A retrospective examination of the experiences of men and women who grew up in ideological communities in Judea and Samaria, shaped by the backdrop of terrorist events, and how these experiences contributed to their identity formation.

The State of Israel has contended with wars and terrorist attacks since its establishment, with many periods in which terror has become a continuous, enduring feature of everyday life. The severity of terrorist attacks exposes the population to far-reaching, long-term psychological consequences, linked, among other things, to a persistent sense of threat and immediate danger to one’s life and close environment, as well as to the disruption of daily routines. The Second Intifada, which provides the temporal framework for the present study, broke out in 2000 and was characterized by recurrent waves of terrorist attacks and a high number of injured and killed; a considerable proportion of these events took place in Judea and Samaria.

The settlements in Judea and Samaria are predominantly community-oriented, largely religious and ideological, with family-like patterns of interaction among their members. Terrorist attacks affecting individuals or families within such communities reverberate across the surrounding social circles precisely because these localities function as communities with a familial character.

This study examines, retrospectively, the adolescent experience of those who were teenagers during the Second Intifada, and the ways in which the ongoing security threat, parental and communal responses, as well as the religious–ideological characteristics of the settlements, shaped their identity formation processes. The study is grounded in a qualitative–phenomenological approach and includes 21 participants (18 women and 3 men) who, during adolescence, resided in religious-Zionist settlements in Judea and Samaria that were directly affected by terror during the Intifada. Data were collected through semi-structured, in-depth interviews, which were transcribed and analyzed via a multi-stage process of repeated reading, coding, thematic construction and integrative synthesis. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the School of Social Work at Bar-Ilan University. Participants were recruited through the researcher’s personal contacts and social media, and gave informed consent to participate, with the understanding that they could withdraw from the study at any time if they experienced discomfort.

Analysis of the interviews yielded four central themes: (1) Adolescence in the shadow of loss – a theme describing a continuum ranging from concrete loss (bereavement within the community), which in turn led to the loss of a basic sense of safety, through to a symbolic loss of the innocence of youth; (2) Repression, ideology and the preservation of routine – a theme depicting the gap between the adolescents’ emotional needs and the ideological/faith-based responses provided by significant adults in their environment; (3) Coping mechanisms and psychic organization – a theme describing defense mechanisms and coping strategies mobilized in the face of the ongoing threat; and (4) Identity formation under ideological–social conditions – a theme describing processes of personal and collective identity construction shaped by community, ideology and security threat.

The findings illustrate how frequent encounters with death, together with the community’s normalization of extreme situations, produced a reality of concrete and symbolic losses that did not receive adequate response from significant adults and community institutions. Within the emotional vacuum that emerged, adolescents developed defense mechanisms and coping patterns that ranged from repression to sublimation, channeling anxiety into meaning, values and ideological activism. Although these mechanisms enabled immediate functioning under conditions of threat, their interaction with the lack of emotional response effectively covered over a deeper layer of unprocessed pain, leading to adaptation to a state of strain while incurring long-term psychological costs. These processes culminated in identity formation without a meaningful space for exploration, and in the development of an identity status of foreclosure, involving the consolidation of an ideological identity aligned with the community. In retrospect, some interviewees described subsequent distancing from the ideological identity they had formed during adolescence.

The uniqueness of the present study lies in its focus on the retrospective voices of adults who grew up as adolescents in religious-Zionist settlements in Judea and Samaria under prolonged terrorist threat, and in its portrayal of their adolescent experience through a qualitative–phenomenological lens. The study offers an integrative theoretical contribution that brings together research on collective trauma, developmental and identity theories, community resilience, and the dual role of ideology: as a source of meaning, belonging and order, and at the same time as a defense mechanism that encourages identity foreclosure and the repression of vulnerability in the face of concrete and symbolic losses. The study highlights the gap between functional resilience and the absence of emotional processing, and underscores the need to design community and educational interventions that balance rituals of meaning and ideological action with explicitly designated spaces for emotional dialogue, acknowledgment of pain and mourning processes—a contribution relevant also to other communities living under conditions of protracted conflict.