As a Jew, I feel less safe than ever, but now we must share Gazans’ agony

But we aren’t the only ones with inherited wounds. German journalist Sabine Bode coined the term kriegsenkel – war grandchildren – to describe those born into a legacy, not of complicity but of hidden grief and moral debt. In the American south, descendants of families who profited from slavery speak of guilt without memory. In post-apartheid South Africa, children of former regime supporters contend with a stained identity. In Australia, rage over Gaza is shaped, in part, by unprocessed guilt over Indigenous dispossession.

In my therapy practice, I sit with people generations removed from war who still carry its imprint. Inherited guilt can surface as relentless self-scrutiny, over-apologising or taking responsibility for harms never caused. Bodies brace for dangers long past, dreams reignite ancestral sorrow and an unconscious drive seeks atonement for what was broken before birth.

Silence, a protective response to unbearable suffering, is a precursor to intergenerational trauma. Taboo questions go unanswered, or are answered in ways that maintain emotional detachment. Over time, a troubled conscience settles into the body as trauma, distorting identity and limiting growth. Descendants carry unresolved histories, with no clear way to heal them.

I don’t want that for my child.

In this moment, our ability to metabolise vicarious trauma without retreating into denial or blame may be one of the most vital emotional tasks of our time.

But how do we find space to hold another people’s catastrophe in the midst of our own? Especially now, when Jews feel a real and growing existential threat across the diaspora; when my friends have been doxed, a workplace firebombed, and children I love harassed for their uniforms, their schools graffitied with hate? When I, myself, feel less safe than ever.

My answer: Years of listening to clients wrestle with moral dilemmas has taught me that healing begins when we allow painful truths to coexist. My heartbreak over October 7 and its aftermath of surging antisemitism cannot shield me from what lies buried in Gaza’s rubble. Horror over Hamas’ atrocities and the unspeakable two-year torment of hostages cannot justify mass starvation, nor the denial of aid or mercy. This war not being my “fault” will not spare me or my child from its shadow.

When the images pour in, and they soon will, the response will be primal. All we can do is wrest our legacy from the wreckage. No matter where we fall politically, in the face of Gaza’s unbearable reality it is not ideology that’s needed, but moral clarity. We cannot simply blame Hamas or Netanyahu. Our integrity will be expressed through our willingness to bear witness.

The story of October 7 matters profoundly, as does the Jewish story of thousands of years of persecution and exile. But ours can’t be the only story that matters, not after the devastation inflicted on the Palestinian people.

Without abandoning my own crisis, finding the resolve to hold Gaza’s cataclysm within my story hopefully helps my descendants stand steadier in theirs. Our children are not responsible for Gaza’s destruction, but as Carl Jung observed, what we resist persists. And what persists becomes our inheritance.

I will continue to reel from the agony of our newly released hostages. Very soon, I will also behold Gaza’s suffering in full. How I choose to face this will mark both my legacy and my child’s inner life.

Someone will shape how this moment lives on in the Jewish soul. In my family, let it be me.

Ilana Laps is a Melbourne-based psychotherapist and educator.