Photo by Gary Harwood, ’83

Rita Gochberg is an interior design student at Kent State and a former drill sergeant in the Israeli military.

 

OF HEART AND HOME
Zaki Hazou and Rita Gochberg both grew up in Israel, where dealing with terror and death is part of everyday life. Read Hazou's and Gochberg's discussions of life in a conflict zone.

COUNTER-TERRORISM PARTNERSHIP
Learn about Kent State's partnership with the Israel-based Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, which focusing on combatting terrorism.

PODCASTS: TERRORISM AND DAILY LIFE
In a four-part series, Stevan Hobfoll, Rita Gochberg and Zaki Hazou discuss life in regions where the threat of terrorism is part of everyday life.

When Home Becomes the Battlefield

Boisterous 25-year-old interior design student and former drill sergeant Rita Gochberg describes her home country with great affection.

The streets are full of life, day and night. In the morning, people rush to work, crowding onto the many buses that make up Israel’s efficient transportation system. In the evening, young people prepare to hit the streets in droves, whiling away the hours at cafes, bars, discos and restaurants.

Travel to Old Jerusalem and you will witness a scene reminiscent of the famed Marrakesh Market — the carpets, the aroma of the spices, the works of artisans. It is beautiful and it is small, and people are bustling about, yelling and buying. Or, stroll through Tel Aviv, otherwise known as Little America, with its beaches, palm trees and shopping malls.

“Everyone who visits Israel is shocked — they say ‘how are you not afraid, how are you not this, how are you not that?’” Gochberg says. “People think I ‘escaped’ to America. I did not escape —
I miss Israel like crazy.”

Zaki Hazou, ’06, shares the sentiment. Hazou, who grew up in East Jerusalem, an area annexed by Israel in 1967, left his family in 2001 to pursue his bachelor’s degree in criminal justice at Kent State. He now works in the security office for the Department of Residence Services.

“Israel is a small country with three religions and three different cultures,” Hazou says. “If you drive 10 minutes north from Jerusalem, you’ll be in a completely different culture. It can change within a minute.”

A country roughly the size of New Jersey, Israel and the Palestinian territories within and around its borders are home to more than five million Jews and nearly 1.5 million Arabs. Though conflict continues over the occupation of the Palestinian territories, the social, cultural and economic ties connecting Arabs and Israelis remain.

Gochberg and Hazou share a collective, complex experience as inhabitants of Israel — including the ongoing threat of terrorism.

Terrorism and PTSD

Dr. Stevan Hobfoll, Distinguished Professor of psychology and director of the Summa-Kent State Center for the Treatment and Study of Traumatic Stress, says there are psychological differences among populations facing ongoing terrorism, such as Israelis and Arabs, versus populations that experience isolated attacks.

“People [facing ongoing terrorism] have it in their minds that terrorism can strike any time,” he says. The atmosphere contributes to substantial increases in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“In Israel there are generally high levels of PTSD and depression because of the ongoing turmoil. But, if they’re epidemic in Israel, they’re pandemic in the Palestinian areas. Over a third of the Palestinian population has PTSD, and it gets worse every day. And rates of depression are very high,” Hobfoll says.

By comparison, in any given population at peace, rates of PTSD hold at around 1.5 percent.

Links between PTSD and health problems are well established, but can PTSD contribute directly to the cycle of violence in war torn areas such as Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories? Hobfoll says it can, and does — individuals in the aforementioned conflict zones who suffer with the disorder tend to hold retaliatory views and support counter violence.

Hobfoll and colleagues from the University of Haifa’s Center for National Security Studies are conducting the largest prospective examination to date of how people are impacted by ongoing terrorism. They expect that the results will have important implications for the mental health of civilians and soldiers around the world.

Studies completed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States have yielded results, but Hobfoll says these studies are not informative about the psychological impact of ongoingterrorism.

“Maybe it’s simple to say that lots of people get severe depression after an attack, but why doesn’t everyone? Why do most people recover in a matter of days, weeks or months, and what do those recovery trajectories look like? We need to learn more about these questions,” Hobfoll adds. “We also want to know how people adjust and what contributes to resiliency.”

Hobfoll’s study is one of the first to investigate terrorism’s impact based on a comprehensive theoretical model, as well as the first to include examination of “resource gain,” or the benefits of traumatic growth, as a consequence of ongoing terrorism.

