A Love Letter to Trauma Survivors Amid War

Today, I speak directly to survivors of sexual assault, domestic and family violence, gender-based and interpersonal violence, and epigenetic trauma. And I speak to anyone else who wants to read along.

For trauma survivors, certain historical events are difficult to witness for clear reasons—say, the coming to light of sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby and the testimony and treatment of Christine Blasey Ford during the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Judge Brett Cavanaugh. These events can trigger flashbacks, sleeplessness, anxiety, self-care issues, dissociation, and a drop in sense of agency.

Over the last several weeks, it has become clear to me that the War in the Middle East has stirred up social factors that directly echo the original trauma wound of many survivors of genocide, including Jews, Palestinians, Poles, Ukrainians, Syrians, Congolese, Sudanese, Rwandans, Cambodians, Tigrayans, and so many other genocides that are not talked about nearly enough.  

To witness the reprehensible attacks by Hamas on Israeli women, children, babies, festival-goers, and Kibbutz dwellers has cut people across the globe to the bone. (It goes without saying that non-survivors have been gutted by these attacks, but as I said, today I write especially to survivors.)

Hamas killed 1,400 Israeli humans were in cold blood. Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations and states including Iran joined Hamas in celebrating their deaths. And Hamas recently alarmed the world anew when they threatened to repeat these atrocities.

For many Jews, these attacks directly call to the surface of the skin the epigenetic trauma of the Holocaust, the genocide that flows through their veins.

The United Nations stated that Hamas’s indiscriminate slaughter of 1,400 people (most of whom were noncombatants including children), abduction of 240+ others as hostages, and use of civilians as human shields in Gaza are crimes under international humanitarian law.

The cycle of violence didn’t end there, as it often doesn’t.

Israel formally declared war on Hamas, citing the right to defend itself accorded all states under humanitarian law.

Shortly afterward, the radar of many survivors, as well as people who have experienced systemic oppression, began to sound the alarm.

On November 6, 2023, health authorities for the Ministry of Gaza reported that the Palestinian death toll passed 10,000.

Of the civilians killed, estimates say that 4,104 are children and 2.641 are women. The United Nations says that over 1.5 million civilians have been displaced.

According to U.N. data, the number of children killed since the conflict began has exceeded the number of children killed annually in armed conflicts *globally* over the last four years.

Let’s look at these numbers alongside Russia’s War on Ukraine, for which the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued a warrant for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin and one of his cabinet members for the abduction of Ukrainian children.

In 2022, 477 Ukrainian children died; as of October 8 of this year, 83 have died as a result of the fighting. Report: U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. In:

The United Nations has reported that Israeli forces have killed 88 United Nations aid workers, more than have been killed in any single conflict in history. The Israeli Defense Forces have sophisticated, precision-targeted weaponry, yet air strikes have targeted 47 U.N. buildings and more than 200 health facilities.

The Alarming Rise in Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia

There has been an alarming rise in anti-Semitism, which in the United States and other countries had already been rising. According to the CNN, the Anti-Defamation Leage has recorded over 1,200 reports of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States through May of 2023. And since the Hamas attacks and Israel’s response, the ADL noted a 288% increase in anti-Semitic incidents.

If you’d like to open any of these links without interrupting your reading, right-click on the link and select “open in a new tab/window.”

Islamophobia is spiking as well. The Council on American-Islamic Relations reported that in the 17 day period between October 7 and October 24, it received 774 reports of bias incidents and requests for help from Muslims across the U.S., a jump of 182% from the average 17-day period in 2022. On October 16^th, an Illinois man stabbed Wadea Al-Fayoune, a 6-year-old Muslim boy, to death and seriously wounded his mother in a hate crime.

This too is something that trauma survivors know well: Trauma begets trauma begets trauma.

My goal here is not to give the full historical context of this conflict. Rather, I wish to lay out some patterns that survivors of interpersonal violence may be noting consciously or viscerally (or both) in your bodies.

Whose Trauma Do We Center?

People can experience epigenetic and present-day trauma at the same time.

As is the case with Israel and Palestine, more than one group of people involved in a conflict can experience ancestral trauma.

Israelis, Jews, and those who are part of the Jewish and diaspora are experiencing horror, grief, and trauma. The attacks on Israelis are the most violent, large-scale attacks since the Holocaust.

Palestinians, Muslims, and those who are part of the Arab diaspora (including Arabs and Palestinians living in Israel) are also experiencing horror, grief, trauma, and lack of safety. The attacks add to an endless string of attacks, expulsions, and persecutions they have experienced since the 1940s.

When two or more people, or groups of people, have and are experiencing trauma, it’s important to ask a key question: Whose experience of trauma does dominant culture center?

