How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war
A year later, memorials to the 7 October attacks use art, virtual reality and dark tourism to stir support for limitless violence. But there is a different way to remember
by Naomi Klein
A slick, high-priced television production. Speeches from top officials. A live audience of thousands. A unified show of collective sorrow and military resolve.
That is how the Israeli government hoped to mark the passing of one year since Hamas’s surprise and bloody attacks last 7 October. But little has gone according to plan.
Many of the families of people killed or taken hostage on that day have come out forcefully against the state-sponsored event, saying pageantry can wait until after the government secures a hostage deal and faces an independent investigation of its own failures before, after and on that day. Some parents have forbidden the government of Benjamin Netanyahu from using their children’s names and images.
Several of the kibbutzim that suffered the greatest losses have said they will boycott. Instead, they will gather in their communities to collectively grieve their loved ones, and remember their hostages, in “intimate, sensitive” rituals. In response, the minister responsible for the ceremony has nixed the live audience while seeming to dismiss the families’ objections as “background noise”. This has led to even fiercer denunciations on social media, with some of Israel’s top celebrities pledging their support to a rival commemoration.
For the government, “everything is a show”, said Danny Rahamim, a member of Kibbutz Nahal Oz.
That may be, but it seems certain that on 7 October, the official show will go on. Indeed it is nearly impossible to imagine a world in which the Netanyahu government – and the legacy Jewish organizations that echo its messaging around the world – would resist the chance to use the potent date as a megaphone to broadcast the same story about the attacks that we have all heard many times before.
It’s a simple fable of good and evil, in which Israel is unblemished in its innocence, deserving unquestioning support, while its enemies are all monsters, deserving of violence unbounded by laws or borders, whether in Gaza, Jenin, Beirut, Damascus or Tehran. It’s a story in which Israel’s very identity as a nation is forever fused with the terror it suffered on 7 October, an event that, in Netanyahu’s telling, will be seamlessly merged both with the Nazi Holocaust and a battle for the soul of western civilization.
In Germany, they speak of a Staatsraison, or reason of state – and in recent decades, its leaders have said that reason is protecting Israel. Israel has a Staatsraison too, related but different. Officially, it is Jewish safety. But integral to the state’s conception of safety is Jewish trauma. Building shrines to it. Erecting walls around it. Waging wars in its name.
And so, as sure as the sun will rise over Jerusalem, Netanyahu will tell his avenging story to the world on 7 October – and no meddlesome, grief-struck families can stop him.
These clashes over commemoration tap into deep underlying debates about the uses and abuses of Jewish suffering, conflicts that date back to before Israel’s founding, and that stretch well beyond its notoriously undefined borders. They are over a series of unresolved but increasingly high-stakes questions.
What is the line between commemorating trauma and cynically exploiting it? Between memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity? And what does it mean to do so while Israel actively produces more grief on an unfathomable scale, detonating entire apartment blocks in Beirut, inventing new methods of remote-controlled maiming, and sending more than a million Lebanese people fleeing for their lives, even as its pummeling of Gaza continues unabated?
With a full-scale regional conflagration looking more possible by the hour, focus on the mechanics of how Israel heightens and manipulates Jewish trauma may seem irrelevant, even insensitive. Yet these forces are profoundly interconnected, with the particular stories that Israel tells about Jewish victimhood providing the rationale and cover story for the shattering violence and colonial land annexation now on such stark display. And nothing makes these connections clearer than the ways that Israel chooses to tell the story of its own people’s trauma on 7 October – an event that has been memorialized continuously since nearly the moment that it occurred.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the response to 7 October inside Israel and much of the Jewish diaspora was the speed with which it was absorbed into what is now called “memory culture”: the artistic, technological and architectural methodologies that transform collective traumas into educational experiences for others, usually in the name of human rights, peace, and against the scourge of denial or the oblivion of forgetting. For mass atrocities, it usually takes decades before a society is ready to reckon with the past honestly. Claude Lanzmann’s landmark documentary about the Holocaust, Shoah, for instance, came out 40 years after the end of the second world war.
In Israel’s case, there was a near instant move to graphically re-create the events of 7 October as mediated experiences, sometimes with the goal of countering false claims that deny any atrocities occurred, but often with the explicit goal of reducing sympathy for Palestinians and generating support for Israel’s rapidly expanding wars. Before the one-year mark, there was already an off-Broadway “verbatim play”, called October 7, drawn from witness testimony; several art exhibitions, and at least two 7 October-themed fashion shows, one of which saw models who had survived the attacks or lost loved ones adorn themselves with prosthetic wounds, fake blood and dresses made of shell casings. A model whose fiance was killed in the attack, for instance, “wore a white wedding dress with a ‘bullet hole’ in her heart”, reported the Jewish News. “Israel’s back in fashion,” read a dissonant headline about the show in the Jewish Chronicle.
Then there are the 7 October films, already an emerging subgenre. First came the Israeli military’s Bearing Witness, which compiled the most graphic and horrific moments captured on video that day. Within weeks of the attacks, it was being screened to curated audiences of politicians, business leaders and journalists everywhere from Davos to the Museum of Tolerance in LA. This was followed by a slew of more professional documentaries, including Screams Before Silence, about sexual violence, fronted by the former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg; #Nova, which uses phone and body-camera video to create a “minute-by-minute” account of the “bone-chilling atrocities”; and the BBC’s Surviving October 7: We Will Dance Again, which does much the same. “America’s most-watched faith network”, TBN, aired a four-part special about the attacks that was seven hours in total.
