In both Palestinian and Israeli cultures, mothers hold a central and significant social role and status, which is amplified when the mother loses a child in the context of the ongoing political violence in the area. The mourning mother becomes a figure symbolizing the nation, despite women's precarious position within the national project writ large, as explained by Anne McClintock and other feminist scholars. In this paper, I examine the function of the mother in mourning in two literary texts, one Arabic-Palestinian and one Hebrew-Israeli: Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Sa’ad’s Mother (1969) and David Grossman’s novel To the End of the Land (2008). While these texts were written decades apart, they both describe a mother dealing with the loss of her son in the conflict between Jews and Arabs in Israel/Palestine; the titular character’s son in Kanafani’s novella enlists as a fighter (fedaii) against Israel, and the protagonist’s son in Grossman’s novel is called to serve in a fictional military operation as an Israeli soldier. Importantly, the sons do not die during the events described in either of these texts, and yet they are engulfed in mourning. Death is constantly implied and even presupposed throughout these works, suggesting it is omnipresent even before it takes place and is an inescapable reality. Thus, the mothers’ mourning is not premature, because death is in fact imminent. Rather, the constant presence of death in situations of political turmoil disrupts the temporality of mourning, in what Ruth Ginzburg terms “pre-trauma.” Through these texts, I examine how being both before its time and in abeyance influences the concept of national mourning, as well as the function of motherhood and the gendered dynamics in relation to the national project. In the context of political violence and occupation, loss and mourning are often used to demarcate and separate between “us” and “them”, and so against this trend I suggest reading these texts together. My goal is not to create a flat symmetry, in a situation where the power dynamics between occupier and occupied are clear, but rather to challenge the national separation and view mourning as a deeply political process that requires contextualization. A comparative analysis allows me to read each text on its own terms, but likewise to bring the shared concepts and ideas into conversation with each other, beyond the national fortifications which engendered the loss in the first place.