Survivors of the Hamas massacre are suffering from trauma — meet the therapist helping them work through it
Therapist Lisa Fliegel’s experiences with the Boston Marathon bombing and inner-city homicide prepared her for Israel
When Lisa Fliegel arrived in Israel, her immediate focus was on the residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz, about 2 miles from the Gaza Strip. Courtesy of Lisa Fliegel
Three hours after news of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack broke, Lisa Fliegel bought a plane ticket.
The Boston-based trauma therapist has spent more than 30 years working with Israelis and Palestinians, as well as survivors of the Boston Marathon bombing and relatives of inner-city homicide victims. So, when friends in the Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair asked her to come to Eilat to be with evacuees from kibbutzim and small towns in what is referred to as the Gaza Envelope, she didn’t think twice.
“My whole philosophy is that therapists need to be in the trenches,” Fliegel told me. “People need to know that you are in their world and seeing what they see and they experience.”
Fliegel has dual citizenship, having served in the Israel Defense Force and lived on a kibbutz for 20 years. In the days before she left for Israel she collected donations from friends to buy items requested by Brothers and Sisters in Arms, an association of active reservists and military veterans who oppose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul.
Fliegel filled six suitcases with tactical gloves, goggles, USB chargers, winter underwear and other items. She purchased the tactical gloves at an Army Navy store in Salem, New Hampshire, where she was housesitting at the time.
The people in the store said, “God bless you for what you’re doing,” Fliegel recalled. “It was this bizarre meeting of my identities: my Israeli me and [the part of me that realized] these are the people who probably supplied the Jan. 6 rioters. And now we’re friends and allies.”
Getting to work
As soon as she landed, Fliegel brought the suitcases and their contents to the donation center at Tel Aviv Expo. Then she went off to a vigil for the Israeli hostages.
When Fliegel arrived in Eilat Oct. 22, her focus was on the residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz, which is about 2 miles from the Gaza Strip. 400 people lived on the kibbutz before Oct. 7 but more than 100 of them have been taken hostage, were murdered or are missing. The survivors have taken up residence in the Red Sea Hotel.
One of Fliegel’s tasks was to provide clinical supervision for other caregivers in Eilat, which usually has around 60,000 residents but, with the arrival of tens of thousands of Israelis who fled the war zone and are being housed in tourist hotels, its population has essentially doubled.
“I consider the whole city of Eilat a clinical milieu,” Fliegel told me in an interview via WhatsApp.
Fliegel often begins her therapeutic interaction by bringing the traumatized Israelis a cup of water from her perch in the lobby where many sit and follow news of the war in Gaza on their phones.
“One of the main things I do here is sit in the lobby and see if somebody’s getting upset,” she told me. “I just bring them a cup of water and they get to know me and the next day I bring them a cup of water and they say, ‘Can I talk to you?’”
Sometimes, people have told her that therapy can’t help, that there’s no way a therapist could comprehend what happened to them.
“And then they proceed to talk to me for another two hours until I have to end the conversation because I have to go pee,” she said.
A sense the world will never be safe
According to Fliegel, the challenge for a trauma therapist in this situation is that the cause of the trauma is ongoing. It’s not a situation in which something horrific happened and then it’s over. The pain is exacerbated by developments that have thwarted Judaism’s basic framework for grieving.
“You can’t sit shiva in your own house because Hamas burned it down. Or it’s covered in blood,” she explained. “They can’t bury their dead at the cemetery on their own kibbutz because their kibbutz is a closed military zone.”
In the Red Sea Hotel where the Nir Oz Kibbutz residents have been living, a conference room was reserved for sitting shiva. The times for reciting Kaddish were posted outside the room.
Last week, a forensic lab in Tel Aviv identified two bodies as being members of the kibbutz. That same week a hostage video released by Hamas showed a 13-year-old boy from Nir Oz whose grandparents were murdered during the invasion. His sister, parents and junior high school classmates are living at the Red Sea Hotel.
On her way to speak to a youth counselor who wanted to know how to deal with the classmates of the teenage hostage who had seen the video, Fliegel was delayed by an incoming missile alert. She took refuge in a safe room at the closest hotel she could find, where a wedding was underway in the safe room. Fliegel started singing the traditional Jewish wedding song. It was a moment of joy that didn’t last long. She then had to console someone whose colleague had died by suicide, a tragic reminder that, for many Israelis in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks, trauma can bring on a sense of hopelessness, that the world will never be safe again.
