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In this exploration of the position of Mizrahi Jews living in Israel and faced with the genocide taking place in Gaza, Nissim Avissar delineates the tension between complicity and vulnerability, denial and guilt, hope and death. Describing a community placed between “living in constant translation” and “Arab melodies in Hebrew words,” he evokes the complexity of being identified as both perpetrator and victim. This is a subjectivity that works actively against the collapse of the third into the splitting and projection that allow cycles of violence and retribution to play themselves out through generations of conflict. From a post-apartheid South African perspective, I followed Avissar’s argument into an exploration of the conditions under which thinking (thirdness) becomes possible. This is concerned with destruction and recognition, and in Winnicott’s terms the movement from object relating to object usage. Then I look at the interplay between aliveness and deadness, aggression and the death drive, in constituting the possibility of witnessing and transformation. Finally, my response turns to the nature of hope in the face of overwhelming atrocity and annihilation.