Tal Hartuv gives an unforgettable TED Talk, one of those mini lectures presented live to audiences and circulated widely online.
It’s primarily memories of a day in 2010 when she went hiking with a friend near Jerusalem.
The smell of the pines, the canopy of autumn skies—and what it felt like to stand bound, gagged, and barefoot for half an hour as two Palestinian men held machetes to their throats.
Ms. Hartuv renders the fine detail in poetic language: when one of the men pushed her onto her knees and her head toward the ground, she thought she was about to be beheaded.
The glint of the sun off the machete. The feel of repeated stab wounds with the machete. “He’s doing it with such force that I can feel my bones crunch. And as he tugs out that serrated blade, I can feel my flesh rip.”
Her reliving the experience by talking about it is part of her ongoing therapy.
She’s in an excellent country to seek such treatment: many Israelis, in a country beset by war and terrorism for its entire 75-year existence, suffer from PTSD, and psychotherapists often specialize in it.
Anna Levy of Ashkelon expects an upsurge in her business, with so many touched by the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks that killed 1,400 Israelis, wounded many more, and left countless others traumatized.
Most Israelis must serve in the military. Some of the thousands of Israeli soldiers, including reserves called up for the Israel-Hamas War, will be mentally scarred. Some already are.
Ms. Levy has worked with the Ministry of Defense, treating people and families suffering from PTSD.
“The army is constantly, constantly active. There’s a big service needed here,” said Ms. Levy, whose neighborhood was rocketed on Oct. 7. She’s unable to live in her damaged house.
“But also, it’s the fact that communities near Kfar Aza have been subjected to terrorist attacks constantly.”
She referred to one of the kibbutzes near Gaza targeted by Hamas.
“Together with the major wars, it does lead to accumulated trauma. Parents become traumatized. And they are not able to deal with the trauma in their kids. We’ve seen two generations.
“I’ve been here long enough to see two generations of traumatized people, parents, and their children.”
The children experience their own shocks as they survive rocket or terrorist attacks or other mayhem, she said.
In some cases, the parents, themselves afflicted, can’t handle their own lives as they struggle with fear and anxiety, compounding the children’s issues.
“I’ve treated hundreds of patients [with it],” she said.
Ms. Levy added that not all of those came about through security-related situations. She’s experienced in treating stress disorders stemming from sexual abuse but focuses now on PTSD related to security situations and terrorist attacks.
Among soldiers, she sees PTSD more among veterans than the younger draftees doing their compulsory service. It can represent an accumulation of stress built up over years, she said.
In some people, symptoms emerge quickly, she said. Others “live as if in normal life and then later on for different reasons, they cannot hold the fence any longer. And delayed symptoms of PTSD emerge very quickly.”
“The longer you repress the symptoms and try to carry on as usual, often the worse the consequences are,” she said.
“I am treating people like this currently. Forty-five-year-olds. I have one guy, very severe PTSD, and now he’s been called up again for active service. I don’t know how he’s going to manage it. I’m really worried about [that]. But he has gone.”
Vicarious Traumatization
Another therapist, Karen Shachar Fernandez Amar, of Moshav Brehya near Ashkelon, said Israel’s new cases of PTSD will take a while to unfold and reveal themselves.“What we usually say is, we have the PTSD and right now we’re not even in the ”P“ stage of this one,” Ms. Shachar said.
“We’re in the TS, traumatic stress right now. And it will take a while till we’re post-traumatic, while the war is still going on.
“But the D—as a therapist, you need a certain amount of time to pass for you to continue to be in the stress disorder.”
“Because it happens to the whole community, we get comfort from one another and we pull one another out of it. Unless of course like my friend whose house was just bombed, then she’s more traumatic than I am. Because glass fell all over her.”
“I’m traumatizing you by it,” she told The Epoch Times reporter.
“This is called vicarious traumatization. Each time we look at social media and see those poor hostages and babies put in cages in Gaza, being paraded around—it causes vicarious traumatization.
“To hear the stories that these parents are telling of their children crawling from the [Kibbutz Re'im rave] party as they’re being shot.
“This is traumatizing, to hear the stories again and again. And everybody’s got another story.
“There were lots of people. I don’t even know the details of my former client who was murdered in their home, and I can’t stop thinking about this poor woman ending her life right now.
“So that’s traumatizing. But it’s vicarious traumatization because it didn’t happen to me. But because I’m around all these bombs and sirens, it adds to my traumatic stress as I imagine what’s going on.”
Ms. Shachar said she has worked in a trauma unit on the Gaza border.
“I tell my clients, do not expose yourself to too much social media. And if you can read about it instead of watching it, it’s much better for you.
“Because you don’t need to be exposed to the picture that I saw two days ago that I can’t get out of my mind, of a Palestinian Gaza guy taking a man and taking a hatchet and cutting off his head.”
