Healing My Zionism Trauma

Originally published on Substack

When I was a child, there was a suicide bomber in the local supermarket of my settlement. Someone shot him before the bomb went off. Though the event had long passed, my body never forgot. For years, every supermarket, every bus, I was scanning without thinking, eyes moving, body tight, profiling everyone. I drove through fiery molotov cocktails and had rocks shatter our windows on the highway. There were periods where I wore a bulletproof vest while being driven, my dad driving at breakneck speeds to never let another car pass us and shoot at us. I walked to school with a gas mask, sat in the bomb shelter watching the news as sirens cut through the night. This was my life. The fear was real, the danger was real, the trauma was real.

The body remembers everything. Trauma never stays in the past. It lives in the present, inside the nervous system, running subconscious programs and inherited beliefs that make us feel like what happened then is happening now. The Holocaust, the pogroms, the bus bombings, the sirens, all woven into how we see, how we react, and how we justify what we do. What’s actually happening becomes filtered through what conditioning wired us to see. So measures get taken, walls built, checkpoints created. Anything to make the fear stop. Not because it’s unsafe outside, but because we feel unsafe within.

These programs run our lives and create our reality until we look at them, own them, and take responsibility for them. Until then, we stay stuck in endless cycles, perpetuating the very things we think we’re protecting ourselves from.

This is the story of how I broke the cycle.

I was taught about the Holocaust the way most Israeli kids were. That we were sheep led to slaughter. Victims who needed a state to ensure it never happened again. The only way to prevent it was through military might, through power, through never allowing ourselves to be weak. The Holocaust story was woven directly into the founding of the State of Israel, into prophecy, into identity, into redemption. The premise that there always was and always will be a unique evil out there trying to get us. The birth of “never again.”

We visited the camps in high school. Stood inside the gas chambers, the ovens, and the trains. We learned that wherever Jews went throughout history, pogroms followed. Never welcome, always kicked out, always persecuted. Antisemitism was written into human nature itself. This programming ran deep, layered through every part of growing up, fusing that past trauma with current identity, with the state designed to protect us, with our very survival, until separation of these things became impossible.

Every terrorist attack collapsed past into present. Sirens going off, Iron Dome lighting up the sky, news reporting that countries want to wipe us off the map. All of it confirmation of what we’d always been taught. The pogroms happening now. The expulsions happening now. The Holocaust happening now, and we must stop it even if by unconscionable force and destruction. We found every way to compare our present to our past to avoid the discomfort of seeing what we ourselves were contributing to perpetuating the cycle of violence in the present moment.

We can’t see it because the programs run too deep. These beliefs about fear and survival have fused the idea of the state with existence itself. Zionism is our safety. And questioning Zionism triggers Holocaust programs in the body, the existential threat, like we are on the verge of another imminent genocide even when we are the Goliath.

Growing up, checkpoints were normal. Jews drove right through while Arabs were pulled over, made to wait excessively, step out of their cars, get searched, IDs checked, sometimes for hours. I witnessed streets with military presence and control everywhere, cameras on every corner. I drove past pillboxes overlooking Palestinian neighborhoods. Later I served in those pillboxes, drove through their towns at night on patrol just to make our presence known. I didn’t stop to think about what that meant, how that felt to them. It’s just how things were, what kept us safe.

I could meet certain Palestinians in certain places without understanding the system creating tiers of existence between them and their own families. I could go to school with someone without realizing it took them four hours to cross a checkpoint I drove right through. I worked alongside people without understanding they couldn’t visit relatives a few miles away. These connections felt like validation that there wasn’t a problem, when I was so deep in it I couldn’t see the walls.

Outside of our settlement in the West Bank, in “shared spaces,” Palestinians during certain periods weren’t allowed to use the same roads as us. They had to weave through back roads while we drove normally. There were military-mandated curfews during our holidays. Workers couldn’t get to work because they weren’t allowed to move. It never occurred to me to question what life like that, under a different set of rules and conditions, might feel like. I just knew everything around me, whether reasonable or excessive, existed for our safety.

Israel operates like a collective body whose nervous system finds coherence only through crisis. A crisis hits, whether real or manufactured, and we all synchronize around fear and survival. For one moment the fragmentation stops. We cry “together we will win” and the rush of belonging, purpose, righteousness, and transcendence reminds us of a unified identity against a common enemy. A real-life Amalek that validates our fundamental belief about who we are: the eternal victims, the chosen people under constant threat, the ones who must fight to survive.

Yet when the external threat starts to fade, that organizing principle disappears. Without a common enemy to focus on, without a crisis to rally around, people would be forced to turn inward and face what’s been there all along.

Left versus right, religious versus secular, Jew versus Arab, Ashkenazi versus Mizrahi, rich versus poor, Jew versus Jew. Lines drawn and redrawn infinitely. The fragmentation everywhere. This is the inner conflict playing out collectively. The contradictions we can’t face inside ourselves get projected outward. Only when an external enemy appears does coherence return. The crisis becomes the glue. When it fades, the fragmentation surfaces again and the search begins for the next hit. The next war. The next moment of unity. But unity built on a shared enemy isn’t unity. It’s avoidance of what we refuse to face within.

When the body runs on crisis, it lives in survival mode. The parts that process nuance, empathy, and complexity go offline. There’s no more conscious choice, only reactivity. Perception narrows until the threat becomes almost hyperreal while everything outside that tunnel disappears. The body’s designed for this in short bursts when actual danger appears, but when a society lives here chronically, mass dissociation sets in. People feel euphoric, purposeful, awake while being physiologically cut off from reality. Pain and grief get numbed and the suffering of others becomes invisible in our experience.

