The missing Palestinian debate: Why can’t we talk about our collective trauma?

Young Palestinian women sit at Haifa’s Naima café

Sheren Falah Saab writes in Haaretz on 12 July 2026:

This personal essay was written twice.

Because sometimes a journalistic story doesn’t end when it’s published. It continues to live on for years after it first appears.

How do you tell the story of the internal discourse within Palestinian society in Israel, the one that takes place behind closed doors – if at all – and is almost never voiced publicly, certainly not in front of Jews?

It’s been almost three years since October 7. Since then, there has been the war in Gaza, the war in Lebanon, tens of thousands killed and wounded in the Gaza Strip, and Israel’s involvement in the Syrian-Druze city of Sweida to protect the Druze from Ahmed al-Sharaa’s regime. Add to that a relentless stream of upheaval compressed into a remarkably short period of time.

All of it has left deep emotional scars on Palestinian citizens of Israel. But not only on them. Druze, Bedouins, Circassians and others have also been forced to wrestle with questions of identity, belonging and the future.

And yet, even after everything that’s happened, public conversation has remained limited and, at times, almost entirely absent.  Perhaps the clearest expression of this is the cultural silence. Not because there are no feelings, thoughts or disagreements, but because there is almost no space where they can be discussed honestly.

Forget the state of the nation, politics or Jewish-Arab relations. What do people talk about among themselves? Weddings and funerals. Summer vacations. The epidemic of violence and crime. The cost of living. Whether to stay here or leave. But the big, painful questions, those tied to collective trauma and the rapidly changing reality around them, often remain unspoken.

But I can’t let it go. Partly because I’m a journalist, partly because I’m from here.

Living in a village in the Galilee means I have a front-row seat to everyday life. I hear conversations at the supermarket, the pharmacy, the market, on the street, and at family gatherings and social events. It’s hard for me to separate the journalist from the person who belongs to this society.

So I keep trying to bring it up. I’ll mention the war in Gaza, October 7, how these past few years have changed me, or how long it took me to recover from the psychological toll of that period. I believe that sharing invites sharing. That the person across from me will feel comfortable doing the same.

Even at the gym, when a siren goes off and we all squeeze into the shelter, I’ll make some comment about the war. About the feeling of stagnation, instability, and ongoing pain that has been with us for years. But almost every time, the response is the same: silence.

That silence makes me sad. Why don’t we talk about the war and what it has done to us? Can we talk about what it’s done to people on the home front, to minorities in the Galilee, to Palestinian society in Israel? Are we allowed to express fear, vulnerability, fragility?

I listen to the conversations around me. People talk about everything except the war’s impact on their lives.

“Is it fear?” I asked a friend who knows this silence well.  “People just want to live their lives,” she said. “A murder here, a murder there, everything hurts. So people don’t talk. It’s a way of coping. If you don’t talk, you can push some of it away. Who wants to feel helpless? To watch children being killed in Gaza and be unable to do anything? To see Beirut being bombed and have no way to stop it? Besides, people are afraid. If they talk, maybe the police will come.”

She once told me that even in her own home, the war is discussed in whispers. “So no one will hear us,” she said.  Her children are about to start university, and she warned them not to express their views about the war in public.

She isn’t the only one. At a Pilates class I attended with a group of women – some of them, like me, mothers of teenagers – I heard the same message again and again.  “They have opinions too,” one woman said. “They oppose the killing and they want to speak out. But I told them to keep their heads down and stay quiet.”

“The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness,” Judith Herman writes in “Trauma and Recovery.” (1997) “Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried.”

“The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma,” she continues.

I brought these thoughts up in a conversation with a friend, a physician, and found myself complaining about the silence. About how hard it has become to talk to people about the war and what it is doing to our psyche.

He was quiet for a moment before answering.  “We are no longer a normal society, and it’s hard to judge people for that. The wars, Israeli policy, the way we’re treated as a minority, all of it has shattered us into pieces. We stopped functioning as a society a long time ago; we are fragments of a society. We’re people living side by side, sometimes sharing the same experiences, but also suspecting one another and killing one another.”

It was painful to hear, but it also felt honest.

Maybe that’s why I keep asking these questions, even when I know an answer may never come. Because at some point, the silence itself became the story.

Three years after October 7, the war is present not only in images from Gaza, casualty figures, or news headlines. It’s also present in sentences that trail off halfway through, in words spoken in whispers, and in subjects that everyone knows about but no one dares touch.

It’s present in the fact that an entire society keeps going to work, studying, getting married, and raising children while struggling to talk about the wound it carries.

I don’t know whether this silence is a survival mechanism or a sign of a deeper crisis. It may well be both. But it seems to me that a society unable to tell itself what it’s been through will also struggle to imagine what might be possible in the future.

And the question that has stayed with me all this time is not only why we’re silent, but how long we can keep living inside this silence.

This article is reproduced in its entirety