[quote]edmontonalberta wrote:
I was wondering if Jewish faith was used often to help soldiers of the IDF integrate back into society after long combat missions. I have read that a large portion of the Israeli population has seen combat, and one never hears of PTSD of the IDF (here at least), where as here that is heard very often for soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. [/quote]
This is a very interesting question, and one that is being asked by a lot of people.
For those that don’t know, the rate of PTSD for combat troops in basically every country that studied it (USA, Canada, European nations, Korea, Russia, etc) is about 30%. Very consistent across countries. But in Israel, the PTSD rate is about 1%., and it has been studied since the Yom Kippur war.
So, obviously, everyone is wondering what is the deal?
As a religious Jew, I would love to say the reason is Judaism, but Israel is roughly 50% secular, and the IDF (while it had religious soldiers such as myself) was distinctly secular. And, more importantly, there is little or no difference on PTSD rates between religious soldiers and non-religious. (The religious soldiers do fair better by a rate of .75 to 1.25 or so, but it’s a small overall change compared to IDF soldiers vs. other soldiers.) So I think this miracle has some pretty Earthly reasons behind it.
Here are the guesses that have been hypothezised:
- Mandatory conscription results in everyone having very similar experiences. Literally every person you meet; every fellow citizen (excepting arabs who can join the IDF, but it’s not mandatory – many Israeli arabs happily defend Israel) is or was a solider. So there is a massive informal support network in place. You mom is not just your mom, but an ex-soldier.
Same with dad, brothers, sisters, and everyone you went to high school with and work with and everyone you go to Shul with. So having people to talk to and who understand what is going on is not a problem. People already know. I can speak for myself (I was not much of a soldier — a combat engineer – but due to the nature of our wars being in our home, I repeatedly found myself in combat.
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We fight for our home. Fighting in some far-off land for reasons that are not exactly clear sucks and makes for an unhappy soldier. Here, we are defending our home from basically two religious sects that have decided we, as a people, must be eradicated from the Earth. This is pretty easy to understand and makes for a motivated soldier.
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Being a home war, you can go home. As in, for a while, I was reporting for duty every morning at 5:00 am, but sleeping most nights with my wife and kids at my parents’ home. Again, having that support is key.
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The civilians are just as much victims of fighting as you are. Gush Katif, my home growing up, was repeatedly shelled, with the foreign arabs specifically targeting my school or our school busses. So you just get used to a certain level of crap.
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Israelis, as a people, are just survivors. Basically all of us have relatives who fled the Nazi death camps, were expelled during the ethnic cleansing in all the Islamic countries of their Jewish populations, survived the Soviet gulags, etc. In order to live through something like that, you have to have a pretty good outlook on life, be it genetic or perhaps religious.
Regardless, we are all descendants of the people who were too damn stubborn to die or had coping skills to become normal people after that sort of thing. I think this carries on.
- A key religious prophecy in Judaism is that all the nations of the world will turn against us as a people and that, with G-d’s help, we will survive. Even the non-religious Jews believe this at some level, and the prophecy proves itself out on a weekly basis in the selective outrage from the press and, in particular the UN.
I mean, the arabs in the portions of Judea and Samaria they occupy (or even “Arab East Jerusalem” that is arab only because of mass murder and ethnic cleansing of its Jewish population in the late 1920s) can do horrible things like, say, blowing my wife and unborn son up, but if Israeli bomb harms a purported civilian because Hamas intentionally puts rocket launchers in populated areas, Israel is guilty of war crimes. Not a peep about blowing up families going to market on a bus, however. Anyway, the feeling of “fait accomply” provides a level of “I don’t give a shit anymore” which also helps with PTSD.
Note, none of these are my own ideas. Of the ones I think are most important, I think it’s 1, 2, and 5.
