‘We Had No One but Ourselves’: Barriers to help-seeking and resilience among Arab-Palestinian adolescents in Israel during war

Abstract The war that began in Israel on 7 October 2023 (ongoing) has profoundly disrupted civilian life. Arab-Palestinian adolescents who are citizens of Israel faced not only the general hardships of conflict, fear, disruption, and uncertainty, but also ethnic discrimination, systemic neglect, and sociopolitical marginalization. This qualitative study explores their lived experiences, drawing on six focus-group interviews with 34 adolescents (ages 12–18) from diverse Arab-Palestinian communities. Two core themes emerged: barriers to accessing formal support (e.g. schools and state-linked services perceived as unsafe, surveilling, or misaligned) and resilience strategies developed through informal support systems, especially families and peer networks, that provided emotional regulation, meaning-making, and a sense of safety when institutional care felt inaccessible. Adolescents described trauma both explicitly (sleeplessness, hyperarousal) and muted (vigilance, exhaustion, self-censorship under language policing). The study advances an emergent explanatory model of politically embedded informal resilience and highlights practice implications for social work, including building trusted micro-contexts in schools, equipping families and peers with brief, culturally anchored supports, and reducing institutional threat signals to foster safe help-seeking.