There is no ‘after'” in Israel yet

Many Jews outside Israel speak fluently about October 7. We tracked the hostages. We debate military strategy, diplomacy, proportionality and global perception.

But stepping into Israel after more than two years of war and only weeks into a fragile ceasefire, reveals a harder truth: Israel is not post-war. It is still living inside the event.

On our Project A Mission last November, we moved through Israel’s physical and emotional fault lines. We visited kibbutzim, shelters, hospitals, classrooms and one reality became clear: Israel is fighting multiple wars at once, most of them invisible even to those who care deeply.

Displacement as a way of life

At Nir Oz, the devastation is total. Around a quarter of the kibbutz’s residents were murdered or kidnapped. Most homes are uninhabitable. Families are scattered across temporary housing with no clear path back.

This is not evacuation as diaspora Jews might imagine it. It is bureaucratic and emotional paralysis. Homes cannot be sold, mortgages cannot be approved, government decisions indefinitely frozen.

Even memory is contested. Should the ruins stand as testimony, or should rebuilding come first so children don’t grow up inside a graveyard? Some of the elderly neighbours will not live to see the decisions resolved.

The healers who are also wounded

Across Israel, therapists are treating trauma they are still living themselves. There are no protocols for this scale of horror. How do you treat a hostage who survived underground tunnels? A child who watched a parent abducted? How does a therapist who buried family members help others who feel guilty for surviving?

One child now sleeps with shoes on every night. It’s a defence against the lie that “the war is over.” Rockets fell the next day. This is not PTSD as a clinical category. It is collective trauma delivered simultaneously, with the healers just as exposed as those they are meant to heal.

Fifteen seconds to live

The bomb shelters near the Nova Festival are impossible to forget. Concrete rooms meant for a handful of people held dozens. Fifteen seconds to decide whether to run, hide or freeze. Inside, people fought with their bare hands. A young Israeli threw grenades back until an RPG killed him and others. A Bedouin Muslim worker tried to negotiate, identifying himself as Arab and was still executed.

These were not battlefields. They were bathroom-sized rooms where civilians were forced into impossible moral choices.

Hospitals at war

At Sheba Hospital, the scale becomes clinical and staggering. On October 7, the hospital instantly transformed into a wartime operation. More than 2300 casualties have been treated with a 99.9 per cent survival rate, the result of years of battlefield simulation few outside Israel even know exist.

But survival is only the beginning. Israel now faces a rehabilitation crisis without precedent: amputees, paraplegics, severe psychological injury. Sheba doubled its rehab capacity in weeks. Virtual reality therapy, scuba rehabilitation, flight simulators. It is innovation born of necessity.

Mental health cases have tripled. Some patients refuse human therapists altogether, choosing an AI program trained to provide empathy without judgment. This is not resilience as a slogan. It is survival through forced adaptation.

The families behind the uniforms

Israel’s “civilian army” reality is often discussed abstractly. On the ground, it looks like Haogen, an organisation supporting 35,000 reservist families. Mothers raise large families alone while working multiple jobs. Tourism incomes have vanished. Fundraising happens on Instagram out of necessity, not branding. Children rehearse lockdowns and funerals with equal familiarity. Teenagers attend shivas as routinely as school events.

Rebuilding as resistance

In the north, at Kibbutz Manara, 75 per cent of homes have been destroyed. Residents have been displaced for over two years. And yet young Israelis have moved into abandoned kindergartens, forming volunteer brigades to secure, repair and rebuild. With almost no resources, they hold a ten-year vision to transform a devastated border region into a thriving community. Here, reconstruction is not government-led. It is youth-led. Hope-led.

The quiet war in classrooms

At The Teachers Lounge, Jewish and Arab educators sit together, often for the first time, not to debate politics, but to tell personal stories.

Israel’s four education systems rarely intersect. October 7 nearly shattered this program. Facilitators resigned. Sessions paused. Yet alumni networks grew stronger. Because coexistence, it turns out, requires emotional courage more than slogans. If only Jewish and Muslim educators were doing this work together in Australia.

What even engaged Jews may still miss

Israel is not fighting one war. It is fighting many:

• a war against displacement

• a war against trauma
• a war to rebuild

• a war to hold society together

Diaspora debates often focus on geopolitics and optics. What we witnessed was deeper: a country living inside prolonged grief while refusing to surrender its future.

Advocacy changes when you stand in these places. When you hear the stories firsthand. When Israel stops being an argument and becomes a lived reality. Seeing this up-close changes how you speak, how you listen and how you show up.

If that kind of understanding matters to you, we’ll be returning in April 2026.

Liora Miller is a co-lead of Project A and Vice President of National Council of Jewish Women Australia. projectainoz.org