Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef. Israel’s former Chief Rabbi gave us a master class this week. Against the background of the tensions between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, he declared, “Did Trump turn against us for no reason? It is because of the decrees against Torah scholars.” At the same appearance, he called the Attorney General “Jezebel,” all because state authorities are enforcing the law against yeshiva students who failed to report for service. An embarrassment of riches. Where does one even begin? With the mangled speech? The political ignorance? The vulgarity? Or should we content ourselves with the desecration of God’s name?

Rabbi Yosef’s explanation of Trump’s conduct is not political analysis. It is tribal magic. In his world, the President of the United States has no American interests, no international struggles, no economic calculations, no power contests, no desire for an agreement with Iran, and no complicated relationship with Netanyahu. He is an agent of Providence, punishing the State of Israel because its authorities dared to demand that young Haredi men carry some portion of the burden borne by others their age.

Reality, as usual, is a little more complicated, and therefore rather difficult for His Dishonour, Rabbi Yosef, to grasp. President Trump is indeed pursuing an arrangement with Iran, demanding a reduction in the fighting in Lebanon, and publicly criticizing Netanyahu’s conduct. He has said that Netanyahu needs a “softer touch” in Lebanon and, on another occasion, that the United States must keep him “somewhat sane.” Their dispute concerns war, Iran, Lebanon, and Trump’s attempt to reshape the region according to his own interests. It is doubtful that this president, whose intellectual stature is hardly more impressive than Yosef’s, even knows that the yeshiva student exists.

Yosefs’s stupidity goes far beyond a factual error. The very notion that the entire world revolves around yeshiva students lies somewhere between grandiosity and intellectual limitation. In his telling, hundreds of millions of people in the Middle East, wars, oil, nuclear weapons, relations among great powers, the global economy, American elections, and Trump’s personal ambitions are all mere scenery for the only struggle that truly matters: whether a Haredi young man will be required to report to a recruitment office.

This is the sealed world of fundamentalism. And here is one of its senior figures, unable to understand reality because he is ignorant and limited and therefore left with only one option: to force his mythology upon it. Every success is a reward for Torah study. Every disaster is punishment for harming those who study it. Anyone who tries to test the claim is immediately branded an enemy of Torah. A perfect defense system against any assault by facts.

The phrase “Ben Torah” (A Tora child) itself deserves scrutiny. What makes a person a son of Torah? Is sitting in a yeshiva enough? Is Torah measured by the number of hours spent bent over a lectern, or by the way a person honors or humiliates other human beings? What is a man who calls a public servant “Jezebel” merely because she is doing her job? Crude, repellent, and a disgrace to the Torah he claims to represent. Is this a Torah that recognizes and honors every human being created in the divine image, or a violent system that has licensed itself to humiliate anyone who stands in its way?

The sages of the Mishnah gave us the proper model: “Hillel said: Be among the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, loving humanity and drawing people close to Torah.” I assume the core curriculum of this narrow minded man did not include Maimonides’ magnificent commentary on that teaching: “They said that when Aaron, peace be upon him, sensed that a person was corrupt within, or was told that he was corrupt and had committed a transgression, he would greet him warmly, befriend him, and speak with him at length... and that man would become ashamed of himself... and return to the right path.”

Mr. Yosef, loving the members of your own camp is not enough, nor are the looting of budgets you did not produce, the evasion of service, and the accumulation of political power. A disciple of Aaron is judged by his treatment of other people, especially those who are not subject to his authority. A man who loves Torah in your fashion and hates human beings as you do has understood neither Torah nor humanity.

Today’s Haredi leadership could hardly be further from the disciples of Aaron. It belongs to a government that has turned callousness into policy and cruelty into a language. It lends legitimacy to a government whose senior figures incite, humiliate, threaten, and sanctify force. It will never stand before the throne and say, enough. It sits at the government’s table, gorges itself, and leaves not a crumb for anyone else.

In doing so, it has betrayed one of the Torah’s oldest functions. The prophet was not the king’s courtier. He did not request a budget in exchange for silence. He stood before David, Ahab, and Jeroboam and reminded them that there is a law above government. Jewish tradition was not born to grant immunity to the sovereign, but to set limits upon him. Not one of today’s rabbis is capable of confronting the king as Shimon ben Shetach did, one of the founders of the Torah world they claim as their own, when he ordered the King of Israel to stand and face judgment. And our own Rishon LeZion, first in title and petty in spirit, is an idler, a coward, and a wretched inciter.

Something deeper is also happening within the public they lead. Growing parts of it are being swept into Kahanist nationalism. The alliance between political Haredism and Kahanism is no accident. The two movements share a similar psychological structure. Both divide the world into the pure and the impure, the loyal and the traitorous, the chosen and the enemy. Both despise doubt, complexity, and universal responsibility. Both regard compromise as weakness, compassion as submission, and equality as a threat. One brings the rabbinic seal, the other a metaphorical pistol and a hangman’s noose. Together they manufacture a Judaism containing almost nothing of the spirit that sustained the Jewish people for generations.

This is one of the bitter ironies of our time. People who call themselves “Torah scholars” support nearly everything opposed to its spirit. The Torah commands love for the stranger, and they seek to expel him. It warns against the tyranny of government, and they bind themselves to its atrocities. It demands one law for citizen and stranger, and they take part in a regime of discrimination. It places human life at the center, and they embrace a cult of death and killing. It declares that the king is subject to law, and they wage war against every institution that seeks to restrain their king.

Hence also the insult to those required to carry the burden. A secular or religious young person may leave home, risk his life, be wounded, or be killed, while his Haredi peer is portrayed as protecting him through study. And when the state asks even to discuss a different distribution of responsibility, it is described as a “decree.” Not a civic argument, not a dispute over policy, but a cosmic persecution of Torah itself. In this way, every possibility of conversation is blocked in advance. Whoever opposes the exemption is not merely mistaken, but wicked. A woman who enforces the law does not hold a different view, she is “garbage.”

Such language is not a slip of the tongue. It is a system of rule. First the opponent is stripped of dignity, then of legitimacy, and finally of the right to take part in shared life. This is precisely how fundamentalism turns from private belief into dangerous political power. Israel’s nationalist Haredi core is part of that war. It is not an alternative to Muslim or Christian fundamentalism, but a member of the same family. Each speaks in the name of a god alien to the moral faith it claims to represent, and all grant the little man the same dangerous exemption from thought, doubt, and responsibility.

