Layers of trauma inflicting moral views 
The complicated situation of being both a victim and an occupier 

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There comes a time in life when one becomes quite sure and comfortable in one's opinions and view of the world. Right and wrong; what does justice mean; where and when would one compromise one's principles; what is true (not absolute truth, God forbid) and false. 
I thought I was in that place. My political views where quite solid, derived from Jewish history and naturally from my education and life experiences. Basically I thought we should not do to others what was done to us for so many years. I thought we cannot be racists, as a people, almost by definition. 
My father's family originated in Poland and immigrated to Israel, then Palestine, in the early 1920s. My mother's family emigrated from the Netherlands in 1939, more or less at the last minute. My grandfather said that Hitler would invade Holland and they should leave. Unfortunately he couldn't persuade some members of the family who chose to stay a bit longer since they couldn't imagine living in this god-forsaken country in the Middle East. I remember the stories about the letters that arrived from occupied Holland and from the concentration camp (Bergen-Belsen), and my mother, as a child, losing one letter by accident. And then the letters stopped, she said. I read a lot about the Holocaust and the Second World War. I read diaries, where I could relate to the growing fear when living in occupied territories, I read history books, a diary of a Nazi. I read about the resistance and about resistance in other dictatorial regimes. 
Slowly, political awareness began to emerge regarding the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and (then) Gaza, and the realisation dawned that oppression and crimes are committed in my name. I felt I could no longer merely grumble with my friends about the situation and do nothing.   One Saturday we visited friends living thirty minutes from Jerusalem (on the Israeli side of the Green Line). We crossed a checkpoint on the way back. There was this young soldier directing Israeli vehicles to the left, Palestinians to the right (to be checked). I thought: What if his grandmother once faced such a selection? How can history play such tricks on us? I must emphasise that I believe there is no comparison between then and now, that there is a huge difference between the Holocaust and what we are committing in the Occupied Territories, but I belong to those who believe that we should compare, and that we should self-reflect and check ourselves time and again. I suppose we should remain vigilant even to semantic resemblances. I joined the women's organisation MachsomWatch (checkpoint watch) - a volunteer-based organisation that reaches all areas within the Occupied Territories, including military checkpoints, Palestinian villages, persecuted shepherd communities, and military courts, where we document and disseminate information to combat the silence and indifference of the media and public towards the realities of occupation. 
I kept acting against injustice towards Palestinians. I regularly attended demonstrations against the occupation and travelled to Palestinian villages to assist with the olive harvest, etc.
Then the 7th of October happened. Our world turned upside down. In the blink of an eye my home didn't feel safe anymore. My country was in total chaos. The civilian protest organisations took the lead by establishing an information centre about casualties, whom the authorities had no information about, centres to gather information about where and which supplies are needed, who needs alternative housing, and so on. The authorities went numb. The realisation that people were murdered, raped, burned alive, beheaded, tortured, and kidnapped on Israeli territory and regardless of their age, identity, or nationality, was incomprehensible and appalling. Many of my beliefs shattered into pieces.
During the first week I couldn't tear myself away from the television, watching the news with dismay and shock. It was hard to fall asleep, hard to eat. I didn't watch the horrific videos from the seventh of October. But images that were censored and that we were spared from seeing joined the ones that we were not, and the ones we did not see we imagined. I believe that it is within the space between the imagined and the concrete that art is being created at this time. At the end of this week my son wrote in the family WhatsApp group that he received a draft order and he has to report the next day. Worry, fear and the sense of utter helplessness overwhelmed me. I went to the studio. 
All of a sudden everything that I have done prior to the 7th seemed irrelevant. On a sheet of paper, I started smearing black acrylic paint with a piece of cardboard (usually I use oil colours on canvas). Acrylic is a medium that is immediate, quick to dry, therefore the painting can be finished in one go. It is a rather simple, not sophisticated medium. It doesn't encompass years of cultural heritage. It felt right. It felt like writing a diary rather than an artistic self-absorption. I painted portraits from images I saw in the news: faces of concerned parents in a hastily established centre for locating missing persons, faces of heartbroken people receiving devastating news, desperate people. The portraits conveyed my emotions very accurately, so I "borrowed" them, trying to figure out how to understand the new reality, what do I feel beside horror amid the feasibility of our greatest fears coming true. I thought I can identify a trauma that is beyond the individual trauma but a national one. We all carry it in our DNA - the trauma of the Holocaust that is deeply ingrained in our identity. It is a component of our literature, our collective memory, and rooted in our associative archive. As in any trauma, it needs a trigger to surface. This was a particularly harsh trigger, almost verbal one-on-one, causing the trauma to resurface immediately. We were all engulfed in our grief, overwhelmed by the dreadful sensation that we were living a nightmare. I found myself unable to cease painting black backgrounds. Eventually, I began to question whether I should continue, feeling as though abandoning the black would be a betrayal. 
I'm uncertain if anyone truly becomes accustomed to living in a state of constant fear and worry, but I found that over time, one grows somewhat used to such a life. I imagine that when faced with extreme and perpetual life-threatening fear, such as being held hostage in the Hamas tunnels, or living in Gaza, as well as in any place in the south of Israel, enduring relentless bombardment, or, for that matter, being a soldier in Gaza, one enters a state of survival against all odds. You cling to whatever can carry you through the next hour, the next day.  
Yet gradually anger permeates in the spaces between fear and despair, and slowly you come out of your shell and become aware of others. 
The death toll and the ghastly sights from Gaza became more and more overwhelming. However, despite my set of values and my rational self urging me to consider the Palestinians' suffering, my emotions towards them became a bit numb. I thought that this mass killing of civilians will not cure our pain or bring the hostages back. The images I unintentionally saw, and testimonies of hostages who came back, of the common people in the streets, men, women and children, beating up the wounded and cuffed hostages on the way, narrowed the empathy I thought I should feel for those of them who suffered the horrors of war.  Yet one day I saw a picture of a young Palestinian mother with her two daughters in what looked like a refugee camp. I knew her portrait is the next one I will paint. In the shadow of a tent behind her, I regained my empathy.
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The essay was published by the Jewish Museum of Vienna in the catalogue for the exhibition (English and German)
"The Third Generation. The Holocaust in Family Memory"