Israel emerged from the disruptive shocks of modernity: mass politics, the modern state system, the world economy, social upheaval, empire, war, and prejudice. As a result, it came to occupy a central place in the way many Jews imagined collective continuity across the lines of state, ethnicity, and culture. For that reason, mourning on Yom Ha’atzmaut over the direction Israel has taken presupposes that Israel is not only a state, but a space of collective attachment, identification, and hope. When the state becomes bound up with domination, destruction, or moral failure, the injury is experienced as a historical, cultural, and collective loss, touching the very terms through which continuity, belonging, and self-understanding have been imagined.

There is, then, much to mourn on Yom Ha’atzmaut: first of all, the dead, the wounded, the displaced, the bereaved, and all those whose lives have been shattered by war, terror, and violence; but also the pursuit of national recognition through the negation of another people; the failure to imagine national existence on terms other than domination or disappearance; the reduction of a dense, entangled, and heterogeneous history to slogans of nation, religion, and civilizational struggle; and the inequality, devastation, denial, and despair that follow.

These are losses of the ordinary conditions that make a livable world possible, the very losses that helped make Israel thinkable in the first place, and whose recurrence within and through Israel now converts the promise of repair into the experience of renewed injury. What signifies refuge, continuity, and collective restoration also bears the marks of domination, fear, and suffering. These are losses of trust, moral orientation, historical understanding, and political possibility. They show that collective attachments are not abstractions but living social formations, vulnerable to being shaken when the protection of one people comes to depend upon the dispossession and vulnerability of another.

Mourning may be understood as a gradual reckoning with........

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