Israel’s “Mental-Health Tsunami” Is Not a Mystery - It Is the Direct Consequence of a State Built on Violence

Israeli experts are now warning of an enormous mental-health breakdown among their own population - a “mental-health tsunami” affecting an estimated two million citizens. Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth describes it as a societal rupture: soaring trauma, collapsing public trust, and a population increasingly unable to cope with the psychological strain that has engulfed the country.

But what Israeli reporting frames as a sudden crisis is not sudden at all.

It is the predictable outcome of decades of militarism, occupation, apartheid, and dehumanisation of Palestinians, all of which generate cycles of violence that inevitably recoil back into the society that produces them.

A State Built on Perpetual Conflict Will Inevitably Internalise It

For decades, Israel has governed through force, military occupation, expanding illegal settlements, repeated large-scale bombardments of Gaza, mass displacement, systemic humiliation of Palestinians at checkpoints and routine violations of international humanitarian law

A society cannot normalise such policies without psychological consequences at home.

A state cannot enforce domination indefinitely without eroding the moral and emotional stability of its own citizens.

You cannot train generation after generation to accept - even celebrate - the subjugation of another people and expect to emerge psychologically intact.

The mental health crisis now erupting in Israel is, in many ways, the inward collapse of a political project sustained by violence.

Trauma Does Not Come From Nowhere - It Comes From the System Israel Created

Israeli professionals cite the events of October 7, 2023 as the primary trigger for the current psychological fallout. But to view October 7 in isolation is a deliberate erasure of the decades that preceded it.

For Palestinians, the trauma did not begin in 2023.

It began in 1948, with the Nakba - the mass displacement of an entire people to create the Israeli state.

It continued through the occupation of 1967, multiple wars on Gaza, and the ongoing siege that has choked an entire population for almost two decades.

This history of dispossession and violence created the conditions in which explosive resistance became inevitable.

Israel’s refusal to confront this truth is now manifesting as widespread internal psychological destabilisation.

This is not to gloat over suffering; it is to state a political fact:

If a state builds itself on the perpetual harm of another people, it will eventually fracture from within.

The Crisis Israeli Experts Are Describing Is the Return of Suppressed Reality

The coalition of eight major mental-health organisations in Israel warns of:

• a “catastrophic outbreak” of psychological distress
• deep collective trauma
• rising addiction
• fragmentation of social trust
• a collapsing capacity for resilience.

These are not random symptoms.

They are the signs of a society forced to confront what it has long denied: that oppression has consequences, not only for the oppressed but for the oppressor.

A society raised on militarisation, fear-based nationalism and the dehumanisation of Palestinians, eventually pays the psychological price of those narratives.

You cannot build social cohesion on moral contradictions.

Meanwhile, Palestine Lives a Reality Israel Cannot Bear to Look At

What is rarely acknowledged in Israeli discourse is that Palestinians have endured far worse mental-health outcomes for decades:

• Children in Gaza have some of the highest recorded PTSD rates in the world.
• Entire neighbourhoods have been traumatised repeatedly by bombings.
• Families live with constant uncertainty about food, safety, shelter, and survival.
• The destruction of hospitals and displacement of millions create mass psychological devastation.

And yet Palestinian resilience persists.

Israel, meanwhile, is psychologically collapsing under the weight of its own political structure.

The Israeli Mental-Health Breakdown Is the Symptom - Not the Disease

Israel’s mental-health emergency should not be read as an isolated humanitarian concern.

It should be understood as a sign that the system itself is unsustainable.

A state cannot occupy, dispossess, besiege, and brutalise another population without ultimately destroying its own emotional foundations.

This is karma.

This is cause and effect.

If Israel Wants Psychological Stability, It Must End the Policies That Created the Instability

Israel’s leaders can spend billions on therapists, awareness campaigns or resilience programs.

But none of it will cure the underlying problem.

Because the problem is political, not clinical.

The root of Israel’s mental-health crisis is the ongoing oppression of Palestinians.

A society that must constantly defend injustice will always be anxious, fearful, and fragmented.

To heal, Israel would first have to admit - and then dismantle - the violence it inflicts daily on another people.

Until then, the “mental-health tsunami” is not a wave that came from nowhere.

It is the tide Israel created.