to the physical injury is mental trauma, which some experts say is particularly acute in the case of suicide attacks. Post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety affect not only the victims of the attacks, but all of Israeli society. There has been a significant increase in antidepressant and sedative use by the general public. Studies after the 1995 bombing that devastated a federal office building in Oklahoma City found that 16 percent of Americans living within a hundred-mile radius of the blast suffered from post-traumatic disorder, including acute stress, flashbacks, or anxious reactions to loud bangs. In Israel, the number of people who find themselves in similar circumstances is enormous. According to Dr. Danny Brom, director of the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma, thousands of Israelis are affected by difficulty sleeping, nightmares, anxiety, fear of leaving home, light or severe depression, chronic headaches and terrible flashbacks.
In 2004, one report estimated that 40 percent of the population in Jerusalem have some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder. Some cannot sleep because the smell of burned flesh will not leave them. More than half of those surveyed said they felt a “loss of control on factors that influence” their lives due to the violence. There are very few studies examining the psychological impact of mass terrorism in Israel. One is an extraordinary document by Marie-Thérèse Feuerstein, Burning Flowers, Burning Dreams: Consequences of Suicide Bombings on Civilians in Israel, 2000-2005. It is the culmination of a research project involving specialists in trauma and bereavement counseling, as well as frontline health professionals at the cutting edge of emergency medicine in Israel following terrorist attacks.
Among the hundreds of people disabled by terrorism, there are many stories of redemption that bear witness to the victory of Israel. One is the story of Tomer Gamadani, a police officer who suffered from serious burns caused by a terrorist bombing. After months of struggling heroically to overcome pain and despair, Tomer married the love of his life. “He was completely burned,” said Irit, his wife. “We had already set the date of our wedding, but I saw death nearby, and I prayed that Tomer would not die.” She asked Tomer, “What will we do about the wedding?” He embraced his fiancée and promised her, “We will get married, Irit.” And they did.
Eyal Neufeld was injured in an attack in Meron. After being in a coma for two months, he woke up blind and deaf, not knowing where he was. “Angry?” he said. “It was a miracle. I was sitting next to the terrorist, and I survived.” Nine people were killed in the attack. Eyal’s lungs were damaged, his spleen had to be removed, and his jaw, eye sockets, and nose were broken. His skull was fractured in two places, two of the vertebrae in his neck were collapsed, and at first it was thought that he would be paralyzed. His disabled right hand has been operated on dozens of times. The terrorists took away his eyesight, but it took him only two weeks to learn to read Braille and to get around with a cane. As soon as his hearing aid was put in, he was able to hear again.
“There are difficult times,” Eyal acknowledges. “There is this darkness that drives me crazy twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. A total obscurity—an unmoving black space, without end, without form, without color. I try not to think about it. When I am attacked by dark thoughts about what to do with my life, about what would have happened if I hadn’t been injured, I try to distract myself. Someone else might have jumped out the window, but me? I may be deaf and blind, but I’m not retarded. Life is too important to me now; I try to see the glass as half full. I’m alive.”
The doctors struggled for five days to save the life of Orly Virani, a survivor of the massacre at the Matza restaurant in Haifa in March 2002. They were afraid she wasn’t going to make it. “My body was full of shrapnel,” Orly said, “and they told me that a person with those kinds of injuries had less than a 20 percent chance of survival. At that time, no one talked about the possibility of getting pregnant and having a child, but I knew that I would survive. I fought for my life. It is a great victory.”
Orly’s story is very similar to that of another miraculous survivor. In June 2002, a terrorist entered the home of the Shabo family in the settlement of Itamar and fired a hail of bullets, killing Rachel Shabo and three of her children. Asael, nine years old, was hit by a series of bullets that took off his leg. Today he walks thanks to a sophisticated prosthesis designed in the United States. At first he was depressed and didn’t want to hear about wearing an artificial limb. Then he met Shlomo Nimrod, a disabled veteran who wears a prosthesis designed to allow him to run and play sports (similar to the one used by the South African Olympic champion Oscar Pistorius). Nimrod convinced Asael to have a prosthesis like his own made. “Dad, I can run on two legs,” Asael told his father before returning to Israel.
Since a Palestinian rocket hit her clinic in Ashkelon, Dr. Mirela Siderer lives with a piece of shrapnel an inch and a half long lodged in the left side of her back. The doctors say it is too close to the spinal cord to be removed. “I felt something like a ball of fire whirling inside of me, and all of my teeth were knocked out,” Siderer told the United Nations commission set up to investigate the Israeli counteroffensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in January 2009. “What was my offense? That I am a Jew living in Ashkelon? I studied medicine to help people all over the world, and I have also helped many women from Gaza.”
A volunteer from Zaka, David Dvir, removed a young woman who had just died from the ambulance to make room for an injured person. “And then I recognized her: it was my friend Nava Applebaum. She was twenty years old; she was supposed to get married the next morning.” Her father, Dr. David Applebaum, had saved dozens of people torn apart by the bombs. He had immigrated from Cleveland more than twenty years earlier along with his wife, who like him was a scholar of the Torah. After directing Magen David Adom in Jerusalem, Dr. Applebaum founded an innovative emergency care center. The Knesset honored him for helping the injured in an attack on King George Street, before the flames had even been extinguished.
“His entire life was dedicated to saving the lives of others. Thousands of Jerusalem residents owe their lives to him.”
Dr. Applebaum had just made a presentation at a conference on terrorism in New York, two years after the September 11 massacre. Israelis have been advising American hospitals on how to prepare for a terror-related mass casualty event, and the country has sent and received international delegations for hospital visits. In New York, Dr. Applebaum had shown slides illustrating how it is possible to treat “forty-four injured people in twenty-eight minutes,” as he had done after one attack in Jerusalem. Then he returned home immediately and took his daughter Nava to Cafe Hillel, the day before her wedding was supposed to take place. Both of them were killed by the explosion at the cafe, along with five other people. Nava had just finished her national service with an organization that helps children who have cancer. “She will be an eternal bride,” said her brother.
One year after the attack, fifteen American doctors emigrated to Israel in the name of Dr. Applebaum. It is one of the many legacies of this extraordinary doctor. His coworkers call him “revolutionary,” a man who was always first to help the victims. Todd Zalut was his assistant for many years at the Shaare Zedek Medical Center. “David was the kind of doctor everyone dreams of becoming,” Zalut tells us. “During the 1980s, David was the first volunteer doctor to work in the ambulances. He slept with a defibrillator next to his bed in case of emergency. He helped many to stay alive. At the end of the 1980s, he was frustrated because the Israeli health care system couldn’t guarantee standard treatment for all. Regardless of their ability to pay, David gave everyone access to his intensive care unit. No waiting, quality medicine, and helping the patient as if the doctor were a friend.” These efforts eventually led to the creation of the David Applebaum Memorial Foundation for the Advancement of Emergency Medicine.
“Everyone had his cell phone number; they called him in the middle of the night, on Shabbat and holidays. He was always there to help. Sometimes he took the patient to America simply because it was too risky to operate on him in Israel,” recalls Zalut. He describes Dr.
