Israel: The Leadership a Wounded Society Needs

‘No one came to look us in the eye.’

Elana Kaminka’s son Yannai was killed on October 7, fighting Hamas terrorists as they attacked the kibbutzim of southern Israel. When I interviewed Elana for my documentary RISING: Voices of Protest and Hope, she spoke not only about the unbearable loss of her son, but about what happened afterwards.

Not one person from the government came to visit the family. Not one government representative came to take responsibility for what had happened to her son and her country.

As Israel approaches a fateful election after three extraordinarily difficult years, a question confronts the country: what kind of leadership does a wounded society need in order to heal?

It is a question I found myself returning to throughout the making of RISING, as we followed Israelis navigating grief, trauma, protest and civic responsibility through one of the most turbulent periods in the country’s history.

Professor Nathaniel Laor, an Israeli psychiatrist and one of the country’s leading experts on collective trauma and community resilience, offered an image shortly after October 7 that has stayed with me.

Drawing on the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, he described a mother supporting the head of a baby as she feeds her. If that support suddenly gives way, what is shattered is not only physical safety. Something more fundamental is broken: the experience of being held.

Laor believed many Israelis had already felt themselves falling during the turbulent months before October 7, as the judicial overhaul tore open deep divisions in Israeli society and uncertainty grew about the country’s democratic future.

Then came October 7.

‘It’s as if we finally hit the ground,’ he said.

October 7 shattered some of the most basic assumptions on which a sense of security rests: that the border will hold, that the army will come, that the state will protect its citizens.

And the trauma did not end.

October 7 was followed by prolonged war, bereavement, displacement, repeated reserve duty, hostages and continuing threats on multiple fronts. The conditions that ordinarily allow recovery from trauma – safety, predictability, trust and some sense of control, repeatedly failed to return. For much of the past three years, the ‘post’ in post-traumatic never arrived.

The hostage crisis deepened this rupture. For many Israelis it became not only a continuing trauma, but a crisis of trust. Was the state doing everything it reasonably could to bring home people taken when it had failed to protect them in the first place?

The hostage crisis reached deep into the Jewish culture. Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh – all Jews are responsible for one another. Pidyon shvuyim, the redemption of captives – is one of the most important obligations in Jewish tradition. And it reached into the Israeli ethos. We don’t leave anyone behind. Yossi Klein Halevi described the abandonment of the hostages as threatening the fundamental covenant of trust between Israeli citizens and their state.

When people are harmed by an external enemy, the experience can be terrifying. But when the institution expected to protect them is also experienced as having failed, and then fails to repair that rupture, another dimension is added to the trauma. This is often called institutional betrayal.

And yet, in the vacuum created by that failure, something extraordinary happened.

One of the most powerful things we witnessed while making RISING was the mobilisation of Israeli civil society. In the days after October 7, many of the networks that had spent the preceding nine months protesting against the government transformed themselves, almost overnight, into emergency organisations, evacuating families, locating missing people, feeding displaced communities, supporting soldiers and hostage families, and providing psychological and practical care.

The same citizens who had been demonstrating because they believed their government was threatening the country’s democratic foundations suddenly found themselves performing functions the state itself was expected to provide.

Laor describes this as an expression of Israel’s ‘embracing spirit’: ordinary people, often carrying profound grief and trauma themselves, choosing not to retreat, but to take responsibility for one another and for the society they wanted Israel to be.

But civil society cannot permanently substitute for the state.

A society struggling to understand catastrophe needs a credible process through which reality can be established, responsibility acknowledged and lessons learned. An independent state commission of inquiry cannot bring back the dead or undo October 7. But establishing what happened, where the failures occurred and what must change can be part of rebuilding trust.

Nearly three years later, the current government has refused to establish an independent state commission of inquiry into the failures of October 7.

So what does a wounded society need in order to recover?

It needs to be held by leadership that provides the conditions in which healing becomes possible.

It needs security. No society can recover while its citizens remain undefended. But long-term security cannot mean living indefinitely from one war to another. Leadership must also be capable of creating the political and diplomatic conditions for a more secure future.

It needs truth and responsibility. Acknowledging failure does not weaken leadership. After catastrophe, it can be essential to rebuilding trust and restoring a sense that institutions are once again accountable to the people they serve.

It needs care. Not sentimentality, but the capacity to see suffering, to look bereaved and hostage families in the eye, and to demonstrate through action that their pain matters.

It needs connection. Trauma can drive people apart, intensifying fear and suspicion and narrowing the boundaries of who belongs. A leader of a wounded society needs to do the opposite: bring people together, rebuild a sense of shared belonging and strengthen the mutual responsibility that Israeli civil society demonstrated so powerfully after October 7.

And it needs a future.

Trauma naturally narrows our attention towards danger, survival and threat. But a society cannot remain indefinitely organised around catastrophe. At some point, leadership must help people imagine what comes after: a future in which Israel is not only secure, but remains true to the democratic and moral values set out in its founding Declaration of Independence.

As Israelis choose who will lead them after these devastating years, perhaps the question is not only who can keep Israel safe.

It is who can help Israel heal.

Who can tell the truth about what happened and accept responsibility? Who can rebuild trust and bring a divided society back into relationship with itself rather than deepen its fractures? Who can help Israelis feel that their country is capable of holding them again?

Ayelet Wider-Cohen, the trauma psychologist in RISING, says something in the film that has stayed with me:

‘Because trauma breaks everything apart, there’s an opportunity to rebuild.’

That is the possibility contained within this moment.

The question facing Israel is whether its next leadership can create the conditions for that rebuilding: safety, truth, responsibility, care, connection and a credible future.

A wounded society does not need leaders who deepen its fear or divisions. It needs leaders who can help transform pain into responsibility, rebuild trust, and make space for something new to emerge.

Watch RISING – Voices of Protest and Hope

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