Can rabbis be stupid? Certainly. But private stupidity is not the greatest problem. The danger begins when stupidity acquires an audience, a political party, a government budget, and religious authority. It grows worse when ignorance is presented as faith, vulgarity as zeal for Heaven, and selfishness as the defense of Torah.

The answer is not less Torah, but deeper Torah. A Torah unafraid of the world and unwilling to lie about it. A Torah that asks responsibility of a person, not immunity; partnership, not privilege; peace, not the adoration of war. A Torah whose students might truly become disciples of Aaron. Until that day comes, the simple truth should be spoken aloud: not everyone who has studied Torah has learned wisdom. Not everyone called rabbi is fit to lead. Not everyone who speaks in God’s name serves anything but himself. There are stupid rabbis in Zion. One of them even bears the title Rishon LeZion, the First of Zion’s idiots.

I have seen you once more in your helplessness,
and my heart was on the verge of tears.
How suddenly you have grown poor,
how you have lost the power to save!

H. N. Bialik

I have no faith in you or in the army you command. When you and the country’s leaders try to blind me with cinematic operations in distant places, I refuse to be blinded. My eyes remain open and my ears hear everything taking place in the territories nearby. The fire in Tehran and the flames in Gaza will neither illuminate the darkness for which you are responsible, nor atone for your guilt there. I write to you because silence has become complicity. I believe that crimes of this kind are made possible, in part, by those who stand aside, indifferent or exhausted. I want no part with them.

Above you sits a reckless Prime Minister whose crimes are as numerous as his lies. Alongside him stand base and corrupt ministers who will yet face judgment and serve their sentences. Not one of them grants you protection of any kind. Not one of them exempts you from anything.

You are the sovereign. This is not a political metaphor. By force of international law and by the very definition of the role you accepted, you are the sovereign responsible for the lives of the people living under the rule of the occupying army. No narrow reading of your office has ever reduced your responsibility to the lives of soldiers and settlers alone. The lives of those who have no rights, and whose fate depends on your authority, are also your responsibility. Unsupervised weapons, soldiers’ involvement, unrestrained fire, the decision of an officer, the policy of a commander, the crimes of an armed settler, the provocations of members of Knesset and ministers: all of it is yours. No one else’s.

Perhaps no one has reported this to you yet, so allow me to inform you: crimes take place every day in the territories under your control. Murder, looting, expulsion, harassment, systematic humiliation, and judicial abuse. All of these crimes wear uniforms. These are not isolated acts by a lawless fringe. They form a persistent, recurring, documented pattern, taking place before the eyes of your army, and more than once with its active participation. The army under your command is failing in prevention, in protection, in deterrence. You have not deterred innocent Palestinians. You have failed to deter settlers whose conduct is criminal through and through. This failure repeats itself so often that it can no longer be called failure. An act that repeats itself year after year, village after village, is no longer a malfunction. It is ideology and policy.

Soldiers under your command carry weapons bought with my taxes and distributed by the state in its negligence. They are present at these scenes. They stand aside. They shield the perpetrators. More than once, they take part. Are your orders today in fact designed to harm the victims and embolden the attackers? How else can one understand your impotence?

I will spare you the hollow excuses in advance. Do not tell me the army is examining the matter; show me the results. Do not tell me the army is investigating or drawing lessons; act. As long as this remains the ongoing reality, the conclusion is inescapable: you and the army under your command have become the long arm of the hilltop criminals. No lie issued by a spokesperson will bleach away that stain.

Here is the question that cannot be evaded. You command an army whose wondrous capabilities can identify a specific window in Tehran and penetrate it with precision, an army that can detonate a pager against a terrorist’s body with grotesque accuracy. Yet in the face of these primitive rampages and their institutional enablers, you ask me to believe that you are incapable? An army able to reach targets thousands of kilometers away must also be able to reach every illegal outpost. Since this never happens, the problem is evidently not capability. The problem is will. And if you do not know where they are, you can always consult Google maps, or the Home Front Command’s instructions; they have the detailed list. Should the task prove too difficult, I would be glad to furnish you with coordinates, names, intelligence targets, and the precise whereabouts of inciting rabbis and members of Knesset who remain at large.

The responsibility, therefore, is yours personally. If you are unable to impose your authority, you are unfit to continue in your role. If you have the capability and choose not to use it, the responsibility is graver still. If ministers in the government are binding your hands, say so clearly and stand against them. For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for us from elsewhere, while you and your government shall perish utterly. Resignation too can be an act of leadership. Refusing to serve as a fig leaf is courage of the first order. If you are merely following orders, I understand the message. If you do not stand against them in every public square, you do not understand the message. This is the only front from which a true existential threat to Israel now arises, and you have abandoned it.

Until you act, the matter is simple: I have no faith in you. I oppose the manner in which you fulfil your role, and I believe that service under your command in the occupied territories must be refused. The details are known. The responsibility is clear. Only your position remains unknown.

You will have no protection when you stand accused before human and Jewish judgment. For the truth cries out from the earth, together with the blood of the innocent whose deaths you failed to prevent.

And if the strength of all of you together has failed
to save your own lives,
is there no man in Judah,
is there not one in all your ranks,
a man of valor, a ruler in strength, great of spirit
and a leader of the people,
resolute and pure of heart,
who will seize you by the hair of your head
and shake you with a firm hand
so as to restore your spirit and your strength
to you, and to raise you up?...

Bialik

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This is not merely a humanitarian question. It is, above all, a question of moral and political responsibility. Gaza did not destroy itself. It was destroyed by human hands, Israeli hands. It was destroyed through deliberate decisions, precise orders, and weapons manufactured, sold, and fired precisely for these purposes. These ruins are the result of actions for which someone must be held accountable. The chain of responsibility must therefore be followed with exactitude.

One simple principle must guide every discussion about Gaza’s future. As at a market stall selling household goods: you break it, you pay for it. Whoever destroyed must pay. This is neither vengeance nor punishment. It is the basic norm between one person and another, between a state and its citizens, between whoever fires and whoever is struck by the fire. Plain morality calls it a human obligation.

