CHAPTER 5 TRAUMA, THERAPY AND RESPONSIBILITY : PSYCHOLOGY AND W AR IN CONTEMPORARY ISRAEL Edna Lomsky-Feder and Eyal Ben-Ari At the base of most scholarly studies of the impact of war lies a rather strong assumption about the nature of such an event. In these works, war is assumed to be a traumatic occurrence that has a host of negative and destructive implications. Given that the traumatic meaning of war is socially constructed, we seek to examine the central discourse by which this kind of meaning is created in present-day Israel. Our contention is that this traumatic–therapeutic discourse – one centring on trauma, suffering and therapy – provides a ready set of cultural models through which war and its effects are interpreted and acted upon. More specifically, we argue that this discourse ‘normalizes’ violent conflict in this society by sustaining and routinizing war in social life. It does so by establishing and maintaining social solidarity around war, producing and reproducing social hierarchies, and by diluting and undermining critical appraisals of war and the military. War, Trauma and Social Construction Violence has been the object of rather intense anthropological scrutiny in the past decade or so. The stress in much of this literature has been on its constructed nature, the symbolism within which it is embedded, and especially its destructive and traumatic effects (Nordstrom and Robben 1996; Abbink 2000: xv; Sluka 2000). In these studies violence has been linked to issues related to cultural representations and images, to the ‘body’ and personal experiences. Typical examples are works on the representations of suffering (Kleiman and Kleiman 1997), the experience of torture survivors in particular cases such as Sri Lanka (Daniel 1996), Indian riot victims (Das Bollig_SB1.qxd 11/12/06 20:47 Page 111