Gaslighting Jews: the traumatic aftermath of October 7

I have just read a superb research article, Traumatic invalidation in the Jewish community after October 7, by Miri Bar-Halpern and Jaclyn Wolfman, published in The Journal of Social Behavior in the Human Environment, published online on 13 May 2025. There is a link to the article here.

This article is one of the very best pieces I have read about the war between Israel and Hamas and how so many people have responded to Jews in the UK and abroad as a result. It is clearly written, very thoughtful and is worth reading for Jews and non-Jews alike.

Much of the debate about the war in Gaza has focused on the rights and wrongs of the Israeli invasion, the response of the UN and most international NGOs, and on related questions. These include the constant barrage of anti-Israel bias in the British media, the hate marches in our cities and the anti-Israel anger at universities on both sides of the Atlantic, perhaps especially in Britain and America.

One issue which has largely been ignored by the British media since the murder of more than 1200 Israeli and other civilians on October 7 and the capture of almost 250 hostages, held by Hamas in appalling conditions, is how the constant attacks on Israel and on Jews since then, over almost three years, have affected the Jewish community, many of whom have felt isolated and marginalised.

The authors of this article, both American trauma therapists, focus on precisely this issue. They begin: “The October 7, 2023 attacks in Israel by the Hamas terrorist organisation triggered profound trauma within the Jewish community, not only stemming from the events themselves but also from the response of others in the aftermath. Rather than being met with compassion and care, many individuals instead encountered emotional neglect, criticism, blame, and even outright denial of their pain.”

A key phrase they return to a number of times is “traumatic invalidation”, which may sound like jargon but simply means what they call, “chronic or extreme denial of an individual’s significant private experiences, characteristics, or reactions, often by influential figures or groups…” What has astonished so many Jews is not just the terrible events of October 7, but how so many friends, colleagues and organisations, from universities and TV news programmes to international charities and many people in the arts, have treated Jews as a result. “Rather than being met with compassion and care,” the authors write, “many  were instead met with a stunning mix of silence, blaming, excluding, and even outright denying the atrocities of October 7 along with any emotional pain stemming from them.”

One extreme result of this extraordinary behaviour by so many is what Bar-Halpern and Wolfman call “traumatic invalidation”, which simply means feelings of isolation, anxiety and depression caused by Jewish people’s reasonable responses to the events of October 7 and the mix of silence, hostility and denial which followed, led by numerous prestigious national and international organisations.

Of course, Jews are no strangers to this. From Holocaust denial to attacking Israel as an apartheid or even genocidal state, our historical experience, past and present, has repeatedly been denied, misrepresented or caricatured. Leading BBC reporters and presenters like John Simpson and Mishal Husain, for example, were quick to insist that according to BBC guidelines Hamas was not a terrorist organisation. Numerous journalists and intellectuals have documented the astonishing systemic bias of the BBC, Sky News and many once-respected NGOs against Israel. The damage of the scale of this bias to the reputation on these broadcasters and NGOs is irreparable. At the time of writing, it is not yet clear whether the reputation of many leading British and American universities will recover, both from the way Jewish students and some academics have been treated and by the apparent indifference shown by many universities to this kind of treatment.

The article analyses several forms of traumatic invalidation, First, simply ignoring the concerns of Jews in response to October 7 and the hostage crisis. Second, what the authors call “emotional neglect”, which means being indifferent to the suffering of Israelis and Jews and refusing to show “caring or loving responses” to people traumatised by such suffering. Thirdly, insulting, mocking, and abusing Jews, whether at universities, in central areas of our cities, in cultural institutions or as viewers and listeners of news programmes: “Being told that what you do, feel or value is wrong.” Fourth, criticising and insulting Jews: whether burning Israeli flags, consistently mocking Israel’s Prime Minister on comedy programmes like Dead Ringers on Radio 4, or name calling. Fifth, blaming: Jews being told that they started a conflict that in fact Hamas, backed by Iran, started, or now (in the case of the Druze in Syria), being blamed for a conflict which started with terrible attacks in Syria on a small minority. Sixth, denying reality: being told that what you consider to be true is simply untrue, calling attacks on schools and hospitals used by Hamas terrorists “war crimes”, talking of the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, “genocide”, when these figures, terrible as they are, are relatively small the numbers killed in other parts of the world, whether Christians in parts of Africa, the victims of Assad in Syria, or the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Muslim countries in North Africa and the Middle East in the 1940s and 50s, which went largely unreported for decades by our broadcast media.

Why are the terrible experiences of some groups considered worthy of compassion and attention, and the traumas of other groups are not? Last week, one of Britain’s best-known politicians, Diane Abbott, could not even bring herself to acknowledge that Jews have been victims of racism, when for centuries Jews were expelled from Britain, could not sit in Parliament, were subjected to numerous forms of discrimination and violent attacks during antisemitic riots.

Or imagine being a Jewish student or parent of a Jewish student at a university graduation ceremony recently, where numerous other students were allowed, without comment or discipline, to wave Palestinian flags at one of our oldest and most famous universities. How would that feel? How would you want the university authorities to respond? Or imagine if you were a Ukrainian student at a graduation ceremony and Russian or pro-Russian students were allowed to wave Russian flags to show their support for Putin?

Numerous Jewish cultural institutions have faced bankruptcy in order to pay for security and security guards outside Jewish schools and synagogues. This is no longer unusual in Britain and the numbers have escalated since October 7.

The Bar-Halpern and Wolfman article concludes: “In these painful times, we must make space for the pain each one of us carries without dehumanising one another. Healing happens in connection, and social support is essential. Fear and sadness are universal experiences that unite us. When we pause, listen with the intent to understand, and truly see each other’s pain, we create the possibility for healing and growth. May hope and compassion connect us all.”

No article I have read about October 7 and its consequences has spoken to me so directly and movingly as this piece in The Journal of Social Behavior in the Human Environment. It eloquently and empirically captures the sense of fear, isolation and anger many British and American Jews continue to feel, all this time after October 7. It is a trauma we feel almost every time we read a story about hate marches in our universities and on our city streets, or watch and listen to one-sided news programmes on once reputable TV and radio channels and then read former and current BBC executives defending such biased coverage, while insisting that we should pay an annual licence fee for the privilege of constantly hearing and seeing our experience misrepresented and sometimes even vilified.

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