Hundreds protest against government decision to abstain in UNGA vote on resolution urging humanitarian pause in Gaza.

The war between Israel and Hamas has progressed at such speed, with body counts mounting by the hour, that it can feel like the chasm of human grief it is leaving behind has gotten relatively little attention. In Israel, the society I know better, every individual seems to be connected to someone who was murdered or has been kidnapped. In Gaza, death surely feels inescapable. I have been worried about this reverberation of pain almost from the moment I learned what Hamas had done—that a grief this overwhelming will harden people such that generations will have to pass before any political resolution feels remotely possible.

“The whole country has PTSD,” was the first thing the Israeli writer Etgar Keret texted me a week after the attack. I realized that he was the person I most wanted to speak with. Keret has long been an impish figure on the Israeli literary scene, writing very short, absurdist stories for three decades, contemporary fairy tales that are allegorical and often gut-punching. What Keret hasn’t tried to do is be the voice of Israel. Unlike a generation of writers before him who were comfortable with this role—famously, Amos Oz, David Grossman, and A. B. Yehoshua—Keret is more concerned with how humans survive being human. Possibly, this is why his stories have had such universal appeal, regularly featured on This American Life.

Since the October 7 attack, Keret has been writing what he calls “war notes”: short thoughts, observations, and outlines of stories jotted down as if on scraps of paper meant to be shoved deep in a pocket or thrown away. One of them, “Signs of Life,” found its way onto the front page of Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s largest paid daily newspaper, and a version even appeared in English on the actor Molly Ringwald’s Instagram feed. Keret composed the paragraph-long text for a young girl whose father had been killed. “Close your eyes, and allow yourself, just for a moment, to simply feel the pain. To hesitate. To be confused. To feel sorrow. Remorse,” he wrote. “You still have your whole life to spend persecuting, avenging, reckoning. But for now, just close your eyes and look inward, like a satellite hovering over a disaster zone, searching for signs of life.”

I spoke with Keret about how to find these signs of life. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Gal Beckerman: Israelis are used to dealing with terrorist attacks—it’s been a part of their reality for a very long time. But this felt different, and I’m curious if you can articulate why.

Etgar Keret: I think the experience of every Israeli citizen on that Saturday was this terrible intimacy with the war. At first there was a real lack of information, which left two points of view. Either the point of view of a family trapped in a room calling live to the television channel, saying “Send help, I can hear them murdering someone outside; they’re entering; they’re throwing a grenade here; my daughter is already dead.” And you hear this live, so you’re in this point of view of somebody who’s being massacred. And the other point of view was on Telegram, where you could see Hamas massacring people. But this was at such a primal level—not about territory, not about ideology. This was the plan, to bring the killing to us. Many times, people say to the survivors, “I can’t imagine what you felt when you were there.” But in a weird way, when I go and meet families who survived the attacks on the kibbutzim, I almost feel that I was there with them.

The idea behind putting it all on Telegram as it was happening, it was almost like presenting the pilot episode of a genocide, that every Israeli who sees would think they’re next: I’m burning this house down. I’m murdering this woman. I’m coming for you. The people they massacred, among them were Bedouin, Israeli Arabs, Filipino workers who help elderly people, Thai agricultural workers. It was about murdering in the most horrible way all the people who are in this area.

Beckerman: This must be having a profound effect on people’s psyches right now.

Keret: That’s why I described it to you as the entire country suffering from PTSD. I was on the street and I saw someone’s kid imitating the sound of an alarm siren, and his father snapped at him, and you could see that the kid didn’t understand what his father wanted from him; he was just making a sound—woo woo woo. I heard a fight between a parent and their child, and the child said, “Daddy loves the soldiers more than he loves me.” You can really feel it with children that they are aware their parents are acting strange. They don’t understand where they are. Where is their open heart?

Beckerman: What other kinds of responses are you seeing from people you know?

Keret: There is this feeling that reality has changed and that we have to adapt. And the people I appreciate the most are doing it slowly. The right answers don’t jump out at them. Here’s one story, for example.

There is this guy on my street who I like. He works with kids and teenagers, where he teaches them robotics with Legos. And the other day he calls me, and he never calls me, and he starts speaking, and in the beginning, I didn’t even understand what he was talking about. And then gradually he says that he’d been volunteering with a group of teenagers who are Israeli Arabs—Palestinian citizens of Israel. So he had been working with them for two years, and they grew very close together. And he said they were one of the most amazing groups and they won a championship. They went overseas. And he was their coach, so they were a little bit like a family. And then he called me, basically, just as he was looking at those kids’ Facebook pages. And there were photos taken from Telegram of horrible, graphic things—I don’t even want to repeat—of people being murdered in horrible ways, and he says he sees them posting them and kind of saying, Haha, you know, Yeah, shows them. And when he talked to me, I felt that on some level, he could say, I’m an Israeli; they betrayed me. But he wasn’t talking like that at all. It was a little bit like a parent discovering that his child is a sex molester or something, or enjoys watching snuff films. It was really like this searching thing, like, What didn’t I understand? How do I explain this?

Beckerman: How do you approach this as a writer, as an artist? What do you see as your tools for helping?

Keret: My parents were Holocaust survivors. And I think in many ways, they almost trained me for this moment. I had learned that the world can turn and change really quickly. One of the things my mom told me, she said, when everything’s stable, you can lean on whatever you want. But when things start shaking, lean on yourself—connect to your emotions; be reflective. And another thing that my father told me has become a mantra, even when I speak with people in the kibbutzim. When I was a child, I wasn’t the smartest kid. They had taught us about the Holocaust in school, and one day I asked my father if the Holocaust was the worst time of his life. And he said to me, “There are no good times and bad times. There are only hard times and easy times.” And he said, “All my life, I ran after the easy times. But one thing I have to admit: It was the difficult times when I’ve learned about myself most.” And I think that there is something to that. This will never justify all the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians that are happening these days.