This is reminiscent of trauma occurring in a family or community of origin.

In some cases, there is a clear perpetrator and victim. And often, it should be said, the discomfort or even potential pain of the perpetrator gets centered. Often, a community worries how the perpetrator will feel when survivors come forward- how difficult it will be for them, and what the consequences will be for their emotional, social, and professional lives.

In other cases, “How will they feel when people come forward?” In others, more than one party can justifiably claim harm.

Echoes: the injunction not to speak

If you’re a survivor of trauma, you couldn’t help but be acutely sensitive very early on to the prohibition against speaking out about what’s happening to the Palestinian women, children, and civilian men in Gaza.

For most survivors, the initial assault(s), violence, or trauma was nearly always accompanied by an injunction from the perpetrator against speaking out about the assault.

Sometimes, perpetrators say that telling anyone what happened will cause them harm.

Sometimes, they threaten to cause us further harm. In my case, the man who assaulted me when I was 15 said that if I told anyone, he would similarly harm my younger brother and sister. This left me, like other survivors, feeling trapped.

The crux of the injunction-to-silence dilemma: Staying silent causes us further harm, and leaves us vulnerable and unprotected. It does not stop the cycle of violence. And yet, speaking out also causes trauma, and potentially results in further harm to us, and also risks the wrath of those we depend on for survival and social well-being.  

This dialectic festers in our tissue. It lodges in our blood and breath and bones.

I’d recognize it anywhere, because it reverberates in my body still. And that’s why I recognize it in the current situation.

The Insistence that speaking out will harm Jewish people

The word testimony comes from the Latin testis, a “witness, or one who attests” and the suffix monium, signifying action, state, and condition. Those who give testimony are witnessing an action, state, or condition.

Soon after Israel began to bomb Palestine, people began calling for a ceasefire because of what we are bearing witness to.

People who have spoken out to call for a ceasefire have immediately received accusations that they are anti-Semitic, some coming in violent ways. I’ve received hate messages on social media. A colleague who works in trauma was called a “Nazi.” Today, a yoga colleague who is Jewish and has family affected by Hamas’s violence, spoke out in support of a ceasefire; he is already receiving a flood of hostile responses from family and friends.

There’s an idea floating around that calling for a ceasefire is inherently anti-Semitic. Or that a ceasefire will allow Hamas to regroup. Or that it will harm the hostages. Or that it amounts to a genocide against Jews.

None of these things are true. And they echo the notion survivors have been inculcated with that speaking out about assault will do inexorable harm to the perpetrator’s psyche, relationships, career.

The situation on the ground is dire, and poised to get worse.

On October 28, Craig Mokhiber, United Nations Director of the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, resigned over what he termed a “textbook case of genocide.” In his resignation letter to the High Commissioner of the U.N., he wrote:

“As a human rights lawyer with more than three decades of experience in the field, I know well that the concept of genocide has often been subject to political abuse. But the current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate. In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms are accompanied by Israeli military units. Across the land, Apartheid rules. This is a text-book case of genocide.”

What did Mokhiber mean by “explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military?”

Since the conflict began, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called the Palestinians "human animals.” (This is a direct echo of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s words about there being “no such thing” as Ukrainians, and calling Ukrainian’s drug-addled Nazis.”)

Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said that it was "an option" to "nuke Gaza," echoing the nuclear saber rattling of Dimitry Medvedev, Russia’s Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation.

An Israeli lawmaker from Netanyahu’s Likud party, Galit Distel Atbaryan wrote on social media, “Erase Gaza from the face of the earth. Let the Gazan monsters rush to the southern border and flee into Egypt, or die.”

The New York Times reports that Israel has requested 24,000 assault rifles so that Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right minister of the police, can arm civilians who want to force Palestinians from the West Bank.

Multiple news outlets, and social activists groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace have reported a letter written by 100 Israeli doctors seeking to have the IDF bomb Palestinian hospitals to dust.

Palestinian journalists and their families have been targeted.

Civilian infrastructure like aid, medical care, electricity, food, have been targeted.

These are violations of the Geneva Convention, and they seem poised, improbably, to grow even more extreme.

I’ve been following geopolitics intensely for several years, but am far from an expert on the Geneva Conventions.

For more, see this letter from Raz Segal, associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University and endowed professor in the study of modern genocide. I also recommend this piece in The Guardian on war crimes.

Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic. But don’t take my word for it: See this courageous and beautiful open letter from Jewish writers and artists, who explain why in a clear and loving way. (The letter was scheduled to be published in a corporate magazine, but the magazine’s lawyers advised them not to publish it.)

We need not wait to determine whether this is a genocide or genocide-in-the-making to take collective action. And we need not fear being called anti-Semitic.

