Enough Already

Recorded in the studios of the Accessible Culture Center 1The numbers in the public committee report on the national response to the treatment and rehabilitation of IDF disabled veterans are unsettling. Inside the report, published this week and running more than 150 pages, is a single table, orderly, dry, and mapping the wounds of recent years. Only a few figures, but they bleed like Israeli society itself. Here they are. Before October 7, the Rehabilitation Department of the Defense Ministry was treating 61,000 people. By September 2025, that number had risen to 82,000, today it is more than 87,000, and the forecast for two years from now is 100,000. Before October 7, 18% of these people suffered from mental health difficulties and PTSD. About a year ago that figure rose to 38%, and in two years they will make up half of the people the Rehabilitation Department supports (in numbers: from 11,000 to 31,000, with a forecast of 50,000). In two and a half years, 26,000 people serving in the security forces have joined the Rehabilitation Department’s list of beneficiaries, an increase of about 43%. Looking ahead, in the committee’s table, next to the year 2028 appears (?). A question mark, in parentheses, small, symbolic. Because no one has any idea how many more we will lose, how many more wars lie ahead, where we will be in 2028. These are the kinds of question marks you hope will never, ever match reality. Elsewhere, outside this table, the committee notes that the rate of psychological injuries among those wounded in the current war is about 60%. Most of the newly wounded are suffering from mental injury, many of them alongside physical injury. The numbers are so severe that even the government understood something had to be done, and it established the committee that prepared the cited report. This team, headed by Prof. Shlomo Mor-Yosef, who led Hadassah and the National Insurance Institute, is supposed to determine how the Rehabilitation Department can cope with the dramatic increase in the number of people needing assistance, and whether it must rethink its path in order to provide them with the best possible service. The basic assumption, and a fully justified one, is that the state must give everything to those willing to sacrifice their lives, their bodies and their souls for it. But this is not only a story about official aid mechanisms. When you see the numbers, your breath catches, and the realization sinks in, this war is changing, and will continue to change, Israeli society far more than we are able to absorb. No army, no country, is meant to be at war without end. A war with no clear boundaries, no clear purpose. Someone should stop this serenade already.

2The Rehabilitation Department of the Defense Ministry was not built to handle so many casualties. Before October 7, 6,000 service members a year approached it seeking recognition of their injuries, and since then that number has tripled. Alongside requests for disability recognition, there are also routine requests for treatment, benefits, and the like. Before the war it handled 700,000 such requests a year, in 2025 the number rose to 1.2 million, and today it is more than 1.4 million. The department’s budget has doubled during the war and its staff has grown, but there are still too few employees, and they work with outdated computer systems. The main burden falls on the social workers, each of whom is responsible for 850 wounded men and women. Under such conditions, it is impossible to truly accompany them, build an individual rehabilitation plan, or help properly. That is not me saying this, it is the Mor-Yosef committee. That is why it recommended changing everything from the ground up. First, to remove the Rehabilitation Department from the Defense Ministry and turn it into an independent national authority, the Finance Ministry opposes this. But the change must be much deeper. The department’s work procedures need to change. It should rely more on AI. Huge budgets should be added to build new computer systems, here too, the Finance Ministry opposes the Defense Ministry’s cost estimate. And personal escorts should be assigned to the wounded, a role that has developed throughout the health system in recent years, care managers, case managers, who help each patient realize their rights and spare them a great deal of bureaucratic pain. More generally, the number of positions should be significantly increased, especially social workers, the Finance Ministry opposes the size of the increase. Overall, the committee says, the Rehabilitation Department’s budget should be increased by 20%, meaning an additional roughly 2 billion shekels a year, and there should also be one-time funding of about half a billion for computer systems. By comparison, each day of the rounds with Iran cost more than 1 billion shekels, so the increase in question is less than two days of war.