Israel stands at the head of the list of those who owe. It is the state that decided to turn Gaza into heaps of rubble. Hamas’s criminals emerged from it and committed their atrocities in Black October, but Israel’s disproportionate response made it fully accountable. The self defense of the first days became a campaign of vengeance and a deliberate application of ideologies of expulsion and degradation. For that alone, payment is due. The field of destruction, unseen since the Second World War, is the result of a calculated, merciless, and boundless policy. Many thousands of buildings were damaged or demolished. Tens of thousands of people were killed, and hundreds of thousands were wounded and harmed. The majority were innocent of any crime. Decades of labor and billions of shekels invested in water infrastructure, electricity, hospitals, and schools were wiped from the face of the earth. There was no security justification for any of it, and therefore Israel’s debt and obligation are immense. No other country in the world should send a single shekel into Gaza before Israel invests its best resources there.

But Israel could not have inflicted all this evil on its own. Someone supplied the weapons. Others sold the bulldozers of destruction. The smart munitions and cluster bombs did not arrive by themselves at the killing zones. The diplomatic umbrella enabled the entirety of this evil as well. The United States, Germany, Britain, France, and many other countries continued to sell weapons and instruments of destruction even after it was already entirely clear what their purpose was and what their results would be: the indiscriminate killing of civilians and relentless devastation. How many bombs fired at Gaza were manufactured in Texas, Bavaria, or the British “Regional Defense and Security Clusters”? How many were paid for with tax money from citizens in other countries who did not know, or who knew and did not ask? Every state, every corporation, and every arms dealer that sold equipment used in this systematic destruction must pay. Partners in destruction must become partners in financing and reconstruction.

This can be calculated with great precision, from the first bullet to the last cent. Every supplier and profiteer of the war, and there are many, must be required to pay their proportional share of the reconstruction. And the Israeli death factories must pay first.

There is one more player that finds it convenient to remain unmentioned: the Jewish people in the Diaspora. Not because they are guilty of the crimes Israel committed, God forbid. Nor because, for many years, Jewish establishment organizations around the world gave unequivocal support to the Israeli political machine that made all this possible. The reason is moral obligation and collective responsibility. The Jewish people built massive fundraising campaigns for Israel in its times of need. At this time, a campaign for the reconstruction of Gaza would be the deepest expression of Judaism. Not the Judaism of Ben Gvir and Smotrich, with its racism and hatred, but the Judaism of Hillel the Elder, whose essence, on one foot, is this: what was hateful to us, we must not do to others. And if we have done the most hateful thing of all, we must make amends.

One more question must stand at the center of Israeli political debate. In the coming elections, every politician must answer a simple question: what is your plan for Gaza, and where will the money come from to rebuild what was destroyed? Any candidate who evades this question, who tries to divert attention to supposedly “security related” matters without confronting the debt and the obligation, is no leader. Just another escapist in a suit.

The question of who will pay for Gaza is painful, complicated, and binding. Precisely for these reasons it is the right question. We already know what happens when debris remains in ruins. It becomes fertile ground for the next generation of hatreds. In Gaza, where the war has ended for no one who truly lives there, reconstruction is not a reward. It is the only condition for the war’s end.

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We can dispense with the threadbare arguments of the “imagine a European or American country whose major parties pledge in advance to form a coalition without Jews” variety. What a festival of weeping and self pity that would produce. Yet once again, what is forbidden to the rest of the world is permitted to Israeli Jews when they turn it against Palestinians, who happen to be no less Semitic than we are. And so, let us stay here and dig inward, into the Zionist questions themselves.

It is amusing, even ridiculous, to watch this Zionist Olympiad. Worn out politicians with nothing to offer but incitement compete over who is the better Zionist. “I am a Zionist” and “you are a post Zionist,” “he is a Zionist by the book” and “she is most certainly not.” “Post Zionist” has already become a terrible curse, the worst. What are they actually talking about? Herzl’s idea, at least in its political architecture, was clear enough: to establish in the Levant a nation state on the nineteenth century Central European model, a parliamentary democracy within which the challenges of the Jewish collective would be resolved. The passage from an ancient religious people to a secular modern nation was essential, and it arrived with explicit instructions: “We shall respect the rabbis, but we shall see to it that their place is in the synagogues, just as the army’s place is in the barracks.” That held for very little time. Today, the further right you move along the Zionist scale, the more the rabbis find themselves inside the army’s barracks, and the army becomes the long, extended arm of the religious rioters. The further left you move, the more you are gripped by blind loyalty to that same unruly army and by continuous groveling before the rabbis. Zionism, at both its poles, now worships precisely the institutions Herzl sought to keep within their bounds.

What is the problem? This definition of “Zionist” is superfluous to begin with, and whoever still insists on using it does so in the service of exclusion and malice. Zionism was the movement meant to allow the Jewish people to pass from a dispersed, diasporic order to a new structure of government, centralized and sovereign. It was the scaffolding that made the move from the old house to the new one possible. In May 1948 the task was completed. The new house was inaugurated in an unprecedented elation for the Jewish people, and in an appalling catastrophe for the Palestinian people. Amid all the jubilation and panic, no one remembered to remove the scaffolding, even though it had been entirely redundant from the day the house was built. Since then, every Israeli has had three names. Our family name is: we are all human beings, like all other creatures. Our middle name is: Israelis, by virtue of our identity card and citizenship. And the first name varies according to each person’s religious or cultural identity. What do we need a fourth name for, the Zionist one? What does it add that the other three do not already cover? Nothing good.

The test of “are you a Zionist” serves in Israel to build a ladder of loyalty and privilege, even though no single definition captures the whole range of those who call themselves Zionists. Everyone knows who is privileged and who is left outside the fence. Zionism is the filter, the sorting device by which Israelis discriminate against one another.

The right uses its Zionism to discriminate against Arabs. The secular camp uses its Zionism to despise the ultra Orthodox. The ultra Orthodox, too, enter the game and call themselves Zionists in order to curse the refugees and the migrant workers, recall with no longing Eli Yishai. Each has its own Zionist filter. A true democratic state cannot sustain itself over time on such a method. In a democratic state, citizenship is meant to be the only status, with no ideological identity tests. The moment the Zionism test took the place of the citizenship test, democracy died from within. We of all people ought to know this, for sorting human beings by the state is precisely the selection that Jews were forced to undergo so many times in history. It seems the Jewish camel cannot see its own racist hump.

For this reason, the contemporary use of the Zionist test is far more than an old relic of language. It is a betrayal of Israeliness. It tells the citizens, and Arab citizens in particular, that their belonging to the state is conditional, contingent on their submission to the ideological framework of the Jewish majority. It is also a betrayal of democracy, for a true democracy belongs to all its citizens, and not only to those who pass a national test within it. When “Zionist” becomes a synonym for legitimate, then “the one who is not a Zionist” automatically becomes a suspect, fit to receive the entire package of exclusions and discriminations. So let it be clear: I am not a Zionist, I am an Israeli. Zionism completed its task in 1948, and I came into the world after its expiry date. An Israeli, like all Israelis, members of my own people and members of other peoples, those who think as I do and those whose views are the opposite of mine. We are all equal to one another.

