Kav OFEK – Letter to Colleagues in Israel (Autumn 2025)
By Mannie Sher, The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, London
(This letter, written in the spirit of Sher’s Timeless Lessons: A Psychotherapist’s Journey, is offered in companionship with Israeli colleagues living through the long aftermath of war.)
Letter from London: Fragments of Pain and Possibility
My dear friends and colleagues,
I write across the Mediterranean not as an observer, but as one whose heart and family remain deeply entwined with yours. Since the first rockets fell and the streets of Gaza and Israel were again engulfed in fire, I have lived in a state of divided mourning: grieving the lives lost and the ideals that once held meaning for so many of us.
It is difficult to find language for the unthinkable. The images of devastation, the hostages, the funerals, the cries of children, each pierces the protective shell that usually allows life to continue. For months I have felt the slow corrosion of hope, and the return of a question that has haunted Jewish and Arab histories alike: How can we live beside one another after such unbearable pain?
In these months I have sensed not only the shattering of lives but the fracture of the collective mind. It is as if a long-kept covenant of mutual restraint, our faith in reason, dialogue, decency, has collapsed. What now circulates in its place are fantasies of annihilation: that one side must wipe out the other in order to exist. We know, analytically and humanly, that such fantasies arise from terror. Yet knowing this offers little comfort when terror becomes daily reality.
I have listened to friends in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem speak of a society both united and undone bound together by grief and disbelief, yet torn by suspicion and rage. They describe a loss deeper than politics: the loss of faith in Israel’s own promise, that moral and democratic ideals could coexist with security. I hear echoes of 1948, of the Shoah, of exile and return, all revived in a single psychic storm. The longing to protect, the shame of helplessness, the fear of hatred from the world, all these currents flow together and threaten to drown the thinking mind.
And yet I recognise, too, the suffering on the other side of the wall. Gaza’s people are enduring a cataclysm without shelter or language to express it. Their despair, like Israel’s fear, has turned outward in acts that dehumanise both victim and perpetrator. Two wounded psyches face each other, each seeing only the monstrous projection of its own pain. It is this reciprocal blindness – the inability to bear ambivalence – that fuels our endless tragedy.
As a psychotherapist and social scientist shaped by the Tavistock tradition, I find myself asking: what does recovery mean when both sides have lost so much, and when the inner world feels as ruined as the outer one? The answer, I think, begins with mourning, not as sentiment, but as a slow acceptance of limits, a relinquishing of omnipotent hopes. Only through mourning can thinking return.
Mourning, however, requires a container. In Israel today, containment is fragile. Institutions that once offered coherence – government, media, religious authority – are themselves traumatised. Yet in small circles, I hear of groups meeting quietly: neighbours, teachers, clinicians, parents of soldiers. They gather to share food and silence, to listen without argument. These small acts of human containment are, to me, signs of grace. They suggest that amid destruction, the instinct to relate still survives.
When I speak with my grandchildren in Israel, some in uniform, others demonstrating for peace, I hear their exhaustion but also their stubborn refusal to give up imagining a future. They ask me whether I still believe that understanding the unconscious can help. I tell them yes, though perhaps not in the way we once thought. Analysis cannot stop a war, but it can protect the inner space where hatred is questioned, and grief is allowed to breathe. It can remind us that recognising the humanity of the enemy does not betray one’s own dead; it honours them.
In the psychoanalytic language we share, these months have exposed the splitting of the social ego – the mind’s desperate attempt to preserve goodness by projecting evil elsewhere. Yet as Bion taught, only by re-introjecting the split-off parts can thought resume. For Israelis this may mean bearing awareness of our own aggression without collapsing into guilt; for Palestinians, acknowledging their capacity for hatred without surrendering to despair. The alternative is perpetual projection, each side condemned to live inside the other’s nightmare.
I have often wondered whether Israel, forged in trauma, could ever feel safe enough to tolerate ambiguity. The founding miracle contained its own tragedy: survival demanded unity, and unity required denial of internal difference. Perhaps this war, dreadful as it is, will mark the beginning of a new phase, a painful awakening to the impossibility of perfect security and the necessity of shared vulnerability. Out of the rubble may come a more sober, less grandiose love of the land and its people, one that can live with imperfection.
Writing this from London, I am aware of the privilege of distance, but also of exile’s ache. The diaspora experiences the conflict as an inner tearing between identification and impotence, between loyalty and doubt. We, too, must integrate our splits: to grieve without recrimination, to stay connected without collapsing into ideology. The task is the same everywhere – to preserve the capacity to think amid the noise of certainty.
If there is one lesson from a lifetime in psychotherapy and organisational work, it is that systems can recover from catastrophe only when they rediscover curiosity. Curiosity is the opposite of fanaticism; it asks, “What else might be true?” Perhaps the work ahead – yours in Israel, ours abroad – is to create small oases of curiosity, where listening can begin again.
My hope is that this letter may reach you as a gesture of shared mourning rather than commentary; an attempt to stand beside you in the darkness, not above it. The ideals that first drew us to group and organisational work – the faith in dialogue, in facing anxiety together, in transforming conflict into learning, feel bruised but not extinguished. They wait, quietly, for us to recover the strength to use them again.
With love, respect, and an aching solidarity,
Mannie Sher
London, Autumn 2025