Trauma, Resilience and the Price of Survival

The Middle East I found was not the Middle East I expected. In Dubai and Abu Dhabi, I found confidence. A society focused almost obsessively on growth, technology, investment and the future.

In Israel, I found cranes everywhere, apartment towers rising from the ground, businesses expanding, families rebuilding shattered communities and an economy that refuses to stop.

Both countries are building. But they are building for different reasons.

The UAE is building because it believes the future belongs to it.
Israel is building because it has learned that survival itself is an act of defiance.

And therein lies the story.

Because after three weeks travelling through Israel and the UAE, what struck me most was not the enormous differences between these two extraordinary countries. It was the growing gap between how they see themselves and how the world increasingly sees them.

Nowhere is that gap more consequential than in Israel.

The first thing you notice when arriving in Israel is not fear, it is construction.

Flying in from Dubai, almost half the plane was filled with Sri Lankan construction workers arriving on three-year contracts. Once you land, the reason becomes obvious. Cranes dominate the skyline. Apartment towers rise from the ground. Roads are being expanded. Rail projects are underway.
But why so many foreign workers? There was another consequence of October 7 that I had not fully appreciated until I arrived.

The construction boom is real. Cranes dominate the skyline and building sites seem to be everywhere. Initially, I assumed the large number of foreign workers arriving in Israel was simply a response to the hundreds of thousands of reservists repeatedly being called away from civilian life.

The reality, I was told repeatedly, is more profound.

October 7 shattered trust. Before the massacre, tens of thousands of Palestinians worked in Israel. They built homes, worked on construction sites, farmed land and performed countless jobs that helped underpin the Israeli economy. For many Israelis, coexistence was not a political slogan but a daily reality.

That reality died on October 7.

Many Israelis now believe they can no longer distinguish between those Palestinians who seek peaceful coexistence and those who might facilitate terrorism. Whether that fear is objectively justified in every case is almost beside the point. Trust, once broken, is not restored by argument.

Several people explained another concern that had never occurred to me.

Even where a Palestinian worker may have no sympathy whatsoever for terrorism, Hamas and other militant groups have demonstrated a willingness to intimidate, coerce and threaten families. The fear that workers could be pressured, blackmailed or exploited by terrorist organisations is one that many Israelis now regard as an unacceptable risk, especially after the majority of Palestinians supported / celebrated October 7.

The result is visible everywhere. Sri Lankan, Indian, and other foreign workers are increasingly replacing labour that once came from the Palestinian territories.

This may prove to be one of Hamas’s greatest strategic successes and one of the greatest tragedies for ordinary Palestinians.

October 7 did not merely kill Israelis. It destroyed relationships, trust and economic interdependence that had taken decades to build. It has created a psychological and social divide that may take generations to repair.

Many Palestinians are now paying a terrible price for decisions made by leaders who have consistently prioritised hatred, corruption and violence over the welfare of their own people.

The tragedy is that the people who most need peace are often the people least empowered to pursue it.

In contrast I revisited Kibbutz Nahal Oz, one of the communities devastated on October 7, where houses are rebuilt and 60% of families have returned.
“We are not a memorial,” resident and Oct 7 survivor Amir Tibon told me. “We have a future to live.”

That sentence stayed with me. Perhaps because it captures something essential about Israel. The country is not defined by what seeks to destroy it. It is defined by what it insists on creating despite it.

And yet, underneath that extraordinary resilience and the endless construction lies something else.

Profound exhaustion. Israel today is a traumatised society. Not in the superficial sense often portrayed overseas, but in a deep and visceral way. Virtually everyone knows someone killed, wounded or had been kidnapped.
Families have endured fathers, mothers, sons and daughters serving hundreds of days in reserve duty. Good friends tell me of the more than 500 days served by men in their families.

Businesses have been disrupted and relationships are very strained. Children carry anxieties no child should know.

And all of this exists against the backdrop of a war that seems to have no clear end.

One morning, at 5:45am, my phone screamed an alert. Seek shelter immediately.

Within seconds lights flicked on throughout the buildings around me. Parents woke sleeping children. Babies were carried downstairs. Families, like my daughter’s, gathered in a cramped concrete shelter beneath the building.