In this sharp and painful sense, Zionism in today’s Israel has become racism. As long as those who claim they would replace the racial doctrine that holds power today keep evading the plain declaration that they stand for full civic equality, without all the Zionist shticks and tricks, they are essentially the same thing. Nicer, a little more secular, and yet just as selective and just as far from equality. The true democratic alternative will begin the moment someone within the political system dares to declare, in a clear voice, that the State of Israel belongs to all its citizens, and that their citizenship is the only category that determines their standing. Until that voice is heard, clearly and without evasion, those who offer only a more polite version of the same hierarchy do not deserve our vote.

That wretched Knesset has finally decided to dissolve itself. Israel is going to elections. But over what, exactly? The noise is so deafening, the failures so endless, death dancing through the streets and Netanyahu frolicking with it. It is hard to imagine a government so thoroughly undeserving that still manages to hold its ground. Amid all the tumult you can no longer tell whether you are more for or more against. A long line of talents, genuine and invented, fans out their faded peacock feathers for display. They solicit your trust in order to betray it with greater skill than their rivals. A thousand slogans are already airborne, and it is difficult to focus on what matters. So, for the bewildered voter and the confused observer, here is a map of the elections.

In the uppermost layer, the visible and performative one, the great Israeli talent show is underway. Politics as reality show. A competition of egos, anxieties, and images. Who looks more like a leader, who has killed more Arabs. No one is offering real ideas, genuine values, or honest alternatives. Just more of the same, slightly rearranged. The parties have no worldview whatsoever; they are marketing platforms built around the himbo standing at their helm. There are almost no voters casting ballots for an ideology. Some are simply indifferent, and the rest are offered no such “merchandise” in the first place. Within this sub-culture, people elect the efficient CEO, or the least-bad candidate, and that is the end of it.

Beneath that circus churns a far heavier and more toxic layer: the eternal question of yes or no to Netanyahu. For years this despicable person managed to do the most dangerous thing any politician can do to a democracy: turn himself into the sun around which the entire political system revolves. Like an absolute French monarch, he convinced himself and the cult of his devotees that the state and he are one. His supporters stopped asking what is right and proper and what is wrong and shameful. They surrendered to a single question: what is good for Netanyahu. His opponents stopped asking what kind of society they want to build and became consumed by the narrower obsession: how to rid themselves of this tumor. So, Israel came apart from a country that owed itself a political debate about its unresolved existential questions into hostile tribes, one animated by a personality cult and the other by a fixation against that same personality. A collective psychosis around one man. No question of borders, occupation, economy, discrimination, violence, crime, corruption, justice, or peace. Only yes-Bibi, no-Bibi.

But even this layer is not the real story. Because beneath the struggle over Netanyahu hides a far harder truth: nearly the entire Israeli political establishment has already made its terms with the fact that Palestinians between the river and the sea, will never have real freedom, and that Israeli Jews will remain ensnared forever in the jaws of this enmity. This is where the great differences between the camps ends. The Israeli right has simply stopped being ashamed of what it once tried to conceal. It speaks openly of transfer and works toward its implementation. Settler militias operate with the blessing of ministers and members of Knesset to cleanse the occupied territories. They erase villages and communities, impose hunger, expulsion, and total destruction. They will not stop until they complete the catastrophe of 1948. The October war unleashed these dark impulses in them. There is no longer any pretense. Years of occupation, siege, and dehumanization have ripened, and now large portions of the public will vote for politicians who dream of genocide, eat cake decorated with a hanging rope, and advance their vision of transfer wherever an opening presents itself.

Facing all this stands the alternative. Liberal, so to speak. Very much so to speak. Because they have long ceased to be a moral alternative. They are only a more cultured style of managing the same reality. Of course they are shocked, obviously they condemn their rivals on the right. But not one of them possesses the essential organs from which minimum courage flows, to put forward a complete alternative to Israel’s atrocities. Voting for them is voting for a different crime: apartheid. They want occupation with the High Court, discrimination with manners, Jewish supremacy with softer constitutional language. That is the real difference today between large parts of the center and the right: not a dispute over domination itself, only over its aesthetics. And that is the sorrowful conclusion: the real choice the Israelis will have to choose is between genocide and apartheid. They call it a Zionist government.

Every election cycle we are told these are the most fateful elections ever. This time they are, without question, fateful, and more tragic than any before. Millions of Israelis will walk to the ballot box feeling they are choosing between different possibilities, even though in practice almost no one is offering any real way out of the dead ends. There is no significant political force willing to state plainly the most basic truth: there will be no Israel, simply none, so long as all these “Zionists” insist on sustaining over time a reality that grants full freedom to Jews and rules over Palestinians with unprecedented cruelty. What we have witnessed until now is only the prologue. The entire system will inevitably become far more violent, corrupt, and brutal. This is not an accidental moral failing. It is the internal logic of the regime itself. And between Yair Golan of the “Zionist left,” working to “advance civilian (not military) separation in the West Bank,” and Lieberman and whatever lies beyond him, the distance is very small, if it exists at all. Fifty shades of right.

The coming elections are therefore not a choice between different futures but between different degrees of denial. Between those who openly sanctify the violence on which the system is built and those who prefer to wrap it in more restrained and polished language. And this may be the deepest defeat of Israeli society today: not only has it lost peace, but it has also lost even the capacity to imagine it. They must not be voted for. The alternative lies beyond them. But it is not suited to Zionist cowards.

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Jus ad Bellum, the right to go to war, must include a just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, last resort, reasonable proportion between means and ends, and a reasonable chance of success. Alongside it stand the Jus in Bello, the laws of war. At their center, the distinction between combatants and civilians, and a proper relation between the force of fire and its consequence. All of these were meant to set red lines between permitted war and forbidden war, yet they have become just a rhetorical lexicon, a washing machine by which states attempt to launder violence and crimes in moral detergents and in the language of rights and justice.