She acknowledged she’s living it like her patients, and indeed most Israelis are.
“I already had four people I know died since Saturday. That’s like, died, murdered, killed.
Her Only Chance ‘Playing Dead’
Ms. Hartuv testified in court against the two attackers. One is now serving a 120-year prison term, the other 55 years. She worries what will happen if either goes free in a hostage exchange.An English immigrant to Israel who worked as a nature guide, she was hiking with an American friend, Kristine Luken, in Beit Shemesh, west of Jerusalem, when the two were attacked by the two machete-armed Palestinians.
After the man began stabbing her on the ground, Ms. Hartuv says in the talk she knew her only chance was to play dead. She knew some people died with their eyes open, so she kept hers open.
Lying on her side, she had to watch her friend “hacked to death in front of my eyes.”
When her assailant turns her over, “Now I’m looking at those blue skies in the setting sun which is obscured by a silhouette of a man’s hand clutching a knife. And I watched him plunge it into my chest and I didn’t move, flinch, or blink and it missed my heart by four millimeters.”
Believing her dead, they left.
“At that point, I didn’t know if I was dead or alive or in heaven or in hell. I knew I wasn’t in hell because I couldn’t hear any country music,” she said in the talk posted online eight years ago.
‘I Could Hear the Wind Rustle’
Ms. Hartuv stumbled away, her hands still bound with shoelaces, thorns piercing her bare feet, determined to die where her body might be found.She was still gagged and trying not to choke on the vomit caught inside. She listens to the sounds of nature, knowing she might never hear them again.
“I hear twigs snap under my feet, birds twittering, crickets chirping, flies buzzing, bees humming, and I hear the wind rustle through the trees,” she said in the TED Talk.
Miraculously, she found help instead of death. She walked over a mile with six broken ribs, some poking out of her back.
She had 30 more fractures in her rib cage, some bones splintering and puncturing her lungs.
She had a crushed sternum, broken shoulder blade, dislocated shoulder, and 13 machete wounds in her lungs and diaphragm.
Weeks after the attack, when she had recovered enough to leave the hospital, she heard herself mentioned on the taxicab’s radio on her way home.
The police commissioner praised her for her presence of mind and courage: she'd stabbed her assailant with a small penknife.
“The blood on her knife helped us catch the murderers,” she remembers the commissioner saying on the radio, “and also an extensive terror cell.”
She Chose Life
Ms. Hartuv credits therapy with helping her resume a more normal life.She also told The Epoch Times on Oct. 13 that an experimental treatment, the stellate ganglion block, has helped her more over the past few months.
The therapy involves injecting a local anesthetic into nerves at the base of the neck.
A study published in 2020 in the Journal of the American Medical Association–Psychiatry said the treatment was promising enough to warrant further investigation.
Ms. Hartuv realized she had to make a choice, she said. She could be forever defined and surrounded by the horror of that day in 2010. Or she could choose life to regain the ability to enjoy it.
She made good progress, she said. Among her choices was to drop her English name, which she requested The Epoch Times not publish, and take an Israeli one. Many Israeli immigrants do that, but for her, it also helped distance her from the immediacy of the attack.
Another choice was not to allow herself, as a survivor of Arab terrorism, to become overwhelmed by hate.
In her TED Talk, she recalls hearing the voice of the doctor treating her at the hospital, hearing someone call him “Mohammed,” and realizing he was an Israeli Arab.
She recalls the outpouring of people of every background—Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Christians—who came to her trial to show their support for her.
Since then, she said, she’s taken into her house, at some risk to herself, an Arab teenager getting death threats from his own community.
She’s gone to Egypt “to hang out with a wonderful Muslim friend.” She’s helped a Palestinian friend kick-start his business.
All of this is better, she said, than wallowing in permanent victimhood.
She’s still understandably cautious for herself and those she knows, requesting The Epoch Times withhold not only her former name but where she lives and where she came from in the UK.
She now works as a guide at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.
“Life is step by step, living in the moments,” she says in her TED talk. “It’s engaging in senseless and random acts of kindness. Life is calling somebody up just to hear their voice. It’s rushing outside when it starts to rain. It’s scraping the mud from my boots. Life is the sound of a cork popping out of a 2010 Golan Heights bottle of cabernet sauvignon.
“Life is making somebody giggle. Life is accepting the past.”
The new conflict awakens her anxiety, she said.
Asked if it was triggering flashbacks, she said, “It’s causing me to flash forward. Meaning, I’m not thinking I’m back in the forest, the place where life stops. It’s causing me [to] flash forward, that I have the same anxiety that the same thing is going to happen again, but in a different context.
“Well, it is happening again, isn’t it?”