The same personal resources threatened by terrorism — such as one’s sense of self-efficacy, safety of loved ones and economic resources — are the ones needed to resist the negative psychological impact of stress, he adds.

Imagine a series of concentric circles, with the inner circles being your most direct losses (death or injury of a loved one, injury to self, death of a family member or friend, loss of property or employment). The more direct a person’s loss, the more likely he or she is to experience long-lasting PTSD, depression or other health problems that result.

Photo courtesy of Zaki Hazou, ’06

Separation barriers, consisting of high concrete walls and barbed-wire fences, separate Israel and Palestinian territories.

“It turns out that PTSD really feeds on economic loss,” Hobfoll says. “We often call our work our livelihood, which is what sustains us, and if we lose that, it has great psychological impact.”

In the wake of events such as terrorist attacks, people often strive to make sense of the chaos that surrounds them. But contrary to what one might expect, resource gains (such as the increased intimacy people feel as they draw closer to friends and family in the wake of a difficult situation), actually have a negative impact, according to research findings.

“The negative impact of finding benefits in trauma is poorly understood, but may be related to the negative consequences of certain styles of coping that interfere with active coping,” Hobfoll says. Active coping strategies are either behavioral or psychological responses designed to change the nature of the stressor itself or how one thinks about it; avoidant coping strategies lead people into activities (such as alcohol use) or mental states (such as withdrawal) that keep them from directly addressing stressful events.

Through interviews with Arabs and Jews, researchers also are trying to determine the factors that increase an individual’s vulnerability to PTSD.

“We know people with less education are more vulnerable and those with less income are more vulnerable, but, for example, we find that the religious are more vulnerable,” Hobfoll says. “In other words, the more you look to God to give you answers for terrorism, the worse off you are, so that’s quite a paradoxical, counterintuitive finding.”

Life goes on

Don’t ask an Israeli to turn off his cell phone; he will refuse, Hobfoll says. In the aftermath of a terrorist attack, the minutes available to check on the safety of loved ones are few, as the phone lines quickly become overloaded and crash.

There’s a routine you go through following a terrorist attack, Gochberg says. “It’s like going through the motions — you hear something happens, you check the list of names to see if you know anyone [who was injured or killed], you see if people you know know anyone, and you feel bad for the families.”

“It makes you grow up really fast,” she says. “You bury friends, stuff happens while you’re serving in the army, and when you’re in uniform you’re basically a moving target. It’s horrible to say, but you get used to it. Life goes on.”

Hazou recalls the first time the blast of a suicide bomber intruded upon his daily life, and after a while became commonplace. “We’d be in basketball practice and you’d hear a big blast, a very loud blast, and then a minute later you’d hear all of the sirens. It was like, ‘oh well, that was a suicide bomber.’”

“I remember the first time I saw a bus after it got blown up, and I remember seeing Palestinians killed left and right. I remember seeing Apache helicopters flying above my house going to Gaza or the West Bank. So, you know — I saw it. Everybody sees it. It’s a very small country. There’s no way you can avoid seeing and hearing things,” he says.

Hazou and Gochberg have developed what might appear to others as callousness, at first glance. But life in a conflict zone requires a different set of coping skills entirely.

“My biggest fear is when my dad calls and says he has some bad news — someone you know has passed away. I will be sad, but I’ve come to the realization that we live in a country of conflict,” Hazou says. “I have to prepare myself; if I let death devastate me, then by the time I turn 30 and have lost 20 people, I’m just going to want to commit suicide.”

Hobfoll, who served in the Israeli military, says the stress of experiencing terrorism can accumulate with each new incident.

“There’s no one who doesn’t have a friend who was killed, or a family member who had at least a close shave, or a good friend whose kids were in a shopping mall where they were hit with shattered glass,” he says.

Hazou likens the conflict to Newton’s Third Law of Motion — for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

“The Israelis bomb a place, the Palestinians are going to send a suicide bomber, and as a result of that the Israelis are going to bomb again. It just keeps going on and on and on and on,” he says.

Both Gochberg and Hazou emphasize that they do not blame the majority for the actions of a minority, and both hope for an end to the conflict through dialogue, not violence, although they understand well that peace may remain elusive in their lifetimes.

“The Psalm that says ‘pray for peace in Jerusalem’— whoever wrote the Psalm knew, or at least had a gut feeling, that there will never be peace in Jerusalem. So keep praying. At least that’s how I see it,” Hazou says.