The reality test in Gaza and in Iran shattered the just war. After October 7 Israel had a classical claim of self defense, of the kind that even rigorous antiwar critique would have struggled to reject. We had then a just cause, legitimate authority, and a real threat to civilians. The justness of the war was rarely ever more deserved, at least in the eyes of those who would justify it. Then, instead of necessary and legitimate self defense, Israel set out on a campaign of vengeance, killing, and merciless destruction, all driven by a governmental ideology that is criminal through and through, and with its own hands it erased every shred of legitimacy from its actions. Hamas’s crimes demand a response, yet they fall far short of justifying tens of thousands of civilian dead, the destruction of infrastructure on an unprecedented scale, planned starvation, and the uprooting of a population. The sum of Israel’s crimes in Gaza exceeds any possible definition of self defense. The justice of conduct is gone, the proportion between means and ends is lost, the distinction between Hamas and civilians has been erased, and collective punishment has taken the place of targeted military action. The Kosher certificate granted to the wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran became, in the eyes of Netanyahu and his gang, became a license to kill in almost every kind of criminal conduct, of which there is no shortage.

Iran displayed the failure in its most distilled form. Israel’s Prime Minister and Washington’s leaders justified the attack on the nuclear facilities in the summer of 2025 as a preventive war, or as a preemptive operation meant to remove a future threat. Yet from Nuremberg to our own day international law has viewed with deep suspicion any attempt to legitimize war on the basis of a future danger that has not yet materialized. The legal debate over preventive wars and preemptive strikes has continued for decades, yet the very fact that any state can present its fears as justification for aggression exposes the flaw at the foundation of the system. The moment any state is permitted to attack another in the name of a presumed threat, everything collapses, because any war can then be presented as self defense. To my mind, presenting a preventive war as a just war is the final stop on the funeral procession of just wars. If even these counts as justice, almost anything can count as justice.

The collapse of the red lines stems from an inherent flaw built into the very conception. It imagined a neutral judge who would determine when the red line had been crossed, yet when Trump and Netanyahu are the judges, the outcome is known in advance. The termination of the just war is, for them, only part of their broader campaign of liquidating every domestic and international judicial institution. In place of morality against wars, they have adopted incitement to war. Any war that preserves their political standing has become just in their own eyes and in the eyes of their cult of followers; the deaf, the mute, and the blind. They have joined Putin, the third world thugs, and the crime barons, turning violence into the operating principle of choice. Instead of working to abolish war as a form of relations between peoples and human beings. The naive separation between the justice of going to war and the justice of its conduct held up for some decades, yet from the moment it granted figures like Netanyahu and Trump an almost unlimited space to violate its rules, the distinction meant to restrain violence became the mechanism that enables it.

The alternative is a shift from the conception of a just war to a conception of a just peace. A conceptual framework that places peace itself as a moral project with conditions, as a mirror image of the just war, which set conditions for the act of violence. A just peace differs from a negative peace, which is no more than a ceasefire that leaves the wrong in place. It is a positive peace, demanding a structural change of the relations that gave birth to the violence in the first place. It overlaps with the ancient Jewish principles of repair: with Teshuvah in its Maimonidean sense, which requires “regret for the past and acceptance for the future,” the return of stolen property before any request for pardon, and with the full and comprehensive meaning of the concept of Shalom, peace.

Four foundations constitute the just peace.

• Historical recognition of the wrong, an official public acknowledgment that what happened did indeed take place and that the perpetrator bears responsibility. This is a recognition that goes beyond an empty declaration or a polite apology.

• After it comes substantive compensation: restoration wherever possible, or monetary and territorial compensation where restoration is impossible, the return of full rights. Recognition and compensation lead to a structural change that prevents recurrence. Since to settle for compensation for the past while preserving the mechanisms of control and supremacy is to prepare the next round of violence.

• The just peace requires the dismantling of structures of supremacy, of constitutional discrimination, and of the regimes of control imposed on subject populations.

• The restoration of political dignity, full civic inclusion, voice in the arena of decisions, and equal partnership in shaping the shared future.

Applied to the Israeli Palestinian conflict, the meaning is sharp. A just peace will require the State of Israel to formally recognize the Nakba, to accept responsibility for the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 48’, to establish an agreed mechanism of return or compensation, to dismantle the occupation in its deep structures, to equalize rights between the sea and the Jordan, and to bring about a fair division of resources and land. These are the necessary conditions of peace itself, and they are not gifts or generous gestures. Any agreement that gives up on these foundations will remain an armistice, a temporary respite that will in time give birth to the next war. A hundred years of Israeli disregard for the deep structures of the conflict, and the tens of thousands of graves on all sides, will bear witness.

The shift from just war to just peace is a conceptual revolution. The first sought to legitimize violence and to bound it within moral limits, the second seeks to dismantle the conditions that give birth to it in the first place. The earlier one turned to aggressive sovereignty and asked it to wield its power with measure and restraint, the new one turns to that same sovereignty and demands that it give up some of its power for the sake of justice. Two different doctrines; one belongs to the world of bullies, the other to the world of those who know that there is no sustainable victory without moral commitment at its foundation. Only this way can Israel and the region as a whole be freed from the cage in which we have been imprisoning ourselves for more than a hundred years. We are the birds of Alejandro Jodorowsky, who said: “Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.”

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A significant portion of that strength flows from the fate and the faith of two people: Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah, determined peacemakers and co-CEOs of InterAct International, an organization dedicated to building peace in the Middle East. They have traversed the full range of human experience, from despair to hope, and from grief to action. Now they have set it all down on paper. Their book is essential reading for anyone who still believes in the possibility of good.

True peace literature, the kind that is not written from a thoughtful academic distance or through the memoirs of retreating diplomats but from an open wound, arrives in the world only rarely. “The Future Is Peace” by Maoz and Aziz is one of those rare books. Not because it reveals facts we did not know, but because it changes how we arrange those facts in our consciousness. And that kind of reframing is almost always the hardest thing to do.

The book’s central argument appears in its opening pages, and it will strike many readers as deliberately provocative: the peacemakers are not the naïve ones. Naivety belongs to the belief that violence will solve what violence itself produces. A hundred years of conflict, dozens of wars, thousands of tons of explosives, tens of thousands killed and millions wounded, and each time the same promise: give us just one more round, one more escalation, one more targeted killing, and victory is nearly within reach. Abu Sarah and Inon refuse to accept this as the definition of realism. True realism, they argue, does not accept violence as a fact of nature from which there is no escape. It recognizes violence as a failed policy, and the stubborn insistence on it not as a mark of maturity but as a failure of imagination. “What is truly naïve,” they write, “is imagining that fear and multigenerational trauma will lead to security.” That sentence is not a call to idealism. It is an empirical observation.

