In considering the Israel-Palestine conflict, focus has remained on conventional major issues: borders, settlements, Jerusalem, Palestinian refugee rights and water. Should there be one binational state, or two states for two peoples? Yet this is a conflict that is sustained by factors more profound than the dispute over limited resources or competing nationalisms. The parties’ narratives, continually rehearsed, speak of a cataclysmic event or chain of events, a collective trauma, which has created such deep suffering and disruption that the rehearsers remain ‘frozen’ amid the overarching context of political violence. This study offers a critical analysis of the concept of collective trauma together with the role of commemorative practices, including core contemporary canonical days of memory, and asks to what extent they may hinder progress in the resolution of an intractable conflict, such as the Israel/Palestine conflict. Without addressing the powerful traumatic current that underpins a chronic conflict, no amount of top-down formal peace-making is likely to be sustainable.