When I’m conflicted or confused as to why my embodied responses to conflict are not always echoed by the people around me, I turn to BIPOC leaders I admire who have experienced genocide, enslavement, and oppression, and who appreciate the nuances of oppression in ways that I can’t yet see.

Here’s Ijeoma Oluo on this on her Substack:

“You may be told that usually it’s important to speak out against genocide, but [that] this time the real genocide is the calling [of] a genocide a genocide. This is gaslighting. It’s a deliberate tactic to confuse people, to make them feel like they can’t say anything at all, lest they cause harm. It’s meant to make it seem like doing nothing in the face of ethnic cleansing is the most enlightened thing to do. Resist this.”

Although people sometimes equate the two, Palestinians are not Hamas.

The day before Hamas’s horrific attacks in Israel, the Arab Barometer, a leading pollster in the Arab world, completed a public opinion poll in Gaza: Hamas was deeply unpopular. (To learn more about the poll, listen to this episode of the Ezra Klein Show podcast; Amaney Jamal, Dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and a co-founder of the Arab Barometer, explains the poll. Actually, I highly recommend all of Ezra’s podcasts since October 7th.) Furthermore, Palestinians haven’t had an election since 2006.

The other thing here: Understanding genocide and activism on behalf of humanity are inherently tied to anti-oppression and racial justice frameworks. If you’ve done the work of ferreting out the ways in which you (and me, and we) uphold white supremacy, and what it takes to ensure inclusivity and equity for all, it’s clear that speaking out on behalf of Palestinians is also pro-Jewish, and in adherence with Jewish (and yogic) values and traditions. (See Jewish Voice for Peace.)

Dad at 21, just before going to war

Why I’m Speaking Out

Many of you know that my mother was a prisoner of war in the Soviet Gulag in World War II at the age of seven. My father served in the U.S. armored division that liberated the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp.

As I said in this post, between 75 and 80 million humans died in WWII. Think of the artists, musicians, engineers, doctors, scholars, parents, humans the world lost! How many more have to die? How many more?

After the war, my father co-founded the Council for a Livable World in Washington, D.C. to limit the nuclear arms race.

He became close friends with the contemplative Thomas Merton; their letters to one another are published in several of Thomas’s books, including Witness to Freedom: Letters in Times of Crisis, and The Cold War Letters.

Silence feels like complicity to me. Soon after the war started, a began to feel a growing disquiet that grew and grew, until it rang like a gong through my body.

Precisely because of my personal experience + professional understanding of epigenetic trauma, I will continue to call for an end to the violence.

In a devastating piece on the Holocaust in December ’22 issue of The Atlantic, Clint Smith III wrote,

"American soldiers wondered how thousands of people could have been held captive, tortured, and killed at the camp, while just outside its walls was a small town where people were going about their lives as if impervious to the depravity taking place inside. Buying groceries, playing soccer with their children, drinking coffee with their neighbors."

The piece is also about how we metabolize, memorialize, and repair our most terrible deeds.

For me, standing up on behalf of the sovereignty and humanity and rights of Palestinians is not an option; it is a biological, moral, and spiritual imperative.

We vowed “Never Again.” And that doesn’t just mean “Never Again” for Jewish people. It means never again for everyone. (And that includes all the countries that have undergone genocide, many of which are mentioned here and many of which are linked in Craig Mokhiber's resignation letter linked above.)

Solidarity cannot be measured by the support of any right to defend that includes the targeting of civilians, journalists, hospitals, medical care, food, infrastructure, aid, or by this kind of body count.

If that is your definition of solidarity, we can disagree with love.

Those of you who know my work know that to the best of my capabilities, I stand for unconditional justice for all humanity.

What Survivors Can Do Now

To my Jewish and Palestinian brothers, sisters, and non-binary folks, I see you and I love you.

To my fellow survivors, I see you and love you.

Pay close and tender attention to your body. What is it trying to tell you?

Take care of yourselves. Get good sleep. Eat good food. Recognize gaslighting when it occurs.

If want to take action in a quiet way on behalf of humanity, do so.

If you’d like to speak out, do so.

If you’d like to support someone who is speaking out, that’s great too.

If people that you’re in relationship with push back in a non-violent way and you’d like to engage them, do so.

If they push back without care, feel empowered to disengage.

If people you don’t know tell you what to say or not to say, or otherwise engage violently, you can restrict or block them on social and private channels. (I’m beginning to use the “block” button, because I’m not invested in engaging with anyone violent, bent on aggression, or those who want me to metabolize their trauma, or computer bots.)

Remember: You’ve fought hard to access, tend to, and give voice to your own truth. No one can take that from you.

Much love to all, along with a terrible, aching hope.

---