This wasn’t a drill. The missiles being fired from Iran were not aimed at military installations. They were aimed at civilian cities. At the very shelter where children sat clutching blankets waiting for the all-clear.

As an Australian, the experience was surreal. Wars are something we read about. But in Israel, they are measured in the ninety seconds between the siren and the shelter.

Yet what struck me was not fear. It was the clarity that comes when abstract geopolitical debates are replaced by my frightened grandchildren sitting in a concrete bunker.

The clarity that comes when you realise one side builds shelters to protect civilians and the other side targets civilians sheltering.

And yet even here, there is another truth that I found reluctant to acknowledge.

Military victories are not the same as strategic victories. Israel today is trapped in what increasingly looks like a series of forever wars. The country faces genuine threats from Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and other actors. No serious observer disputes that.

But there is a growing inability within Israeli politics to articulate what comes after the fighting. Wars can remove threats. They cannot create political solutions, and eventually every conflict requires one.

The tragedy is that Israel’s current political leadership appears structurally incapable of providing it. This government thrives on division. Internally, it has torn the country apart through judicial reform battles and the special treatment of the Haredim.

Externally, it offers little vision beyond the next military operation. The result is a society permanently mobilised but increasingly uncertain about where it is heading.

This was brought home to me in a deeply personal way. I was staying only a couple of streets away from the home of Supreme Court Justice Noam

Sohlberg when extremist Haredi demonstrators rioted outside his residence.

The scenes were ugly, aggressive, destructively violent and profoundly disturbing. What made them particularly difficult to process was knowing that friends of mine were simultaneously serving hundreds of days in the reserves defending the very people protesting against the institutions of the state.

The contradiction is becoming impossible to ignore.

One group bears a disproportionate share of military service, economic burden and national responsibility.

Another increasingly seeks exemption from those obligations while demanding influence over the direction of the country.

No society can sustain that imbalance forever. Yet perhaps the greatest challenge facing Israel is one many Israelis do not fully appreciate.
Isolation. Not military isolation but diplomatic and economic isolation.
Israelis are understandably focused on immediate threats. But there is another battle taking place beyond the region. Across Europe and much of the Western world, support for Israel is eroding.

Much of this is unfair, driven by ignorance, antisemitism and some of it reflects genuine concern about where Israel is heading politically.

Yet the consequences may soon become tangible. One example repeatedly raised in conversations was Israel’s extensive scientific and technological partnerships with Europe. These relationships help underpin the country’s extraordinary innovation ecosystem.

If political tensions begin threatening access to research funding, collaborative programs and investment flows, the impact will not be theoretical. It will be felt directly in the laboratories, universities and start-ups that have powered Israel’s economic miracle.

And here lies the paradox.

Many Israelis increasingly support figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir not because they agree with everything he says, but because they are tired.

Fed up being lectured. Fed up being condemned. Fed up watching Jewish students harassed on Western campuses while governments do little. Fed up of seeing terrorism rationalised, sexual violence perpetrated against Israelis washed away, and antisemitism excused.

As one Israeli cleverly explained it to me, Ben-Gvir represents the “fuck you” vote. The response of people who feel abandoned by the world and no longer care what it thinks.

The problem is that every Ben-Gvir headline simultaneously deepens the very isolation that fuels his support.

It is a vicious cycle. The more isolated Israel becomes, the more attractive the politics of defiance become. The more attractive the politics of defiance become, the more isolated Israel becomes.

I left my beloved Israel this time with two seemingly contradictory impressions.

Israel remains one of the most extraordinary societies I have ever encountered. Its resilience is astonishing and its dynamism remarkable. Its determination to build despite trauma is genuinely inspiring and gives much hope for the future.

But resilience is not a strategy. And survival, while essential, is not a vision.
The challenge for Israel is not whether it can continue to fight. It can and will as it needs to. The challenge is whether it can imagine, and then build, a future beyond fighting. This is, to me, the true Zionist Ideal.

Because the cranes filling Israel’s skyline are building more than apartments. They are building a future. The question is whether Israeli politics can catch up to the aspirations of the people living beneath them.

Adam Slonim is an ALP life member, podcaster and businessman.