvious but unexpected. The war has created a psychological phenomenon which we call the Wartime Commuter Syndrome. Every few weeks, our soldiers travel back and forth between the front and their homes. Between bullets and babies. Between the camaraderie of brothers-in-arms to children and wives with needs and expectations. Between the hyper-focus of a combat soldier and the chaos of competing demands. Humans aren’t built for this level of flexibility. When the dust settles, we’ll assess the impact on marriage and family life.
For now, we have a war to win.
The time frame for defeat stretches interminably, while our daily death toll rises. One hundred thousand citizens from the North have been evacuated to hotels because of constant bombardment from Hezbollah rockets. Iran threatens to obliterate us. Uncertainty breeds anxiety; anxiety leads to hopelessness. Strong leadership would be the antidote. Unfortunately, we’re throwing dice against the wall when betting on Israeli leaders to act with integrity — to act as if they deserve to lead a heroic nation.
Yet, we Israelis have faith in ourselves. The past 100 or so days have proven to us that beneath the seemingly irreconcilable divisions, love and commitment reside. And we have history on our side. We, Jews, have survived expulsions, pogroms, the Holocaust, constant wars, terror, internecine strife, and every conceivable iteration of antisemitism. And we will continue to survive. Of this, I’m certain.
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Subscribe“I don’t know what happened to make the WHO so implacably opposed to vaping.”
Lobbying, bribery, corruption spring to mind.
But lobbying by whom, and to what end? Could tobacco companies be paying off the WHO to protect their markets, particularly in developing countries?
Quite likely – countries with tobacco growing industries, perhaps even the high tax benefit from cigarettes in other countries.
Most UN organisations are rife with this sort of thing.
I would think so and not just in developing countries. It would seem obvious that tobacco companies would wish to discredit vaping, especially if it encourages people to quit smoking entirely.
There’s no reason the tobacco companies can’t dominate the vaping industry as well. They have the raw materials!
Of course, but it’s a diminishing market since it’s a halfway house to stopping rather than a long-term addiction like gaspers.
The only people who actually want to vape are those who already smoke cigarettes and want to stop.
No-one in their right minds would vape if they weren’t smokers in the first place.
The tobacco companies tried bubblegum flavoured vape – clearly aimed at young people who probably haven’t smoked cigarettes – but I think those are banned now.
Vaping clearly represents a major threat to them, hence the lobbying and bribery.
The Chinese are heavy smokers, just sayin.
India is a great country but its politics and governance are more than usually awful. Arbitrary and evidence-free government decisions are commonplace, as with this ludicrous ban on e-cigarettes.
The Indian government owns 28% of ITC, its main manufacturer of cigarettes, bidis and other tobacco products. Shares in stocks in that corporation are soaring.
See my post. $$$$$$$$$$
Yes smokers pay a lot of tax. They must continue to get ill or even die to pay for the NHS.
Well, sure, this is kind of true, but only in the sense that every public health institution has been incompetent on COVID well past the point where they made things worse rather than better. The WHO has been absolutely mind-bendingly terrible on COVID and the only thing that “saves” it is the fact that most other large public health bodies reflexively follow it, so it drags them all down to its level.
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Its stance on vaping is exactly what you’d expect to see from the WHO given its track record. This isn’t some weird aberration, the WHO is always like this. Misinformation pours out of it on a near daily basis. COVID is the textbook example, especially anything China-related, but it’s not just that. This is an organization that mounted an investigation of the lab leak theory which it had to renounce days later when people pointed out they hadn’t actually investigated anything. It claimed there was no clear evidence COVID was transmitted person to person, even though human-infecting CoVs always are. It stated outright to a BBC journalist that the there was little evidence masks worked but the messaging had changed due to political lobbying. Their last great outing on the world stage resulted in an article in Der Spiegel titled “Reconstruction of a mass hysteria: the Swine Flu panic of 2009”. Their chief at the time gave a speech in which she argued swine flu should be exploited to fight for “changes in the functioning of the global economy,” and to “distribute wealth on the basis of” values “like community, solidarity, equity and social justice” – and that was before they got an actual former communist as their chief!
