CAUSES AND MANIFESTATIONS OF SECONDARY TRAUMATIZATION AMONG ARAB TRAUMA THERAPISTS IN ISRAEL: THE SHARED TRAUMA PHENOMENON SOCIOPOLITICAL CONTEXT, COMMUNITY PROXIMITY, AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SECONDARY TRAUMATIC STRESS

Abstract

Social workers and trauma therapists in Arab society in Israel operate within a uniquely complex professional environment shaped by overlapping layers of sociopolitical marginalization, community-level trauma, and systemic underservice. This article examines the phenomenon of secondary traumatization among Arab social workers and trauma therapists in Israel, and the structural conditions that produce it, focusing on Figley and Ludick’s (2016) Compassion Fatigue Resilience (CFR) Model. Drawing on qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 25 licensed social workers and trauma therapists from Arab communities in Israel, the study identifies the socio-political, communal, and interpersonal structures that generate secondary traumatization, and documents its psychosomatic, affective, and cognitive manifestations. 
The findings show that therapists experience a condition of “shared trauma”— operating within the same socially fractured and violence-permeated communities as their clients—which intensifies vulnerability to secondary traumatization beyond what existing Western models predict. This vulnerability is not static: it is dynamically activated and amplified during periods of national-collective crisis. Following the events of October 7th and the subsequent war on Gaza, participants described a distinct escalation of psychological burden rooted not in individual clinical exposure but in collective political and historical trauma, accompanied by a pattern of professional silencing experienced by Arab therapists working within mixed Jewish-Arab teams. The article proposes an integrative cultural-ecological framework that incorporates a temporal, event-sensitive dimension of shared trauma, and calls for institutional reforms addressing the structural neglect of Arab mental health infrastructure in Israel.