Any moment now, international journalists will enter Gaza, and their photographs – raw, wrenching, undeniable – will burn into the collective human psyche.
The Jewish psyche, already shattered since October 7, must brace for another rupture. What comes next will remake our legacy as a people. As a psychotherapist steeped in intergenerational trauma, I believe this to be a moment of historical importance, one that invites us to preserve our humanity.
Palestinians return this week to the ruins of the southern Gazan city of Khan Younis.Credit: Doaa Albaz/Anadolu via Getty Images
For Jews, the trauma of October 7 will endure: Hamas’ live-streamed carnage and bloodlust, innocents slaughtered, hostages who felt like our own kin. Friends and strangers here who cheered, condoned or said nothing.
But if we are to protect our children from inheriting more pain, we must make space for another momentous task – a reckoning over the incalculable suffering inscribed in Gaza’s ruins.
The scale of destruction in Gaza will transcend politics. It will bypass ideology and strike the body directly, as a moral wound. Horror, anguish and confusion will flood in. For many, it has already proven too unbearable. Denial and blame, those oldest of defence mechanisms, have been employed as self-protection.
Intergenerational trauma is the transmission of unresolved pain across generations, carried in our waters, our bodies, our value systems. Decades of research show that what remains unspoken strains relationships and erodes our health. Every unprocessed grief seeks a vessel. If it’s not us, it will be our children. So let it be us.
Ilana Laps. “This war not being my ‘fault’ will not spare me or my child from its shadow.”Credit: Mark Nussy
For three generations, Jews have been shaped by the legacy of the Holocaust; terror and erasure live in our nervous systems. In my DNA lives a 12-year-old girl, my grandmother, hunted through a Belarusian forest. Her mother, two months postpartum, runs out of breast milk; her newborn must not cry. Any sound could betray everyone they have left. That pain found its way to me, as these things do.
But we aren’t the only ones with inherited wounds. German journalist Sabine Bode coined the term kriegsenkel – war grandchildren – to describe those born into a legacy, not of complicity but of hidden grief and moral debt. In the American south, descendants of families who profited from slavery speak of guilt without memory. In post-apartheid South Africa, children of former regime supporters contend with a stained identity. In Australia, rage over Gaza is shaped, in part, by unprocessed guilt over Indigenous dispossession.
