The book in English can be purchased here.
This book is an invitation to an anthropological journey to the politics developed around the professional therapy of PTSD (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder) in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Through four years' fieldwork (2004-2008) at two nongovernmental organizations — NATAL ("Israeli Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War") and the ITC ("Israel Trauma Coalition") — the chapters of the book examines how clinical questions of diagnosis, treatment and prevention of the disorder intersect with collective markers of group identity and with political questions of ethno-national power-relations within the framework of the Israeli nation-state. How Israeli experts and their donors (most of them from Jewish-American federations) negotiating mental suffering against one bio-medical category, PTSD, but in relation to different military and political situations, from the uprising of the Second Intifada (October 2000), to the "Disengagement Plan" (August 2005) until the Second Lebanon War (July 2006)? Which symbolic struggles do therapists engage in over the meaning of trauma and its social boundaries within this highly politicized context? What practical agreements have been reached regarding aid interventions and the allocation of resources within deep religious, ethnic and demographic stratification, from Jewish-Israeli citizens who exposed to Palestinian terror attacks in the center of the country, many of them first and second generations of immigrants from East-Europe ('Ashkenazim') to the ongoing threat of rocket fire against Jewish-Israeli citizens who lived in the South of the country, many of them first and second generations of immigrants from North-Africa ('Mizrachim') and later from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia?
"This book is indeed a heartening example of critical ethnography at its best – an ethnography that recognizes and carefully traces the discursive construction of cultural categories in social interactions and seminal texts, is attentive to the multiple voices and cultural strands found in the particular social field it investigates, is open to both the official tonalities of formal organizations and the intimate tones of distressed individuals, and holds a promise for a better understanding of the society it studies by addressing fundamental cultural categories of personhood and sociality. It will be of great interest to anyone interested in Israel Studies, in the anthropology of trauma and resilience, and in the cross-cultural exploration of globalizing processes....
The book concludes with a chapter that brings together the various strands of analysis presented throughout and discusses the network of social actors and practices that have shaped the emergence of a culture of trauma in the Israeli context. Most significantly, it argues that - contrary to other anthropological studies of the localization of global trauma discourses - in the Israeli case power relations and lines of division are not demarcated along national trajectories but along demographically marked internal lines of division within Israeli society itself - religious, ethnic and class-based. Illuminating as this finding is, the author also acknowledges in passing (p. 17) that trauma discourses have been applied to the Palestinian responses to the conflict as well. The acknowledgment of Palestinian psychological distress is largely absent from Israeli trauma discourses concerned with the conflict, and is at times actively suppressed in the Israeli public discourse This suggests that national lines, too, play a role in delineating the outer scope of Israeli trauma discourse." - Quest - Issues in contemporary Jewish history, by Tamar Katriel, October 2016
"Keren Friedman-Peleg’s ethnographic study is an incisive contribution to our understanding of how regional and national history, local institutional cultures, and the expectations of a diverse and divided population shape the clinical phenomenology of PTSD and an unending collective trauma." - Allan Young, Professor, Departments of Social Studies of Medicine, Anthropology, and Psychiatry, McGill University
"PTSD and the Politics of Trauma in Israel is an important contribution to the anthropological literature on PTSD." - Joshua Breslau, Medical Anthropologist and Psychiatric Epidemiologist, Rand Corporation
Mifgash, by: Muli Lahad, December 2014
Galileo magazene, June 2015
Ha'aretz, July 2014
Be'machane, by Keren Friedman-Peleg, June 2014
"The hottest place in hell", by: Keren Friedman-Peleg, May 2014