Last week, I spent part of a morning visiting four pharmacies to collect my father’s regular medications.
It was an ordinary family errand, the kind countless households run without a second thought. Yet by the time I reached the final counter, I was listening less to my own list than to the medication names being repeated around me.
Cipralex (escitalopram) for depression and anxiety. Bondormin (brotizolam) for severe insomnia. Lipitor (atorvastatin) to lower cholesterol. Vector (valsartan) for high blood pressure.
Different faces, different ailments. Yet by the fourth pharmacy, the names had stopped sounding like unrelated prescriptions. Heard together, they suggested a kind of national medical record.
No four pharmacies can diagnose a country. But they can offer a glimpse of the hidden toll of prolonged conflict: a burden that draws far less notice than combat, statecraft, or parliamentary debate.
Israelis have grown used to measuring the price of conflict in familiar ways. We follow the fate of the hostages. We count the dead and the wounded. We track economic losses and the shifting fronts. These are the visible scars.
Far less attention is paid to the damage that accumulates quietly inside the human body.
Since October 2023, the lives of many Israelis have been measured not only by calendars but by sirens, mobilizations, funerals, evacuations, and the anxious wait for the next emergency.
What began with the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust evolved into months of reserve duty, repeated missile barrages, mass displacement, wars in Gaza and Lebanon, two military operations against Iran, and an almost uninterrupted state of national emergency.
Wars shape foreign policy. Long wars reshape societies.
The European debate has become sharply attuned to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies. It has devoted far less attention to the Israeli society that has been transformed by the years of conflict in which those policies have unfolded.
That quieter dimension of Israeli life rarely enters the broader conversation. Instead, much of Europe’s debate about Israel revolves around the occupied territories, settler violence, humanitarian law, military operations, trade measures, research cooperation, and targeted sanctions.
These are legitimate issues, and every democracy at war should expect scrutiny. Yet the intensity of these debates can sometimes obscure the society that lives beyond them.
Beneath the headlines are millions of Israelis who go to work each morning, take children to school, care for elderly parents, and search for fragments of ordinary life while uncertainty has become a permanent companion. One can strongly oppose decisions made by the Israeli government while also recognizing the psychological burden carried by Israeli society.
These positions are not incompatible. To recognize the wounds carried by Israeli civilians is not to deny the suffering of Palestinians. It is to resist a politics in which empathy is treated as a limited resource. Compassion for civilians should never depend on agreement over policy.
Perhaps this helps explain why Israelis and Europeans so often speak past one another.
EU institutions and much of the European public debate tend to interpret Israel through the lenses of international and humanitarian law, diplomacy, and statecraft. Israelis, by contrast, experience the consequences in their homes, workplaces, schools, hospitals, and neighborhood pharmacies.
The same events arrive in Brussels as questions of policy and in Beersheba as questions of the pulse.
Beyond the pharmacy counter
The European Union was built to free its member states from the cycle of war that had scarred the continent for centuries. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine shattered the assumption that large-scale interstate conflict had become a relic of Europe’s past. Across the continent, governments once again speak of deterrence, defense, and rearmament.
Yet for most Europeans, war remains something observed just beyond their borders rather than woven into the fabric of everyday life. For Israelis, it is part of daily existence. That difference shapes more than foreign policy. It shapes how societies perceive risk, define security, and understand what it means to live a normal life.
The EU will continue debating Israel’s policies, and rightly so. But if it wishes to understand the society it critiques, it must also look beyond government offices in Jerusalem and diplomatic briefings. That understanding begins not only in the corridors of government but also in rehabilitation wards, psychiatric clinics, emergency rooms, and yes, even in neighborhood pharmacies.
If prolonged conflict has created a shared challenge, it has also created common ground. Despite profound disagreements, Israel and Europe continue to work together in medicine, trauma care, mental health, and biomedical research.
At a time when calls have grown in parts of Europe to restrict Israel’s participation in European research frameworks, including Horizon Europe, policymakers should take special care not to weaken civilian medical, trauma, mental-health, and biomedical partnerships.
These efforts address shared human challenges that transcend politics. They are among the few areas in which cooperation benefits both societies, regardless of their political differences.
As I carried my father’s medication home, I realized that the names I had heard throughout the morning were telling a story that extended far beyond the pharmacy counter.
Historians will record the battles, the ceasefires, and the treaties. Political scientists, international relations specialists, and legal scholars will debate strategy, deterrence, and international law. They should.
But another archive exists, one that rarely appears in history books. It is written not in official statements or military reports, but in the prescriptions that pass quietly from pharmacist to patient each day.
I walked into those four pharmacies to collect medication for my father. I walked out thinking about a country. What I heard that morning was not evidence of a nation growing weaker. It was a reminder that the deepest wounds of war are not always visible.
Long after the sirens fall silent and the headlines fade, conflict leaves its mark on hearts, minds, and bodies. That may prove to be its longest afterlife.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) and a professor of European studies and international relations in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.