Dramatic treatments take a little more time, but there are several in the works, including October 7, a feature film from the creators of Fauda, as well as the scripted series One Day in October, developed by Fox, slated to air this month.
Most unusual is the decision by the Israeli director Alon Daniel to make a realistic film entirely out of miniatures. His team spent months painstakingly re-creating a dollhouse of horrors: everything from the barbed-wire fence that Hamas breached, to the burned-out cars and bullet-riddled portable toilets at the Nova music festival. A member of the production told Haaretz: “We printed these little stall models in 3D and painted them, and initially it was fun to see it. But it was equally horrifying. There was such a dissonance here between the cute and the horrific.”
A scene from Alon Daniel’s film 06:30. Photograph: Alon Daniel/Go2Films
Because ours is a world riven by violence and injustice, there is a huge body of literature about the ethics of memorializing real-world atrocity. How do you evoke horror without exploiting it? How do you avoid reinscribing the idea that some kinds of bodies are destined for violence, and thereby make it more likely? How do you avoid asking survivors to relive their worst traumas over and over again? How do you prevent a traumatic response in the viewer, who may have a history of facing violence themselves? Is there an accompanying process for reparation and healing? Relatedly, how do you avoid evoking dangerous emotions, like hate and revenge, which can only lead to more tragedy and more trauma?
Amy Sodaro, a sociologist and author of Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence, told me: “These are questions that people who are engaged in memorial work are constantly engaging with. It’s deeply political work.”
During the weeks I spent researching the sprawling memory culture that emerged post-7 October – the bloody wedding dresses, the tiny burned-out cars and the looping final voicemails – I searched in vain for evidence that these questions have been wrestled with at all. Nor did I find any reckoning with the reality that many facts are still unknown, which is why so many victim families are demanding an independent investigation.
With very few exceptions, the primary goal of these diverse works seems to be the transference of trauma to the audience: re-creating terrifying events with such vividness and intimacy that a viewer or visitor experiences a kind of identity merger, as if they themselves have been violated.
A New Yorker who watched the “verbatim play” October 7 reported: “I felt I was actually living the experience … I felt there and [the play was] able to transfer to me the feeling.” The producers were so pleased by the reaction they shared it on social media. A screening of the Israeli military’s 7 October compilation “left the audience in shambles. People walked out of the room in silence, either crying or simply shellshocked,” the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt told the New York Times – and that, too, was a compliment.
All efforts at commemoration aim to touch the hearts of people who were not there. But there is a difference between inspiring an emotional connection and deliberately putting people into a shellshocked, traumatized state. Achieving the latter result is why so much 7 October memorialization boasts that it is “immersive” – offering viewers and participants the chance to crawl inside the pain of others, based on a guiding assumption that the more people there are who experience the trauma of 7 October as if it was their own, the better off the world will be. Or rather, the better off Israel will be.
Nowhere is the trauma transference goal more explicit than in Israel’s booming “dark tourism” sector. For months, synagogues and Jewish federations from around the world have been sponsoring trips that take their supporters on “solidarity missions” to southern Israel. Their tour buses line the edges of the site of the Nova festival, which is now filled with memorials to the hundreds of people who were killed and kidnapped there. And, much to the consternation of some locals, they also step over the rubble to crowd into the still ravaged kibbutzim.
Last February, the reporter Maya Rosen shadowed several of these tours for an extensive Jewish Currents article on the eerie phenomenon. She saw decimated homes preserved like mausoleums, including one of a 23-year-old couple killed in the attack. The tours wander through its rooms where “screenshots of [Sivan] Elkabetz’s last, frantic WhatsApp conversations with her parents had been printed out and tacked to the walls, alongside letters that her mother had written to her after her death.”
This goes beyond a drive to “touch ‘the real’”, a term used by the Queen’s University Belfast scholar Debbie Lisle to describe the crush of tourists who flocked to Ground Zero after the September 11 attacks. Because of the extraordinary volume of intensely personal communications now preserved through voice and text messages (and many in these communities texted and called continuously for many hours, waiting for help that never arrived), combined with access to physical locations where blood and signs of struggle have been left untouched, the participants on these missions almost feel like they have themselves been through the interminable attack.
“An American rabbi who led a trip for her community told me about hearing story after story of people who were killed,” Rosen writes. They learned everything, “‘step by step, where it happened, how it happened, how many hours people were locked in their safe rooms, when people were shot through their window or taken out of their house’. These images gave her nightmares for the next five nights, she said.”
There are other such embodied experiences on offer, including in Tel Aviv’s “Hostages Square”, where tourists have been able to enter a dark, 30-meter-long concrete “immersive mock Hamas tunnel”. To simulate the experience of a hostage, the structure was equipped with the sound of ambient explosions from fighting overhead.
An installation in the form of a Hamas tunnel is displayed at ‘Hostages Square’ in Tel Aviv in February. Photograph: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images
It is hard to believe, given the volume already available, but far more 7 October memorializing is still to come. Despite a worsening economic crisis, last month, the Israeli cabinet approved a proposal from Netanyahu to spend $86m on future memorialization projects related to 7 October and the multi-front military campaigns that have raged since. The money will be spent on the preservation of “heritage infrastructure” (AKA damaged buildings); the creation of a new commemorative site, the establishment of an annual national holiday, and much else.