Keeping Hope Alive When the Third is Dead: Levantine Ethics Within a Perpetrating Polity

In this paper, I reexamine the concept of mutual acknowledgment within the context of violent conflict, particularly the war in Gaza. I ask what it means to keep hope alive when, in Gerson’s terms, the intersubjective third is experientially dead. Writing from within the current Israeli-Palestinian catastrophe, I suggest that the familiar psychoanalytic language of mutual recognition and dialogue no longer fits the reality of ongoing perpetration and radical asymmetry. I elaborate a Levantine/Mizrahi ethics of complex implication as a way of thinking subjectivity under perpetrator conditions, one that acknowledges responsibility for state violence while refusing both denial and totalizing guilt. Mizrahi and Levantine identities – living within contradictions rather than resolving them – offer resources for theorizing hope without immediate reconciliation. Shaped by histories of internal marginalization yet fully implicated in Israeli power, these positions generate a form of double consciousness, a bifocal awareness that holds together perpetration and vulnerability, hope and despair, without resolving them into a single coherent narrative. Through reflections on lived experience and on the work of the Mizrahi-Civic Collective, I illustrate how maintaining complexity against pressure to simplify becomes a form of resistance and a practice of hope. In psychoanalytic terms, the paper proposes complex implication and Mizrahi/Levantine identities as resources for sustaining hope without resolution when mutual recognition is not yet possible.