“Murderous Mourning” In the Shadow of Genocide

This commentary responds to Chana Ullman’s reflections on witnessing Israeli suffering after October 7th, written by a Lebanese psychoanalyst in the immediate aftermath of Israeli military operations across Lebanon. It examines the psychic, social, and historical conditions that have foreclosed mourning and witnessing in contemporary Israeli society. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Israeli anthropological studies of militarized childhood, and Holocaust trauma history, the author argues that Israeli collective life is organized around what Joshua Durban calls “murderous mourning”: a condition in which the collapse of symbolization forecloses mourning, resulting in violence and manic defense. The essay traces how cultural militarism functions as a pervasive social-symbolic matrix through which Israeli children are socialized into narratives of existential threat, persecution and sacrifice – through collapses of temporal and relational differentiation that blur distinctions between past and present, civilian and combatant, child and soldier. Such configurations intensify primitive anxieties, contribute to persecutory forms of collective organization, and create what Sam Gerson calls the “Dead Third.” One Israeli first-grader’s statement captures the deadened social world being transmitted: “Henn was born dead.” This foreclosure of mourning cannot be understood apart from Zionist ideology and the disavowed violence surrounding the State’s founding: establishing a culture of knowing and not-knowing and a double bind in which acknowledging the Nakba is experienced as annihilation, making mourning structurally impossible and its substitutes, including violence, psychically inevitable. Genuine witnessing requires reckoning with these foundational fractures – including disavowal and cultural militarism – a precondition for mourning, aliveness, and ethical relation to the other.