Reflecting on the mindset of the displaced residents of Nir Oz and the other communities targeted by Hamas, Fliegel said, “In Israel, you know that at the end of the day, the army will always be there. But the army didn’t show up. Some of these people were in their sealed rooms for 10 hours. They spent hours holding on to the door as Hamas was trying to break in. And parents weren’t able to protect their children. Mothers weren’t able to protect fathers from being kidnapped.”
‘She’s about taking action’
Fliegel moved from her home in Newton, Massachusetts, to Israel in 1977 at the age of 17 and spent 20 years living at Kibbutz Ketura in the Arava desert in southern Israel. She earned an undergraduate degree in Hebrew literature at the Tel Aviv Teacher’s Seminary and has been a peace activist and defender of Palestinian rights for many years.
The day before she went to Eilat, she joined members of a group called Looking the Occupation in the Eye on a visit to Bedouin encampments in the Jordan Valley she said had been attacked by Jewish settlers after the war with Hamas broke out. The Israelis fed pets abandoned by the Bedouins and documented the vandalization of a Bedouin school.
In years prior, she worked with Palestinian human rights activist Hasan Barghouti and an Israeli labor rights group called The Worker’s Hotline. Together, they helped Palestinian workers sue Israeli employers that allegedly cheated the Palestinians out of their wages, traveling to the West Bank to gather signatures on legal papers and returning to distribute money won in the litigation. She also brought a group of 10 Irish Protestants who were involved in paramilitary clashes with Irish Catholics during the Troubles in Northern Ireland on a tour of Israel and the Palestinian territories.
A chapter in Fliegel’s forthcoming memoir, Bulletproof Therapist, recounts a tension-filled encounter with an Israeli soldier as she accompanied a couple of Palestinian journalists on a visit to a West Bank settlement.
“She’s always worked for both sides,” said Laura Mernoff, a longtime friend in Providence, Rhode Island, who set up a GoFundMe page to support Fliegel’s work in Eilat. The web page states that, “This fundraiser should not be misconstrued as support for Israel’s government or army.”
Another friend, the author Hank Rosenfeld of Santa Monica, has been helping Fliegel write blog posts from Eilat for The Times of Israel.
“I’ve never met anyone like her,” said Rosenfeld, who traveled with Fliegel in the West Bank during a 2019 visit. “She completely goes by her own rules to get stuff done. She doesn’t like to have a million meetings about what to do. She’s about taking action.”
A boatload of trauma
On her blog, Fliegel has been writing about her encounters with traumatized Israelis. A woman whose brother was killed, and whose brother-in-law was taken hostage, wanted to take her kids to her family, but her husband wanted to stay in Eilat with the families of hostages there. A boy had come from a house where the possessions were taken by the Hamas fighters. His father held the door to the safe room closed for as long as he could but the Palestinians shot through the door and wounded the father and the family dog. To escape the smoke that was filling the safe room, the boy and two siblings jumped out a window.
“The stories are so difficult that you need an army of therapists,” said David Senesh, a psychotherapist based in Tel Aviv who has been supervising Fliegel since she got to Eilat. “We all need supervision,” he said. “We give supervision, we get supervision. A long chain of helping and being helped.”
Senesh, 69, is the nephew of the Hungarian Jewish poet and soldier Hannah Senesh, who was executed in 1944. He refers to Israel as a post-traumatic society at large.
“If you want to go back to the Holocaust, that could be a starting point, but you can go back in history,” he said. “It’s trauma upon trauma.”
Senesh himself was a prisoner during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. At the age of 19, he was captured near the Suez Canal with 300 other Israeli soldiers and spent 40 days as a prisoner of war.
Fliegel said she has her own “boatload of trauma.” She lost her mother when she was 12. Her sister Dena, a social worker and union activist, succumbed to leukemia in 1989.
The two sisters were clearly influenced by their parents’ career paths. Fliegel’s mother was a social worker who had a major impact on welfare reform in Massachusetts. Her father, she said, was the first social worker in the U.S. to work with people uprooted by urban renewal projects.
Fliegel is now at Ketura, 100 yards from the border with Jordan. It has 300 members but after Oct. 7 350 evacuees came. There are now 250 evacuees at the kibbutz, Fliegel said.
When she returns to Boston later this month, she says she will continue her supervision of the social workers and psychologists working with survivors of the Hamas massacres.
Asked when she will return to Israel, she said she expects the war with Hamas will be over in six months and that she’ll come back then to do an evaluation of the efforts in Eilat. But then she added, “If I get home and find that I’m going out of mind, maybe I’ll come back in two weeks. We’ll see.”
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