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May 11, 2007
Facing down the fear
Israelis resilient during war with Lebanon.
KELLEY KORBIN
As someone who lived through the Second Lebanon War and who was
at the same time responsible for treating many civilians suffering
from war-induced anxiety, Yuval Moshkovitz developed some theories
about the human, and Jewish, capacity to maintain sanity in periods
of extreme stress.
Moshkovitz is a clinical psychologist who lives and practises in
northern Israel. He was in Vancouver April 30 to speak about trauma
and psychological resilience among Israelis during the war.
Moshkovitz and his young family have lived in northern Israel for
nine years. He said they originally decided to move to the north
for "peace and quiet" and for the lucrative tax breaks
that the Israeli government offers to people who make their homes
away from the big cities. Prior to last summer, there had been about
a dozen years of relative calm in the Galilee and Jews and Arabs
within the Israeli border had a history of peaceful co-existence.
That all changed when Hezbollah started firing Katyusha rockets
into Israel from sites in Lebanon.
Moshkovitz showed slides and a film depicting how the pristine area
was shaken by the horror of war. Shots of beautiful gardens and
people picnicking were overshadowed by images of empty streets,
rubble, destroyed homes and schools and the sounds of sirens and
bomb blasts from the hundreds of rockets that fell from the skies
above the town of Ma'alot.
As a clinical psychologist, Moshkovitz works at a private clinic
and at a hospital in Nahariya, which is about 10 kilometres south
of the Israel-Lebanon border. Moshkovitz described the hospital
as an "enormous city underground" that was built with
help from the United States during the first Gulf War. As a result
of its amazingly safe underground infrastructure, the hospital was
able to remain open to treat patients for the duration of last summer's
war, despite constant sirens and rocket blasts above. So although
Moshkovitz's clinic was bombed and unusable, he continued to practise
psychology at the the hospital.
Up until that point, Moshkovitz, whose regular practice is made
up mainly of children and adolescents, said he had never treated
a patient for acute anxiety. But the war brought a slew of patients
suffering from such disorders.
In fact, the psychology unit treated about 1,800 civilians during
the course of the conflict. Of this group, he said there were more
women than men and more Arabs than Jews.
Moshkovitz said that although, on a personal level, he was living
with a heightened sense of fear, especially on his daily and terrifying
car journeys between his shelter at home and the hospital, he found
the experience to be "interesting professionally." And
he began to ponder how the majority of people, living with hourly
reminders of their precarious situation, managed to cope extremely
well under such extreme and potentially dangerous circumstances.
Moshkovitz posited that, from the time we are born, we have an innate
sense of our own vulnerability and of death, but that most of the
time, we put these notions aside because "to go on living,
you have to forget that you can die every minute." However,
under certain conditions, like riding a roller coaster, seeing a
thriller-style movie or, in the most extreme case, living through
a war, we become reacquainted with the fragility of our condition.
In the Jewish community, he theorized, our awareness of death is
actually heightened by our tradition of "telling and retelling
our past as a lesson." He said, "In a way, we are a post-traumatic
people. From the destruction of the Temple 2,000 years ago and exile
to Babylon, through to the Holocaust, our collective past is filled
with trauma that led to inherited anxieties."
Moshkovitz believes that the resilience he witnessed in most people
during the course of the Second Lebanon War was due to the "mental
defences" or "mental manipulation" that people put
up to back away from their anxieties. He called it a kind of "mental
self-defence" and he suggested that Jews, because of this inherited
heightened awareness of our vulnerability as a people, have a very
well-developed capacity for such defence mechanisms.
He saw these defences activated when, for example, people stopped
checking in with television news about the war 24 hours a day or
when people would drive with their radios blaring in order to drown
out the sounds of the rocket blasts.
"People who were caught with acute anxiety disorders were the
ones who don't have the defence mechanisms," said Moshkovitz,
who added that this may be why he saw a disproportionate amount
of Arabs suffering from anxiety during the conflict. "Arabs
have a different narrative ... they felt less that this was their
war and they felt more fragile in one sense," he said, "[whereas]
for us, it was almost as if we were waiting for it to come."
Kelley Korbin is a freelance writer living in West Vancouver.
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