3A substantial portion of the committee’s report is devoted to mental health, and rightly so. This field has suffered from years of neglect, because of stigma and outdated social norms, and the surge in the number of casualties, and in the number of people seeking mental health help, is dramatic. The committee’s recommendations in this area are far-reaching, including: establishing a mental health system in the IDF, and in the other security forces, that will develop tools to identify signs of distress among service members. Expanding the definition of post-trauma, because the medical literature is currently unable to encompass all the nuances of psychological injuries linked to a prolonged and difficult war, after a wrenching national trauma, and daily contact with the civilian population. Establishing a closed psychiatric ward for IDF wounded and creating recovery homes, alternatives to psychiatric hospitalization, for them and for their family members as well. That last proposal shook me especially, the recognition that family members of IDF wounded, and many of them, also reach a point where they need hospitalization or hospitalization alternatives, and that they too must be given a response. 100,000 service members who will need the Rehabilitation Department in two years are only the tip of the iceberg; around them are entire additional circles, much broader, of those harmed. When I read this part of the report, I started to tear up. It was clear that the committee knew the subject well, had examined it deeply and closely, and knew how to distinguish between the many nuances of psychological distress. It identified the many difficulties faced by those with mental injuries, for example when it comes to returning to the labor market, to functioning in a normal day-to-day way, one that not only survives but also contributes, to you, to your family, to your surroundings, to society. It suggested that ‘veteran’ mental health casualties accompany new casualties. It tried to think of everything; it was clear that the members of the subcommittee that dealt with mental health knew how to put themselves in the shoes of people dealing with psychological distress and their families. From my experience with public committees, that does not happen often. Unfortunately, from my experience with public committees, I also know that it will be difficult to implement these recommendations. Certainly without backing from the Finance Ministry, and at the moment, as noted, it has raised many objections, but even if the ministry supported the reform in full. Right now there is no money for it, but even if there were, shifting such a large amount of resources to the rehabilitation of security forces casualties would have a significant impact on the civilian treatment system, or, put less nicely, could deal a mortal blow to the mental health system. Demand among Israelis for mental health treatment surged dramatically even before the war, and even more so since it began. Yes, it turns out that three years of nonstop stress, death, loss, terrible news, sirens, missiles in the neighborhood, drones on the way, wars within wars, uncertainty, helplessness, financial hardship, working from home, children at home, the whole family at home, no vacations, no time for hobbies, no moment to breathe, all of these do something to the soul. Who would have believed it. The state is trying to strengthen the system, there have been additions in pay agreements with psychiatrists and psychologists, and still there are too few therapists. Training a psychiatrist takes 14 years, a clinical psychologist nine to 11. If the Defense Ministry receives enormous resources, and fully justified ones, that is not the issue, for treating psychological casualties, many professionals will prioritize treating ‘security’ cases over treating civilians. After all, the Defense Ministry pays more, and you do not have to chase it down to get paid. If therapists become even less accessible to the public than they are now, wait times will grow even longer, more people will end up in the emergency room or hospitalized, and we will probably also see an increase in suicides. When the blanket is so short, every tug in one direction hurts everything else.

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4Neta Barzilai released a new album in April, short and gorgeous. Gorgeous in the literal sense, it left me stunned. I listened to it again and again, and I cannot get over it. I was not a big fan of Barzilai before this album, and I came to it completely by chance. But something in its honesty, openness and depth electrified me. After I listened to her conversation with Asaf Liberman, in the podcast 1+1, I also understood why. The album’s title track, which opens it, is called ‘Serenada.’ From the interview I learned that it does not only describe singing under the window of a lover, but also refers to a psychiatric medication called Serenada, used to treat depression and anxiety. Barzilai said she wrote the song after accompanying her then partner to a psychiatric evaluation. She spoke openly about his struggle with PTSD from the war, what that struggle did to him and to her and to their love. She spoke in tears about their breakup, an untimely breakup that reminded me more than anything of the untimely death of a loved one. They seemed meant to stay together, but the deep injury separated them, and their lives have not been the same since. ‘Serenada’ is a song that rises and swirls like a tornado. It reaches into the deepest corners of the soul, then throws everything into the air without stopping: ‘Someone should stop the / Serenade / All the demons, the spirits / Now everyone is singing / We stayed awake at night / We heard the serenade in our heads / All the good words that turned into songs / We were already happy.’ When Barzilai told the story of her partner and herself, I cried with her. And that is only one story. There are countless others, behind the committee’s dry table. And each one is a fragment of the heavy price we are paying for an endless war. No army, no country, is meant to be at war without end. A war with no clear boundaries, no clear purpose. A war in which, even after the IDF and the security establishment have already achieved enormous military successes, Operation the Beepers, the killing of Nasrallah, the opening blow against Iran 1 and Iran 2, the government did not know, or was not able, or did not want to turn them into diplomatic achievements and end the event. Enough. Someone should stop this serenade already. The writer is a journalist for Kan News (Source: Public Committee Report on the National Response to the Treatment and Rehabilitation of IDF Disabled Veterans) Cost-benefit, the previous column