The WHO is a disaster zone and should be scrapped. It took an entirely manageable medical problem and turned it into a global catastrophe due to its complete takeover by a hard left ideology that has learned it can manipulate people through an artificial fear of death.
(Oh, good article by the way, very important topic and I wasn’t aware of how big the difference is!
I couldn’t agree with you more about the WHO. . It has become over-politicised and the people running it, down to goodness-only-knows what level, are too compromised for it to just do a bout of navel-gazing and miraculously emerge ‘reformed’. The whole thing should be scrapped.
Quite apart from anything else, a global health bureaucracy, oddly enough, behaves like any other global bureaucracy does. Since its turf in this case is health, the more global health problems there are, the bigger the empire it builds.
If they’re coming for vaping (I’m a vaper), what about alcohol? Surely more harmful than vaping?
Don’t give them ideas.
What about vaping alcohol flavour-rum & bacardi that sort of thing?. The drinks industry would not like that
It hasn’t been perfect during Covid by any means, but it hasn’t been conspicuously worse than a lot of other institutions. First, is this a serious statement? And second, what kind of defense is it to say “others were worse.” WHO is the tip of the spear globally. It’s the same place that did its best to pretend China was not the source of the virus. It parroted the Chinese claim that there was no evidence of transmission of the virus between humans. That it’s off base on vaping does more to demonstrate consistency than leadership, and the wrong sort of consistency at that.
The bureaucratic mind.
If freedom of the individual is so important, why do we have to waste time and money persuading people that they shouldn’t smoke?
Imagine that all UnHerd contributors were smokers and governments around the world were trying to stop us from smoking. Outrage and more outrage!
We can still have laws to protect people who choose not to smoke from the dangers of passive smoking.
Exactly! Enclosed spaces like bars and restaurants should be able to define their own policies – advertise “Smokers’ Bar!” if they want – as long as no one is forced to work there and the policies are gradually implemented to allow those who took their jobs with the understanding they would be working in a smoke-free environment can change jobs.
It’s the HCN, CO, PNAs etc that are dangerous in smoke, not the nicotine. So vaping should be strongly promoted as a smoking alternative if the WHO wanted to actually, you know, promote health.
I think it is the Puritan strain which runs through much of the public health establisment that accounts for much of the hostility toward vaping. They get high on their prohibitionism and can’t stand that a fun smoking substitute might be available.
The WHO has shown itself to be easily captured by Chinese interests. Has Big Tobacco also bought its acquiescence?
My take as a pot smoker (not a tobacco smoker) is that there is something about vaping that is unconsciously associated with weed smoking. And that this visual association is enough to implicate the device. Between that and the tobacco industry it doesnt have a chance.
Sure the WTO is seriously flawed, but it’s hardly high brow to point this out.
Here’s why.. https://www.who.int/news/item/17-08-2016-michael-r-bloomberg-becomes-who-global-ambassador-for-noncommunicable-diseases
Hmm. Not a very balanced article. I’m a Canadian doc. The national committee I was on a few years ago, as part of its public health mandate, looked into the question of: is vaping an on-ramp to or an off-ramp from cigarette smoking? The answer is BOTH. Over time most places where vaping is common (mostly amongst youth) have seen cigarette smoking rates rise, indicating it is more of an on-ramp than off-ramp. (a huge number of new cigarette smokers started with vaping and moved up)
As with every question of societal policy, the scientific stats and research on vaping cannot answer the question of whether we should ban it. That is a question of civil liberties, and how much control we think the government should have over individual lives. People are free to do many risky things. Should they be allowed to vape as well?
I hate vaping as much as smoking. A friend vaped in my flat, telling me it was not as bad as passive smoking exposure. Even though he vaped by an open window, I started coughing which lasted all evening and well into the next day!
So it is not better than real cigarettes.
Vapers and smokers are banned from my home.
Don’t you just hate auto-correct. Instead of vape, it’s ‘corrected it to taped or raped!! Dumb robot!
On my IPAD I can turn off auto-correct.