But this argument, as powerful as it is, is not the book’s deepest move. That happens in the structure the book builds and then, by its very existence, breaks. Nearly every conversation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict begins by assuming a division between collectives. Jews versus Palestinians, Israelis against Arabs. Identities that dictate positions almost automatically. Maoz and Aziz refuse to play along with this lethal typecasting, and that refusal is precisely what makes them so moving, inspiring, and capable of moving crowds. Their book offers an entirely different division: not between peoples but between principles, not identity against identity but worldview against worldview. Lovers of peace versus lovers of war. On one side, human beings, Jewish and Palestinian alike, who believe that another way of living is possible. On the other side, human beings, Jewish and Palestinian alike, defined by their hatred, religious extremism, and conviction that only force speaks. The dividing line runs not between peoples but through them. And so, the nature of the conflict itself changes: this is not a war between Israelis and Palestinians, but a struggle over what to do with the energy of grief. Whether to let it continue destroying everything, or to harness it for a repair that is enormous and necessary.

Inon and Abu Sarah arrive at this choice from radically different places, and the book does not smooth over that difference but places it at the center. Inon grew up in the Gaza Envelope communities, between Kibbutz Nir Am and Netiv HaAsara, in a place where the border is not a geographic idea but a daily presence. On the morning of October 7, 2023, he woke to a WhatsApp message from his father: “Morning. Sitting in the safe room. Not sure what is happening.” There was one phone call, almost routine, and then silence. His parents were killed in their home, which was burned to the ground. His father’s body was identified only after fourteen days. Of his mother, nothing remained. And within this reality, almost immediately, his choice was made. A one no-one could have expected of him. Maoz, the bereaved and broken son, declared that he was not seeking revenge. That he wept for his parents but also for everyone who would die on the other side in the escalation that would follow. Not because he denied the pain, but because he refused to let it define his being.

Aziz arrives from an experience no less heavy in its grief, only older. When he was ten years old, his elder brother Tayseer was arrested in the middle of the night by Israeli soldiers. They dragged him from his bed in pajamas and barefoot. He was held in detention for nearly ten months, tortured, and released broken in body. A few weeks after his release, he vomited blood, was rushed to surgery, and died. Killed by torture. “I felt like I was all alone. No one was going to replace Tayseer, and no one was going to stand up for me. “ The energy born from that loss was at first entirely rage. For several years, it also led him toward activity shaped by pain and fury. The path away from it was not a revelation but a process. When he learned Hebrew for purely practical reasons and met for the first time an Israeli who was not a soldier at a checkpoint, something shifted. Not because the pain was healed, but because one actual, specific human being had undermined the category of the enemy.

These two stories are not symmetrical, and it is worth saying so plainly. They are not the same thing, not equivalent, and they do not cancel each other out. The loss of parents on October 7 and the loss of a brother under an official policy of torture are different catastrophes that grew from different histories, and the book honors that difference. What connects the two figures is not a competition of suffering but the choice made after it: not to let the molten lava of grief flow in the direction of destruction. That choice, writes Abu Sarah, is not the cancellation of pain. “Anger is like nuclear energy. You can use it to create light, or to sow destruction. You can allow your pain to twist you into bitterness, or it can become fuel for empathy and human connection.” The nuclear metaphor is not incidental. Nuclear destruction is the spread of the bomb. Nuclear energy in peaceful use is that same energy harnessed for benefit. Both tracks are possible. The question is who controls whom: the bomb the human being, or the human being the energy.

The book is structured as a physical journey of eight days that the two undertook in September 2024, eleven months after October 7. Each writes in turn about his experiences at each stop, and at the close of every chapter they write together a text that grows from the shared journey. This literary choice is not accidental. It is a demonstration of the principle itself: two people who do not agree on everything, who do not pretend their narratives are identical, and who nonetheless exhaust everything that can be said together, without surrendering in the slightest their loyalty and empathy to the truth of their own community. Inon writes about Zionism as a movement that saved lives. Abu Sarah writes about the Nakba as a national catastrophe. Both things are true, both are painful, and both can be held simultaneously only if one breaks the optic of “who is right.” The old frameworks are binary: only one of them can be correct. Within the framework they offer, both can be right at the same time and still choose a dignified, shared life.

Each stop of the journey functions as a double mirror, reflecting both the history and the choices that can be made within it. In Jaffa, they stand before the ruins of the Ottoman train station that once connected the largest Arab city in the land to the rest of the world, and they meet a Palestinian tour guide whose grandfather refused for decades to speak about 1948 and wept when someone pressed him. “Let us talk about earlier times,” someone suggested, and he responded: “You must wipe 1948 from your mind. Forgetting is a blessing from God. But I don’t forget, and I consider this a curse.” Inon hears the story and does not respond defensively. He listens. And is quietly, silently sorrowful.

In the Old City of Jerusalem comes a moment the book has been moving toward without the reader noticing. Abu Sarah recounts his visit to Yad Vashem at eighteen, when he still suspected the Holocaust was a political instrument. He entered the children’s hall, saw the faces and names of a million and a half murdered children, and could not stop his tears. “I forgot that they were Jews, forgot they were my so-called enemies. I saw children.” The significance of that moment is not that everything was resolved. It is that identity, when it precedes the direct human response, can block reactions that would otherwise have been entirely natural. When Inon hears that story, he understands that this is precisely what he had asked of the world regarding October 7: not to forget, not to grant cheap forgiveness, but to see children before seeing tribal affiliations and being struck blind by a failure of humanity.

In the West Bank, the frame becomes more physical and more palpable. Abu Sarah describes how, at sixteen, his family received an order to leave their home in al-Eizariya, which had been separated from Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries as a result of the Oslo Accords, despite being less than two kilometers from its center. The road to school passed through checkpoints that were sometimes closed, and when he tried to go around them, soldiers fired warning shots in his direction. Inon, sitting beside him in the tour vehicle, discovered during that same conversation that in those exact days he had been serving in a nearby Israeli military base. They look at each other and say nothing. Not because there is nothing to say, but because what there is to say is larger than words can carry in a moment like that.

