Between Jewish settlers and Palestinian citizens of Israel: negotiating ethno-national power relations through the discourse of PTSD.

This article traces a critical change in the professional implementation of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): the broadening of its use from an apolitical sign of psychopathology, to an interpretative framework in which clinical questions of diagnosis and treatment intersect with political questions of ethno-national power relations. The aid discourse of a new NGO--the "Israeli Trauma Coalition" (ITC)--serves as my case study. I analyze how the experts negotiated similar clinical questions, associated with a single biomedical idiom, PTSD, but in relation to two different matrices of political relations: the "Disengagement Plan" (August 2005), which led to the evacuation of National-Orthodox Jews who had settled in the Occupied Territories, and the Second Lebanon War (July 2006), which led to the exposure of Palestinian citizens of Israel to missile attacks.

From PTSD to "national trauma": the case of the Israel Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War.

Since its establishment in 1998, NATAL, "The Israel Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War," has been propagating the notion of national trauma as a comprehensive category of suffering related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Against the shifting perceptions of PTSD in Israel, we explore recent undertakings of NATAL's experts to naturalize trauma among "pre-clinical" populations of Israeli Defense Force (IDF) veterans. The experts' attempts to de-politicize the suffering of the veterans are constrained by the fact that in their clinical ideology, the apolitical language of the therapeutic is aligned with a somber national pathos that strikes a collective cord of common Jewish fate and identity.

From posttrauma intervention to immunization of the social body: pragmatics and politics of a resilience program in Israel's periphery.

This article traces a critical change in the professional therapy of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): from treatment of a disorder borne by individuals to treatment of an anticipated disorder to be prevented by fortifying the entire population. A community resilience program in the city of Sderot in southern Israel, which has been subjected to Qassam rockets by its Palestinian neighbors across the border, serves as our case study. Drawing on an ethnographic study of this new therapeutic program, we analyze how the social body that the professionals attempt to immunize against trauma was treated.