A 21-year-old asked a group of teenagers to stop spraying party foam inside the pizzeria where he worked. They waited outside until his shift ended, then stabbed him to death.
Yemanu Binyamin Zelka had recently finished his army service. His killers are between 13 and 17 years old.
The same week brought a fatal stabbing in Beersheba, two more in Netanya, and a shooting near Daliat al-Carmel. This morning brought news of a father and his young child found dead in their home, in what police suspect was a murder-suicide.
It is tempting to read each of these as an isolated tragedy or as the yield of failed policing. Each holds some truth. There is a third reading that researchers in this country have been quietly assembling for two and a half years.
PTSD in Israel
Since October 7, 2023, roughly three million Israeli adults have experienced symptoms of anxiety, depression, or post-traumatic stress, according to the State Comptroller.
Nearly 40% of Israeli civilians fall within the clinical range for probable PTSD. The mental health system, the Comptroller wrote, “collapsed in the first days of the war.” Less than one percent of the population has received treatment.
In our research at the Hebrew University, we found that within 30 days of October 7, parents of autistic children reported levels of depression, anxiety, and stress two to four times higher than parents of similar children measured before the war.
In a complementary study several months later, parental post-traumatic stress and anxiety significantly predicted their children’s post-traumatic stress.
Other Israeli research groups have found similar patterns. In a recent study of children referred for treatment after October 7, more than two-thirds of preschoolers and roughly half of school-age children met criteria for probable PTSD, with maternal symptoms a primary pathway.
Pediatric PTSD diagnoses in Israeli HMO data have risen by more than 300%. The strain did not stay with the adult; it transmitted.
The transmission of PTSD
This is what regulatory systems do under chronic load: they transmit. A father reads the bedtime story, but the reading is automatic. He is listening for the phone, hoping for a message from his oldest son in Lebanon. The seven-year-old at his side falls asleep, and the father notices late.
In the morning at school, another child bumps into the seven-year-old in the recess yard and his eyes fill with tears before he quite knows why.
The teacher on yard duty, who spent the previous night at the one-year memorial service for her neighbor’s son, is still inside that night, and the moment passes her by.
By evening, the father is reading the next chapter of the same bedtime book, his phone again at his side.
This is one loop. There are millions of them, running in parallel – interacting, every day, for two and a half years. None of these adults is broken. Each is emotionally depleted.
And this is not only their problem. One thread is thinned. And then the next. This is how a society’s mental health frays, and we arrive at a week like this one.
Children and adolescents are regulated by the adults and structures around them. When those adults and structures are themselves dysregulated, we cannot ask the children to hold themselves together.
The path to catastrophe
The teenagers outside the pizzeria did not commit murder because the country is at war. They committed murder for whatever individual reasons will eventually emerge.
But the social fabric that ordinarily catches escalation before it becomes a catastrophe, the adult who notices, the structure that intervenes, the margin of attention that asks what is going on with these kids, has been thinning everywhere at once.
Sometimes the adults are the ones who run out.
This is not a claim about any individual perpetrator or any individual family. We do not know what brought any of these people to the moments they reached this week, and accountability – where it applies – belongs where it belongs.
But the question of how a society arrives at a week like this one is a different question, and one we are obligated to ask.
After two and a half years of studying Israeli families through this war, what I keep coming back to is something smaller and harder than policy.
Open your eyes.
The friend who has stopped answering. The child who has gotten quieter. The parent in your child’s class who used to say hello.
Mental health support from the system is not coming. We cannot wait. We are the system we have.
The writer is on faculty at the Seymour Fox School of Education, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he directs the Autism Child and Family Lab and co-chairs the graduate program in clinical child and educational psychology. He is also director of the Jerusalem region of the Azrieli National Centre for Autism and Neurodevelopment Research.
Source:
www.jpost.com
