The Weight Israel Carries

By Seth Mandel

Friday, January 03, 2025

 

This is Israel’s longest war. That fact is easy to forget because the current U.S. president officially—and disastrously—ended America’s longest war, which was nearly 20 years. U.S. participation in World War I and World War II, as well as the Korean, Vietnam, and second Iraq wars, all surpassed Israel’s current war.

 

In terms of the war’s duration, only Israel’s War of Independence is close. The symbolism there is obvious.

 

And so is the toll this is all taking on the Jewish state. The IDF has now published some sobering statistics, and the rise in suicides is the one that jumps right off the page. From the Times of Israel:

 

“According to data published by the IDF, 28 soldiers are believed to have died by suicide since the Hamas terror group attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, starting the ongoing multi-front war. Another 10 suspected suicides took place in 2023 before the October onslaught…

 

“The suicide numbers represent a sharp uptick from previous years. In 2022, the IDF recorded 14 suspected suicides, and in 2021 the number was 11.

 

“Overall, the number of deaths in the IDF in 2023-2024 were the highest in decades due to war.”

 

Combat deaths went down in 2024 from the previous year, but suicides increased. Of the 21 soldiers who are believed to have died of suicide in 2024, more than half—12—were reservists. Also according to the report, thousands of reservists stopped serving in combat roles due to mental stress, though it offers no “further data or details.”

 

Israel called up about 300,000 reservists in the current war, so it’s unclear whether this is an anomalous emerging trend or merely what happens when you have that many more men (and all the suicides are men) serving. But that’s really the point: Israel is a small state with full conscription, so prolonged periods of total war are deeply draining on entire families, who are carrying all sorts of added burdens.

 

Israelis aren’t blind to the mental-health challenge posed not just by the war but by what started it: scenes of inhumanity reminiscent of the Nazis. In September, Israel’s health minister, Uriel Buso, warned that Israel was facing “the largest mental health event the state has known since its establishment. A crisis that requires us, as a state and a society, to change perceptions and upgrade the public mental health system.”

 

The following month, Buso introduced legislation designed to decentralize mental-health treatment. Though it went mostly unnoticed at the time (even in the Israeli press), Buso had hit on something important: Just as is the case with physical ailments, you don’t want the last resort to be the first intervention. The goal of primary-care medicine is to keep you out of hospitals and emergency rooms. That prevention can be even more difficult in the chaos of wartime and regarding mental health, the deterioration of which is not always noticeable to others.

 

Buso also sought to take advantage of Israel’s close-knit society. He got a boost to his department’s budget, and instead of keeping it all under his nose at the national level, he disbursed it throughout local community healthcare providers. Psychiatric institutions would merge with major hospitals to make treatment easier and, the Health Ministry’s director general seemed to suggest, reduce the stigma of seeking help.

 

All of which is yet another reminder that Oct. 7, 2023, caused a seismic change in Israel and the Jewish world. In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks, Israel’s HMOs “reported record levels of requests by patients for sleeping pills, painkillers, and tranquilizers,” Tablet’s Hillel Kuttler reported. According to the IDF, of the 17 soldier suicides in 2023, seven of them—40 percent—happened in just the final three months of the year after the attacks.

 

Meanwhile Hamas continues to torment the country over the remaining hostages by refusing to let the parents of these captives even know whether their children are still alive. Missiles from as far away as Yemen continue to fall on Tel Aviv. Homes in the north have spent a year empty, as have communities in the Gaza envelope.

 

Israel continues to be the only Western country that truly acts like it has a stake in how this now-global conflict ends. A country of barely 10 million has been putting the rest on its shoulders. Yet still, Israelis somehow seem immune to the paralysis that most would inevitably succumb to. The CEO of Israel’s largest mental-health organization told the Times of Israel that she doesn’t want people to merely say “the country is in trauma. That doesn’t help us. It’s vital that we look at what we can do, how we can be proactive.”

 

Here’s hoping Israelis have less of a burden to carry in 2025, or, at the very least, that they get some help carrying it.