In the Galilee, the journey arrives at a moment that holds both possibilities together. They meet an Israeli couple that has grown olives on land that was once a Palestinian village. Abu Sarah asks calmly, without edge: “When you came here and bought the land, did you know there had been an Arab village here?” Micha answers honestly. And then Rachel tells them that Ali, a Palestinian worker who had worked with them for twenty years, had become a full partner in every decision. “What was, was. Here is where we are now, and we have to build our relationships.” This is not a solution. It is not a denial of histories. It is a choice for life. A choice made in the present, within conditions that are far from ideal, in relation to an actual human being and not to absolute categories that have made life here so extreme and so nearly impossible.

The book does not conceal that the other direction, the direction of destruction, is the one toward which most members of both peoples are currently traveling. Aziz writes about Palestinian leadership that speaks of nonviolence yet does not march in protest, and about the terrible vacuum that Hamas fills. Inon says directly: “The Israeli government and Hamas are two sides of the same coin. Both are responsible for the death of my parents.” These are not claims of false symmetry. They are an honest recognition that the failure is not ethnic but political, moral, and civic. That leadership which feeds violence grows on both sides, just as leadership that refuses it must grow on both sides. When Inon was asked about the “total victory” his government’s leader promises, Abu Sarah answered with a smile: “Maoz, you simply do not understand what total victory is. That is your problem.” The humor here is not decoration. It is part of the argument: those who are capable of laughing together at the absurdity of the situation have already broken through something important.

Pope Francis, who met them at the Verona stadium in May 2024 and embraced them before the eyes of thirteen thousand people cheering and weeping, said to the crowd: “In the face of the suffering of these two brothers, the suffering of these two nations, I have no words. They have had the courage to embrace each other. Let us pray for peace, and for these two brothers to bring the will to work for peace to their people.” The words “I have no words” are precisely the right words. Not because there is nothing to say, but because before any political formulation, before any plan, there stands something prior to language. Two human beings who chose to channel their energy in a different direction.

The book ends at the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Maoz suggests to Aziz that they walk on the water. And his friend, yes, by the book’s end they are friends, answers: “I do not know if I can walk on the water, but I can walk in the water.” They remove their shoes and enter that symbolic lake. This moment is not a cheap metaphor, nor is it a Hollywood-style closing paragraph. It is a precise statement: there is no promise of victory here, and there is no innocence about the long road that remains. There is only the refusal to accept reality as it is as the final boundary of the possible. And the small, actual step taken into the cold water, in the knowledge that even if you cannot walk on it, you can at least walk in it. That there is no national obligation to drown in the lakes of blood that have already claimed so many unnecessary lives.

A Marginal Note

Al-Aziz in Arabic is one of the names of Allah. One of its meanings is the person of courage, the strong one, the one who possesses power.

Maoz in Hebrew is the man of fortitude, of strength and security. And through the generations, God was the Maoz. As in the hymn “Maoz Tsur Yeshuati,” Rock of Ages, my salvation.

Two men, with the same name, the same life experience, and the same vision. Perhaps it is not coincidental, for it is their calling: to bring all of us the true strength. “The Lord and Allah will give their peoples strength. The Lord and Allah will bless their peoples with peace.”

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In 1927, the French philosopher Julien Benda published his book “The Treason of the Intellectuals.” His argument was simple and sharp: the people appointed to guard the truth, those whom society allowed to think freely in order to defend its values and morality, chose instead to serve power rather than challenge it. He attacked the European intellectuals who turned their backs on universal values and became defenders of nationalism, militarism, and racism. “In our time,” he warned, “justice is considered appropriate only insofar as it is subordinate to national circumstances and serves the interests of those in power.” Israel today has produced a Jewish, local, and far more serious version of that same betrayal. Because what is at stake here is not merely a temporary intellectual truth, but a betrayal of values and beliefs two thousand years old, and the fate of two wretched peoples.

Let us begin with a fact that is hard to deny: the Israeli rabbinate as an institution, and the overwhelming majority of rabbinical judges and rabbis as individuals, ultra-Orthodox and religious Zionists alike, are silent sheep. Collaborators in Israel’s spiritual ruin. Only a few of them have the courage to stand against a government that violates every one of the Ten Commandments in every way possible. With particular devotion to “thou shalt steal” and “thou shalt murder. Done by itself and through its agents. They have nothing to say about a government that looks like the fulfillment of the verses of doom: “How the faithful city has become a harlot… Your princes are rebellious and companions of thieves; everyone loves a bribe and follows after rewards. They do not defend the fatherless, nor does the widow’s cause come before them” (Isaiah 1:21–23). The prime minister stands trial for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. His convicted ministers continue to serve and to offend. The rabbis know. And they are silent.

Please don’t tell me they stay out of it because the rabbinate and the rabbi must not be political. This is a hornets’ nest of interests and maneuvers of the most primitive order. Every choice and decision they make is entirely political: harassment of businesses, religious coercion, discrimination against women, exploitation of public funds. And every one of these choices follows a single principle: always stand with the strong and the violent. I do not mean only the formal and rotted Chief Rabbinate, but the institution of the rabbinate as a social and communal worldview. The sages commanded us to “despise the rabbinate.” In our generation, that must become a binding, practical commandment.

And don’t tell me the reality is complex and that there are considerations the rabbi is not versed in. Were the prophets versed in the military calculus of the kings of Judah and Israel? Or in the tangled web of regional alliances, they wove and unraveled? Nonsense. They were shepherds, farmers, poets, and dreamers. But they knew one thing: a leader who deceives and oppresses, who murders the landowner to inherit his field, removes himself from the order of moral belonging, and God is not with him. Every beginning student at a Torah school is supposed to know that.

The rabbinate as an institution has become the handmaid of the government. Dependent on its funds, on the machinations of politicians who manipulate its institutions, and on family dynasties that have nothing whatsoever to do with greatness. And the result is not only silence. It is a Torah-sanctioned worship of power and admiration of violence.

Examples of shame are not in short supply; they pile up at our door every day. Dozens of religious Zionist rabbis signed a petition to improve the prison conditions of the murderer of Saad and Riham Dawabsheh and their son Ali in the Palestinian village of Duma. The same man who burned their other infant son alive. Thousands of their faithful flocks donated vast sums of money to the campaign to free that despised killer. And what did the Chief Rabbis, past and present, or the members of the Rabbinical Council say about the murder itself? About the celebration in which guests danced with knives and firebombs in front of a photograph of the murdered infant? Nothing. Thousands of documented incidents of daily settler violence in the West Bank, harassment and abuse, and the rabbis are silent in the best case and encouraging in the most common case. There is no settler hate crime that does not have a rabbinical inciter at its origin. Not one was brought before a rabbinical court. Not one was excommunicated. And when someone does open his mouth to condemn, he does so in order to protect the rest of the great robbery project in the occupied territories. Not for the sake of human justice for every person created in the image of God. All that interests them is the government’s money and the comforts of power that defile their spirit. That is the spirit itself; an evil Jewish spirit filling the sails of Israel. The spirit of those who betray the prophecies of Amos and Isaiah, Micah and Jeremiah.

