This article traces a critical change in the professional therapy of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): from treatment of a disorder borne by individuals to treatment of an anticipated disorder to be prevented by fortifying the entire population. A community resilience program in the city of Sderot in southern Israel, which has been subjected to Qassam rockets by its Palestinian neighbors across the border, serves as our case study. Drawing on an ethnographic study of this new therapeutic program, we analyze how the social body that the professionals attempt to immunize against trauma was treated. In particular, we follow the various practices used to expand the clinical. We found that the population was split into several groups on a continuum between the clinical and the preclinical, each receiving different treatment. Moreover, the social body managed according to this new form of PTSD was articulated through ethnic and geopolitical power relations between professionals from the country's center and professionals from its periphery, and between the professionals and the city's residents. Finally, we discuss how this Israeli case compares with other national sites of the growing globalization of PTSD, like Bali, Haiti and Ethiopia, which anthropologists have been exploring in recent years.

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Since its establishment in 1998, NATAL, "The Israel Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War," has been propagating the notion of national trauma as a comprehensive category of suffering related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Against the shifting perceptions of PTSD in Israel, we explore recent undertakings of NATAL's experts to naturalize trauma among "pre-clinical" populations of Israeli Defense Force (IDF) veterans. The experts' attempts to de-politicize the suffering of the veterans are constrained by the fact that in their clinical ideology, the apolitical language of the therapeutic is aligned with a somber national pathos that strikes a collective cord of common Jewish fate and identity. This alignment may account for the Israeli public's acceptance of NATAL's agenda, despite its subversive connotations.

This article traces a critical change in the professional implementation of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): the broadening of its use from an apolitical sign of psychopathology, to an interpretative framework in which clinical questions of diagnosis and treatment intersect with political questions of ethno-national power relations. The aid discourse of a new NGO--the "Israeli Trauma Coalition" (ITC)--serves as my case study. I analyze how the experts negotiated similar clinical questions, associated with a single biomedical idiom, PTSD, but in relation to two different matrices of political relations: the "Disengagement Plan" (August 2005), which led to the evacuation of National-Orthodox Jews who had settled in the Occupied Territories, and the Second Lebanon War (July 2006), which led to the exposure of Palestinian citizens of Israel to missile attacks. In particular, I shed light on the ITC's decision-making processes regarding the organizational representation of suffering and its empirical validation. I found that the distress of both groups has been left dangling between the processes of medicalization and de-medicalization, while a context-related transition from one meaning of trauma to another has taken place. Finally, I discuss how this implementation of PTSD compares with other national sites of its growing globalization.

In this lecture I examine what happens to PTSD as a biomedical category when local political power relations and ethno-national inequality are brought into the understanding of the disorder and its application. On the basis of four years' fieldwork (2004-2008) at two nongovernmental Israeli organizations — NATAL (‘Israeli Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War’) and the ITC (‘Israel Trauma Coalition’) — I will analyze how Jewish-Israeli experts have negotiated similar clinical questions concerning the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of PTSD, but in relation to two different matrices of political relations and different violent situations: the ‘Disengagement Plan’ (August 2005), which led to the evacuation of National-Orthodox Jews who had settled in the Occupied Territories, and the Second Lebanon War (July 2006), which led to the exposure of Palestinian citizens of Israel to missile attacks.