The study, led by doctoral researcher Dana Katsoty and published in the peer-reviewed journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, is among the first to track the bidirectional relationship between economic and psychological outcomes during an ongoing armed conflict. Beginning just two weeks after the October 7 attack, the research team followed 1,035 Jewish Israeli adults across four survey waves spanning a full year. At each point, participants reported symptoms of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress, alongside a detailed accounting of financial difficulties: job loss, unpaid leave, reduced income, increased expenses and business losses. This longitudinal design allowed the investigators to examine not just whether the two domains were correlated, but which tended to precede the other over time.

The answer, it turned out, was both — in a striking temporal sequence. In the earliest phase of the war, psychological state predicted economic outcomes. People reporting higher levels of depression and anxiety in the first weeks after the attack were more likely to experience economic hardship in the months that followed, a pattern consistent with a substantial body of occupational research showing that mental distress impairs concentration, decision-making, absenteeism and job performance. Then, as the war wore on, the causal arrow reversed. Financial difficulties emerged as predictors of subsequent increases in depression, anxiety and PTSD symptoms, suggesting that mounting economic pressure became a distinct psychological stressor in its own right, compounding the trauma of the conflict itself.

The sheer scale of psychological distress at the study’s outset underscores how extraordinary the starting conditions were. Two weeks after the attack, 55.8 percent of participants scored above the clinical cutoff for depression, and 61.1 percent exceeded the threshold for anxiety. For context, population-level prevalence of clinically significant depression in high-income countries typically hovers in the single digits to low teens. Those elevated rates declined substantially over the following six months, offering evidence of natural psychological resilience at the population level. But the improvement did not hold. By the one-year mark, symptoms began climbing again, and PTSD symptoms — measured later in the study because acute stress reactions are typically not assessed as post-traumatic disorder in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event — rose from 16.9 percent at six months to 21.4 percent after a full year.

Economic disruption proved equally pervasive. At every assessment point, a large share of participants reported at least one or two negative financial events, whether reduced income, job disruption, business losses or rising household expenses. The Israeli economy was profoundly disrupted by the war, with hundreds of thousands of workers displaced from their jobs, businesses in the north and south of the country shuttered, and reservists called up for extended military service. By the one-year mark, more than half of the study participants remained in the moderate economic-hardship category, indicating that for a majority of ordinary citizens, the financial consequences of the conflict were not a brief shock but a persistent condition.

Methodologically, the study’s strength lies in its dose-response analysis. The researchers found a clear gradient: the more negative economic events a participant experienced, the more severe their symptoms of depression, anxiety and PTSD tended to be. Crucially, this association held even after the team statistically controlled for age, gender, prewar income and level of exposure to wartime events. That adjustment matters, because a skeptic might argue that people closer to the fighting would naturally suffer both financially and psychologically. The persistence of the economic-hardship effect after controlling for exposure suggests that financial strain operates as an independent pathway to psychological harm, not merely as a proxy for danger.

Perhaps the most provocative finding was comparative. Economic hardship showed a stronger and more consistent association with mental health outcomes than the researchers’ overall measure of direct war exposure. The authors are careful to caveat this: different forms of exposure — displacement, rocket attacks, the death or injury of a loved one, personal combat experience — are notoriously difficult to compress into a single quantitative index, and any such measure risks underestimating the most severe experiences. Still, the pattern points to a plausible mechanism. Financial strain is uniquely persistent and invasive, seeping into daily routines and eroding a person’s sense of security, control and ability to plan for the future. Where a discrete traumatic event has a temporal boundary, the threat of insolvency does not.

The theoretical implications extend beyond this single conflict. Decades of research on socioeconomic gradients in health have established that poverty is a risk factor for mental illness, and disaster research has shown that economic losses predict post-disaster distress. What this study adds is temporal resolution during a prolonged, ongoing crisis: evidence that the relationship is genuinely bidirectional, with psychological vulnerability preceding economic decline and economic decline preceding psychological deterioration. This suggests that prolonged conflict can trap affected populations in what the researchers describe as a reinforcing loop, in which each domain continuously re-arms the other. The authors warn that without intervention, people affected by prolonged conflict may face a double burden, in which financial strain intensifies the psychological consequences of war and psychological distress makes economic recovery more difficult.