I haven’t been writing any stories. Instead, I write these crazy notes. One was a synopsis for a story about an alien world whose energy comes from the pain of human beings, and then suddenly one of their power plants shuts down, and they say, “We need much more juice.” So they release the October 7 attacks and then we’re bombing Gaza, and then, you know, all the dark parts of town are suddenly lit.

I’m thinking that the only thing we can win from this opportunity is to reflect, to reboot. When you look at Israel and Palestine, we’ve been in the same loop pretty much since [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu came to power. Netanyahu believed in this policy of divide and conquer. And the idea is, If I keep Hamas, if I give it a little strength, it will be a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority; maybe it will be a way of stopping a Palestinian state. But this is an idea that is like a pagan ritual in which Hamas attacks us, we attack them, then we shake hands and another suitcase with money comes from Qatar. He believed that he could dance with the devil, and now this exploded in our face.

Beckerman: It seems to me, though, that what has been special about your war notes is that they look past politics to the human beings who are suffering now, at their grief.

Keret: When I visit with the survivors of the kibbutzim, I don’t talk about politics at all. I feel as if I’m coming as a representative of humanity—failed humanity, but still, humanity—in the sense that I come there as somebody who has been left intact, a guy who can laugh at a joke, some proof of existence. And I really feel that I don’t have anything to give to them, you know, talent-wise, just this idea of trying to conduct some kind of dialogue or perspective that is not hatefully reductive, but that allows for ambiguity and confusion.

Beckerman: Was this the motive behind the war notes?

Keret: It started with me just writing things that I saw. I go to meet the kibbutz people, and the woman that shows us and takes care of us, she has a baby on her hip. And she keeps going around and doing stuff with the baby on her. I have a herniated disc, so I noticed this. We were there for more than four hours, and all the time she had the baby. And when she walked us to the car, I wanted to say something nice. So I said, “Oh, your baby didn’t cry even one time; you’re so lucky to have such a baby.” “No, no, it’s not my baby,” she said. “The baby belongs to a woman whose family was massacred, and she’s not functional. So somebody said, ‘Will anyone take the baby?’ So I took the baby.” So it’s basically kind of writing those things down. Just to be sure that, later on, I won’t think I made them up, you know?

Beckerman: But you’re sharing them, like the one that Molly Ringwald shared on Instagram and that Yedioth Ahronoth, the Israeli newspaper, ran on the front page?

Keret: This particular note, the first person I sent it to was a teenager whose father was murdered. And she read it, and then told me she read it at his funeral. And it’s strange, because, you know, when I looked at Molly posting, you know, there is something about this text, because it says Look inside you; try to see what you’re feeling. Everybody thinks it’s about him or her. But I was writing for a girl whose father was murdered.

[Read: I was a child in a war]

Beckerman: Do you think there’s something about ephemeral writing? It’s not meant to be published necessarily; it’s writing almost in its purest form, where it’s providing a kind of catharsis, but it’s not about polishing it or making it perfect for someone else.

Keret: Right now, these feel like notes in the sense that there is some kind of raw energy or an attempt to remind myself of this moment. But it’s all a bunch of thoughts and anecdotes. I can tell you one. Some of the kibbutzim were really hit hard, like places like Kfar Aza had a huge massacre. But there were kibbutzim like Nir Am that were attacked, but no one was kidnapped and the attackers were held off from entering the kibbutz. And when I came to read to the children of the kibbutzim, there was this really nice dad from one of the less affected kibbutzim, and he said to me that he basically moved to the kibbutz a very short time ago from the city. And he said that when he went with his wife, he saw a beautiful house he loved, in Kfar Aza. And his wife said, “No, I want to be in Nir Am; it’s easier with the car.” And he said, “Yeah, but this is a nicer house.” And somebody said to him, “Look, you know, a nice house. Every house is nice. But it’s nicer when the people living in it are happy. Do what your wife wants.” And then he said, “I listened to my wife, and all my family is alive. And if I would have moved to Kfar Aza, I’d be in hell right now.” I think of these things because my parents were Holocaust survivors; this arbitrariness was familiar to them, the things that you did that saved you, the things that you did that would cause your death.

And the thing about kibbutzim, these are communities that don’t always respect privacy. At one gathering, a group of kibbutz members said to a young girl, “Come on, come on, tell him what you said when you heard the terrorist, when you heard him outside.” And she said, “No, no, no, I don’t want to.” They said, “No, come on, tell him, it’s funny.” So this girl told me about the moment when she heard terrorists inside the house shooting. She whispered when she told me this, but her thought was, There are so many books that I haven’t read yet. I don’t want to die stupid.

There are dozens of stories like this. So for me, I think that all those stories that I collect, they’re kind of proof of humanity. Saying, like, these are not victims, they’re people living; they’re doing pranks; they’re making fun of each other.

Beckerman: They still have humor.

Keret: It’s not even humor, because it’s not funny, but it’s acknowledging some kind of humanity in an inhuman situation. And my mom, we lived in a city where everybody was of Iraqi descent. So my mom was really one of the only Holocaust survivors in our town. And whenever they would ask her to come to Holocaust-memorial ceremonies to speak as a survivor, she would say, “I think you got it wrong. I passed the Holocaust. I don’t work in the Holocaust.” She resisted this idea of the Holocaust as a grand event, a giant jigsaw puzzle, and that her role was to be a tiny piece. She said, “No, I’m a human being. I will not be reduced to these stories. You can shoot children in black-and-white; I’ll stay in color.”

Jonila Castro and Jhed Tamano say they were taken from the street by the military and endured abusive interrogations.