‘The Whole Country Has PTSD’
The war between Israel and Hamas has progressed at such speed, with body counts mounting by the hour, that it can feel like the chasm of human grief it is leaving behind has gotten relatively little attention. In Israel, the society I know better, every individual seems to be connected to someone who was murdered or has been kidnapped. In Gaza, death surely feels inescapable. I have been worried about this reverberation of pain almost from the moment I learned what Hamas had done—that a grief this overwhelming will harden people such that generations will have to pass before any political resolution feels remotely possible.
“The whole country has PTSD,” was the first thing the Israeli writer Etgar Keret texted me a week after the attack. I realized that he was the person I most wanted to speak with. Keret has long been an impish figure on the Israeli literary scene, writing very short, absurdist stories for three decades, contemporary fairy tales that are allegorical and often gut-punching. What Keret hasn’t tried to do is be the voice of Israel. Unlike a generation of writers before him who were comfortable with this role—famously, Amos Oz, David Grossman, and A. B. Yehoshua—Keret is more concerned with how humans survive being human. Possibly, this is why his stories have had such universal appeal, regularly featured on This American Life.
Since the October 7 attack, Keret has been writing what he calls “war notes”: short thoughts, observations, and outlines of stories jotted down as if, Israel’s largest paid daily newspaper, and a version even appeared in English on the actor Molly Ringwald’s feed. Keret composed the paragraph-long text for a young girl whose father had been killed. “Close your eyes, and allow yourself, just for a moment, to simply feel the pain. To hesitate. To be confused. To feel sorrow. Remorse,” he wrote. “You still have your whole life to spend persecuting, avenging, reckoning. But for now, just close your eyes and look inward, like a satellite hovering over a disaster zone, searching for signs of life.”