For policymakers, the practical message is that mental-health treatment and economic support cannot be scheduled sequentially. The researchers argue that emergency and rehabilitation programs should integrate psychological care with direct economic assistance, and that this integration is particularly urgent for people facing loss of income, employment instability or rising expenses. Cash transfers, employment protection, subsidized childcare and business support are not merely economic instruments; by this evidence, they are mental-health interventions. Conversely, psychological services may function as economic protection, helping people maintain the cognitive and emotional resources needed to keep working, budgeting and rebuilding. Katsoty summarized the core conclusion plainly: the psychological and economic consequences of prolonged conflict cannot be treated as separate problems, and supporting recovery may require addressing both at the same time.

As wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere grind on, the findings offer a sobering template for what recovery will actually require. Symptom rates in this cohort declined and then rebounded, a trajectory suggesting that one-year horizons may dramatically underestimate the long-term psychological cost of prolonged conflict, particularly as economic reserves deplete. The study followed participants for a single year; whether the reinforcing cycle documented here continues to tighten, stabilize or loosen in the years ahead remains an open empirical question. But the direction of the evidence is clear. If societies hope to rebuild after prolonged violence, they will need to treat the wallet and the mind not as separate recovery projects, but as two fronts of the same campaign.

Subject of Research: Bidirectional relationship between economic hardship and mental health during the Israel-Hamas war

Article Title: When war hits the wallet, mental health can suffer too

Article References: When war hits the wallet, mental health can suffer too. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: mental health, economic hardship, war, PTSD, depression, anxiety, longitudinal study, Israel, October 7, financial strain, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Among Jewish Israelis, the survey finds a strengthened sense of Israeli identity. Rather than eroding national cohesion, the traumas and conflicts of the past three years appear to have consolidated it, with respondents reporting that their identification with Israel has deepened since the attacks. The contrast with Arab Israeli respondents is stark and politically significant: Arab citizens of Israel were more likely to say that their sense of Israeli identity had weakened over the same period. This divergence points to a widening gap in how the country’s two major population groups experienced the same sequence of events, and it complicates any simple narrative about a nation unified by crisis. The Barometer’s longitudinal design, which allows comparison with earlier waves, makes these opposing trajectories visible in a way that single snapshots cannot.

Perhaps the most striking finding concerns geography and self-perception. When asked whether Israel is more like a Middle Eastern country or more like a European one, 42 percent of Israeli respondents chose the Middle Eastern description, while only 18 percent described Israel as more European. For a country whose founding generations often imagined themselves as an outpost of European civilization in the Levant, this represents a meaningful reorientation of collective self-understanding. The trend is even more pronounced among Arab respondents: the share of Arab Israelis who see Israel as a Middle Eastern country has more than tripled compared with the 2022 wave of the survey. Whatever the causes—regional diplomacy, prolonged conflict with neighbors, or a cooling toward European institutions—the direction of travel is unmistakable.

The survey also documents a widening perception gap between Israelis and Europeans on the question of Jewish safety. A substantial majority of Israeli respondents said that Israel is safer for Jews than Europe, a judgment that reflects both the memory of October 7 and Israeli perceptions of rising antisemitism on the continent. European respondents, by contrast, were far more divided on the same question, suggesting that the two publics inhabit sharply different realities when it comes to assessing where Jewish life is most secure. Among the four European countries surveyed, Poland stood out: 35 percent of Polish respondents—the highest share in any European sample—viewed Israel as the safer option for Jews, a notable result given Poland’s own complex history of Jewish life and loss.

Israeli attitudes toward the European Union have grown more skeptical as well. Compared with the 2024 wave, more Israeli respondents disagreed with the statement that the EU is, in general, a success, and this disagreement was particularly pronounced among Jewish Israelis. The finding arrives at a moment when relations between Israel and many European governments have been strained by the conduct and consequences of the Gaza war, and it suggests that the diplomatic friction is filtering down into public opinion. For a country that has long sought a special relationship with European institutions while officially belonging to no European bloc, the erosion of confidence in the European project represents a quiet but consequential shift in the political environment.