Over the years, I started seeing that the entity I’d trusted with my safety didn’t actually have my best interests at heart. The state wasn’t protecting me, it was using me. The system had its own goals, meeting our need for unity and purpose while simultaneously advancing its agenda for control and power.

No one is truly free in a system like this. The domination operates on everyone, each in different ways, all participating in something that doesn’t actually serve us. Ironically, this is what should make unity with Palestinians possible. They understand the system better than anyone because they’ve experienced it most directly. Their struggle for freedom reveals what the rest of us are caught in but cannot see. They’re showing the way out of the prison we created for ourselves, the same prison that allows us to create one for them.

For years, I was hiding inside of my own life. I carried things I couldn’t face admitting to, participated in harm I couldn’t acknowledge, and built my identity on foundations I knew weren’t real. My nervous system was constantly wired. Every moment felt like the one where everything would finally be exposed. I developed physical symptoms my body couldn’t ignore. The stress of maintaining the split between what I presented to the world and what I knew about myself was breaking me down from the inside-out.

Eventually I was so misaligned with the truth that the pain of continuing to run from myself became greater than the pain of facing what I’d done. I had to look at my own life first, the places where I could see and own my mistakes clearly, where my errors of judgment were undeniable. And I decided I had to tell the truth. This same mechanism of taking responsibility on a personal level is what shaped my capacity to look critically at the bigger system I’d been conditioned into. I had to confess the truth to people I’d hurt, to try to make amends for years of causing pain, and to sit with what it meant that I was capable of these things.

In my personal life, coming forward with the truth cost me my relationship, my family, the image I’d built, and the only safety I’d known. But going through that process personally taught me to understand the mechanism of how I stayed trapped.

I learned that when I couldn’t face what I’d done, I built a false image to hide behind. The “good person” who would never do such things. I needed that image so badly that I justified everything to protect it. Denied what threatened it. Projected blame outward. Defended the false version of myself rather than facing the real one. That split between who I pretended to be and who I actually was, that’s what kept me in hiding. From myself and from everyone else.

Confession shattered the false image. Forced me to sit with who I’d actually been, what I’d actually done. Not the story I told myself, but the truth. The younger version of me didn’t have the awareness I have now, but he was still me. I had to hold both that I did real harm and that I’m not fundamentally bad. Sitting with that paradox, not collapsing into shame or justification, that’s what opened something. Once I could see my own humanity while facing my capacity for harm, I could finally see that in others.

When I went through the healing process in my personal life, I developed the courage to do the same with Zionism. To sit with what I’d participated in as a soldier, as a citizen, as someone who believed unwaveringly in the narrative I inherited. To finally just be honest about it and face the consequences of that honesty.

The cost of admitting I was wrong was nothing compared to the cost of lying to myself to stay right.

After facing truth instead of running from it, something opened that I couldn’t access before. I met my partner. Her father’s family is from Southern Lebanon. These were people I’d been conditioned to see as enemies. Years of deprogramming made it possible to find the deepest version of family and love in people I was taught to hate. Facing myself, changing my mind, dismantling what kept me trapped opened the path to a love I couldn’t imagine.

Anyone born into this kind of system as it exists would participate in it. Not because of some unique evil, but because the programming is complete, the trauma runs deep, and the nervous system gets wired this way from the beginning.

We always said our oppressors were uniquely evil, that it could never be us. But Zionists are learning the painful lesson of what happens when roles reverse. It can happen to anyone given the right conditions.

When I understood this, when I saw that I too was capable of the same harm under different circumstances, the illusion of separation collapsed. I couldn’t maintain the narrative that they were fundamentally different, fundamentally worse, fundamentally less human. Because I’d seen it in myself. I’d felt how easy it was to justify harm when I was afraid. How natural it felt to build walls when I was wounded. How righteous domination became when I felt unsafe.

This recognition made forgiveness possible. For myself, because I could see I was doing the best I could with the programming I had. For others, because I recognized they were trapped in the same patterns. And when I could hold my own humanity and theirs at the same time, I could finally break the cycle.

The way forward requires arriving back in the present moment, not living in the past. Not reliving the Holocaust, not replaying the pogroms, not cycling through attacks from decades ago. Here, now, with what’s actually in front of us.

The path to safety and healing is understanding. Understanding why things are like this. Understanding where each side comes from, what shaped the current reality, what keeps the cycle going. Understanding that we all have the capacity to inflict harm no matter what our story makes us believe.

Facing our shared past without needing to be right about it, without weaponizing it to justify present actions, transforms the past into shared ground. Each side carried different pieces of what happened. Holding all of it without defensiveness allows something new to emerge. All of it can be faced. It’s going to be okay even after admitting the truth. Even when it’s painful.

Breaking free isn’t political, it’s about learning to feel what’s actually present instead of what conditioning trained us to see. Recognizing when the body reacts to past patterns versus responding to present reality. The work of seeing clearly, arriving back in your own heart, makes it possible to finally see what’s in front of you.

True healing is possible only once you recognize that the threat you felt you needed to defend against lives inside of your own nervous system rather than outside of yourself.

I know this kind of work is possible because I lived this journey. I experienced the bombs, the sirens, the wars, the loss, the fear and then I did this work. I faced what I’d been hiding from, confessed what I’d been denying, sat with the pain of what I’d been guilty of and complicit in, and still ultimately found forgiveness. That’s when everything changed. I found love where I was taught to see hate, I found an inner peace amidst the chaos. And I found family in people I’d been conditioned to see as enemies.

What opens on the other side of this ultimately cannot be explained in words, only ever experienced.

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