July 6 Jerusalem

The Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University is quite lovely, and was easier to find than I feared. Thanks to the kindness of several strangers—the bus driver, a passenger, and the guard at the gate—I arrived at the Rothberg International School half an hour early.

Gayle is a terrific speaker: warm, personable, funny, wise, and full of stories. Her points really stick because she connects so closely with herself and her audience.

I appreciated the distinctions she shared about different aspects of grief, loss, and trauma, and found them very meaningful and relevant. She mentioned a term our trauma mission heard last summer—rolling trauma. The phrase was coined by Boaz Shalgi, a colleague of Jude Recanati at NATAL. In contrast to single-event PTSD, rolling trauma refers to continuous, cumulative exposure to traumatic events. The nervous system never completes the stress cycle before the next event occurs.

Sound familiar?

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I sat near a young woman studying at Columbia University, and asked her about the climate there. She had been in Israel during the encampments period, and said she had not encountered any antisemitism on campus upon her return. She also said she doesn’t engage with people who are not supportive of Israel, and openly displays signs of her stance, including a “Zionist” sticker on her laptop and the large Star of David she wears in New York. She hopes to attend graduate school in Israel, but said it is very difficult to be admitted.

I joined Gayle and Danny Brom for lunch. Danny plans to travel to the UK soon with a group of IDF soldiers attending the Peace of Mind program, which was developed in 2007 by Metiv, the Israel Psychotrauma Center that Danny founded and leads. Peace of Mind attracted tremendous interest at our trauma mission last summer.

During a brief discussion about the use of the term genocide, Danny said he applies it to Israel’s conduct in Gaza. I noted that I associate genocide with an intent to destroy a people.

To explain his thinking, he referenced the Netherlands, his native country, and the apology it issued for its role at Srebrenica in 1995, where Bosnian Serbs killed more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys. Dutch courts later found the Dutch state partially liable for failing to protect a smaller group of men under the control of its UN peacekeeping force.

The conversation moved on naturally from there.