Why War?

I presented this text in an evening of conversation between psychoanalysts, about three months after the beginning of the October 7th War. In this text, I approach a reading of the war situation starting with Freud’s answer to Einstein, in “Why War?,” and based on his thinking about the situation of the war in his writings. I rely on the basic opposition Freud makes between conflict resolution, the means of violence and force in subduing and exterminating the adversary – which operate under the reign of the death drives, and the alternative of cooperation and establishing alliances between entities that operate in the service of the life drives. In my opinion, the current state of war embodies a sharp turn in the bloody history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and is the product of a process of a terrible alliance established over the years between agents of the death drives, on both sides of the conflict. Agents who hold messianic ideologies and pull the conflict toward their own agendas, aiming to bring forth the day of judgment and seeking justice in heaven. I claim that what leads and inflames the current state of war, what prevents both sides of the conflict from walking the path of compromise and act in the service of the life drives, is the difficulty and/or refusal to lose, or, in other words, the foreclosure of loss which is an essential and necessity for existence and life, as psychoanalysis and culture teach us.