The Barometer also probes a question that has grown more uncomfortable for European observers: how Israelis view the continent’s far right. As in 2024, a large share of Jewish Israeli respondents said Israel should maintain ties with far-right parties in Europe if those parties support Israel. This pragmatic posture—prioritizing support for Israel over ideological compatibility—has long frustrated European Jewish communities who see populist nationalism as a threat. The survey adds a German dimension: fewer German respondents than in 2024 viewed the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as a dangerous development, with many saying the party’s ascent is no more dangerous than similar developments elsewhere in Europe. The normalization of a party that German establishment politics has long treated as beyond the pale is thus reflected not only in Israeli perceptions but in German self-assessment.

When Israelis are asked which European countries they consider friends of Israel, the ranking is unambiguous: Germany comes first, followed by Hungary. The prominence of Germany, a country whose relationship with Israel is shaped by historical responsibility, has been a consistent feature of the Barometer across waves, and Hungary’s second-place position reflects the Orbán government’s explicitly pro-Israel foreign policy. More surprising is the collapse of the Netherlands, which has fallen sharply in Israeli perceptions and now ranks among the countries seen as least friendly to Israel—a remarkable reversal for a state once regarded as one of Israel’s warmest European partners. At the other end of the emotional spectrum, Israeli respondents pointed most often to France and Spain when asked which European countries they perceive as most antisemitic, naming two governments that have taken prominently critical positions on Israel’s conduct of the war.

One of the Barometer’s longest-running questions concerns whether today’s Germany is a different Germany compared with the period before 1945. Here the survey records a subtle but telling decline: among Jewish Israelis, 67 percent answered yes in 2026, down from 75 percent in 2024. The generational pattern is equally significant, with older Jewish respondents more likely than younger ones to hold this view. The finding suggests that the postwar German project of earning Israeli and Jewish trust, built over decades of remembrance culture and staunch support, is not immune to erosion, whether through German political debates over the Gaza war, the mainstreaming of the AfD, or simply the passage of time as the generations with living memory of the Holocaust recede. That the decline is concentrated among younger respondents raises questions about how historical memory will continue to anchor the German-Israeli relationship in the decades ahead.

Prof. Dachs summarized the survey’s significance by observing that the Barometer captures a moment of profound reassessment: three years after October 7, Israelis are not only rethinking questions of security and identity, but also their relationship to Europe and the political forces shaping it. The methodological foundation of the study lends weight to these conclusions. The 2026 HU-EF Barometer is based on online surveys conducted by Kantar in Germany, Great Britain, France, and Poland, alongside a benchmark survey conducted in Israel. Each European country sample included 1,000 representative participants, while the Israeli sample comprised 1,003 respondents: 502 from the general sector, 250 Arab respondents, and 251 Orthodox Jewish respondents. Fieldwork in the four European countries was carried out in June and July 2026, with Israeli fieldwork conducted in May 2026. The questionnaire took approximately eight minutes to complete, and the sampling error is 3.1 percent per total market sample, a margin that places the headline findings on solid statistical ground.

Taken together, the 2026 Barometer paints a portrait of an Israeli society turning inward and eastward: more confident in its own identity, more convinced of its own indispensability to Jewish safety, more doubtful of the European project, and more willing to engage with political forces on the continent that traditional pro-European constituencies regard with alarm. The divergence between Jewish and Arab Israeli respondents on identity, the tripling of the Arab Israeli share viewing Israel as Middle Eastern, and the Dutch fall from favor all indicate that the realignment is not uniform but layered across communities and issues. What the survey cannot yet show is whether these shifts are durable transformations or acute responses to war that will soften as time passes. The Barometer’s value lies precisely in its ability to answer that question in future waves, tracking whether the Israel of 2026—a country that increasingly sees itself as Middle Eastern, safer than Europe, and skeptical of the EU—becomes the settled self-image of the next decade or a snapshot of a nation in the midst of crisis.

Subject of Research: Israeli and European public perceptions of Israeli identity, Jewish safety, and Israel-Europe relations three years after the October 7 attacks

Article Title: Three years after October 7, Israelis reassess identity, safety, and Europe, Hebrew University survey finds

Article References: Three years after October 7, Israelis reassess identity, safety, and Europe, Hebrew University survey finds. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: October 7, Hebrew University, Barometer survey, Israeli identity, Jewish safety, Europe, European Union, Germany, antisemitism, far-right parties, Arab Israelis, public opinion