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“Abandonment, simply abandonment, I have no other words to describe it. I feel I’m forsaken because the government has decided that the lives of Arabs are worthless. If you’re an Arab in Israel then there’s no one to protect you. Now they’ve learned, you can murder me and get away with it! Just because I’m an Arab”.
This is how Mona’s fourth analytical meeting of the week opened, the morning after it was announced that the suspect in the shooting that killed Mussa Hassuna, during the violent riots that broke out in the city of Lod, had been released from custody and would not be prosecuted.
I have been returning to this moment quite a bit since the seventh of October. I find a connective thread, connecting Mona’s feelings then to the grief experienced by the survivors of the massacre. And it’s always the same feeling, always the same word—“abandonment” as Mona lucidly stated, “I have no other words to describe it”.
“Countless generations which knew by rote, word for word, the story of Abraham—how many were made sleepless by it?” Søren Kierkegaard asks in his book ‘Fear and Trembling’ (, p. 25) and adds ”What they leave out of Abraham’s history is dread …and Yet Abraham believed, and his belief was for this life. If his faith had been only for a future life, he surely would have cast everything away in order to get out of this world to which he did not belong” (, p. 18).
In retrospect, I didn’t have the courage to be with Mona at that moment as my sleep wandered from me over the first weeks after the massacre. I didn’t have the courage to listen without leaving out the dread, to listen from within her. Now I can see how I held with empathy the loneliness that arose in the face of humanism’s collapse into evil, but I didn’t really understand the depth of the dread involved in the lack of presence of human moral conscience: the collapse of the empathic space, a self without a selfobject.
In Kohut’s lecture What Are Patients Angry About? (Kohut, 1972, p. 28) he ended by sayi