Israel as a Laboratory

For Israeli psychiatrists and psychologists, the Yom Kippur War was a bench mark. Before it, nation building and the chronic threat of war seemed to leave little room for worry about personal emotional problems. Esteem for the psychosciences was low, at least by Western standards. Since the 1973 war, public respect for psychiatry has risen sharply. For one thing, many psychiatrists and psychologists performed heroically during the conflict: they moved to the front with the troops to deal with battle shock on the spot; behind the lines they manned crisis centers to treat soldiers and civilians alike. Their work was doubly appreciated because the Yom Kippur War produced more psychological shock than any of the country's earlier wars. This was partly because there were so many casualties (about as many as the U.S. suffered at Pearl Harbor) and partly because the war abruptly dispelled the assumption of quick Israeli supremacy in battle.

"Traumatic recollections of the Yom Kippur War continue to haunt and obsess the Israelis," said former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban two weeks ago in Tel Aviv at the First International Conference on Psychological Stress and Adjustment in War and Peace. The war was "a psychological disaster," added Psychologist Richard Lazarus of the University of California at Berkeley. It "may signal the start of a major personality change for Israelis." Constant political tensions, he added, have turned Israel into a "great natural laboratory" for the psychosciences.

In the Yom Kippur War, Israel saw an unexpectedly high number of its soldiers fighting personal breakdown, from conversion symptoms (paralysis of a healthy leg, for example) to panic, amnesia and other classic reactions of "battle shock." Some of the effects were new to Israelis. The need to abandon wounded comrades on the field during the heavy and continuous fighting, a denial of the Israeli army's code of behavior, was shattering. One Israeli machine gunner shot down so many Arabs that he fled in panic, obsessed by the idea of a pile of corpses blotting out the sun. Another soldier, unhurt when his halftrack was blown up, broke down because the machine had been his home and sole reference point in five days of fighting.

Civilian stress took different forms.

One woman developed infantile anger when her pilot husband was killed--she had loved the "strong" pilot and could not accept his "weakness" in getting killed. Another pattern among war widows was guilt for embarrassing friends by "forcing" them to express sympathy.

During the Yom Kippur War, Israeli women tended to bypass emergency public service and plunge into household tasks to relieve anxieties about loved ones at the front. For a while, the fledgling women's liberation movement in Israel seemed almost snuffed out. Now it is growing again, but the current crisis has helped reinforce traditional sexual roles. A recent survey of women showed that 90% of them felt that females should not take combat positions in the army. Despite the near constant threat to national survival, women have not fought since 1948.

Lazarus, an American Jew, gently suggested that the Israelis' belief that they can master any situation may have produced some scapegoating after the Yom Kippur War. His reasoning: if a war goes badly, a people who deeply believe their fate is in their own hands have no one to blame but their leaders. He also feels that Israelis may be employing "middle knowledge"--a term which refers to the process by which a dying person suppresses knowledge of his predicament in order to maintain hope.

Middle knowledge or not, surveys reported at the conference show strong national morale. In late November, following the triple shock of 43% devaluation, Arafat's United Nations speech and the Bet She'an massacre, the number of Israelis who felt confident that they could cope with the dangers they faced rose from 78% to 85%.

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