They will examine the slaughterer’s knife under a magnifying glass. And who examines the conqueror’s knife? The cattle and chickens slaughtered in their abattoirs are kosher. But those who murdered and plundered with a rabbi’s sanction have never been declared treif (non kosher). No rabbi has declared them “cursed before the Lord” (I Samuel 26:19), and no religious officeholder has banned them “from being counted in the inheritance of the Lord” (ibid)

This is the real question of kashrut that the rabbinate and its shameful rabbis are unwilling to confront. The Jewish tradition understood kashrut not as a Jewish eating disorder, but as a symbolic moral act. What comes to your table, what is permitted to enter your mouth, what suffering did the animal endure whose flesh you eat, these are ethical questions, not technical ones. Kashrut is not a Jewish diet. It is a symbol of the demand for an upright life in all its dimensions. But when the rabbi who rules with such precision on the slaughterer’s knife asks nothing at all about the knives of the rioters or the defilement of the weapons of soldiers who stand by and watch, their kashrut turns from ethics into fraud. The obsessive fastidiousness about trivial details is a thick curtain concealing the real perversion.

And the paradox is cruel and painful: on the last Easter, the Pope stood in Saint Peter’s Square in Rome and said what not one Israeli rabbi dares to say. He turned to the crowd and quoted directly from Isaiah: “When you spread out your hands, I will hide My eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not hear; your hands are full of blood” (Isaiah 1:15). The spiritual leader of the religion that persecuted the Jewish people for generations is quoting our own prophets against our own wars. And where are the rabbis of peace, to stand beside him and save the good name of Judaism?

The tradition from which a true rabbinate grows is not a tradition of comfort. The prophet Nathan hurled at David: “You are the man”. Elijah did not fear Ahab and accused him directly: “Have you murdered and also inherited?” (I Kings 21:19). And so did Amos and Jeremiah and all the rest of their fellow prophets. The rabbis of Israel and their institutions inherited those texts, studied them, know how to quote them and then return to the nonsense. Of the Shabbat elevator, gentile milk, and how long a father is permitted to kiss his daughter. Their stringencies and prohibitions, which contain not a shred of commitment to human life, are loathsome idol worship.

A rabbi is not only great, he is also someone who knows how to fight. Someone capable of representing those who have no voice in the public arena. Someone who does not hesitate to enter the heart of the vital dispute without fear and with no favoritism, to stand before authority in the name of the powerless. His greatness was never measured by the quantity of knowledge stored in his learned head for “a Torah scholar who lacks moral sense, a carcass is better than he” but in his courage to take a stand and voice an opinion. To wrestle with the thugs of the kingdom.

Against the multitudes of these robe-wearers, a few who dare shine out like the radiance of the firmament: Rabbis for Human Rights, Michael Melchior, Micha Odenheimer, Arik Ascherman, Yehuda Gilad, Gilad Kariv, the brothers Benny and Amichai Lau, Tamar Elad-Appelbaum, and a handful more heroes you can count on one and a half hands. They are the exceptions that testify to the terrible shame of the rule. Lovers of peace and haters of hypocrisy, who have the courage to swim against this foul current and lead their communities accordingly. Knowing that only dead fish swim with the stream.

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Each of you, alone and together, is the sum of every memory of who we were and every hope for what is still to come. Like every grandfather, my heart fills each day with love for you, and like every Israeli, that love is saturated with worry. Especially today, on this Independence Day. I never imagined that Independence Day would become Israel’s Yom Kippur. Sadly, that is what these days have become. A period of reckoning and spiritual torment, strangled by a remorse that leaves no room to breathe.

I want to speak with you about the worry that has accompanied me since the day you were born, a worry that grows more urgent with every year you grow into this world. Each of you, individually, surpasses all my dreams. Wise and gentle, gifted and committed. I can already see the extraordinary humans you are becoming, and it fills me with joy. But against you, in terrible and painful contrast, the present moment is the fulfillment of my worst nightmares. So how does one build any bridge between your beauty and the ugly face of reality? I have no single good and decisive answer to give you. The essential building blocks of a decent future are simple to understand and hard to achieve: to see reality clearly, to acknowledge its failures, to take responsibility, to turn away from evil, and always to try to do good. What is true between one person and another, is all the more true between the different peoples within a society, and between us and the world at large.

But it is not happening.

We live in a hard country. And one must understand that the state, every state, is not merely sovereignty, borders, a flag and an army. The state is the framework within which human beings who have decided that shared life, law and fate have value enact that contract. For the Jewish people, who lived for long generations without a political home, wholly unable to defend themselves against the hatred around them, the state was the healing idea. Its founding was salvation for Jews at the price of a terrible tragedy for Palestinians.

In its early days it carried within it a genuine and deep hope. I understand that hope. I carry it myself. The hope of a place where one can be both Jewish and free, where children can be raised without fear for their future or the dread of being driven out with cruelty, where we can speak in our beautiful language, celebrate our holidays with real joy, and bury our dead with dignity. Where our fate would differ from the fate of my parents and their parents before them. For those who never had such a place, this is not a small thing; it is everything. These were my hopes then, and they remain my hopes now. But when I look around me and at your future, all I hear is the melody beneath those anxious words: “a small, wretched and maddened place, a distant place, a place for worry”.

Israel, the place, the people and the state, have turned Jewish history on its head. My parents’ generation and my own built here a reality entirely severed from that history. The heritage and the values on which hundreds of generations of Jews were raised have been erased and are gone. The “Jewish state” spoken of endlessly is a cult of death, of “it is good to die for our land,” and it is far better still to kill in its name. Idolatry, alien and hostile to the spirit and the Torah teaching upon which we were raised. Today, on Independence Day 2026, we are at the peak of an identity that sanctifies the negation of the other, whose entire existence is an addiction to power and a cult of victimhood. Judaism was delicate and refined; Israeli culture, by contrast, is hotheaded. Judaism was a culture of peace; Israeli culture believes one must fight over everything, forever, against everyone. And this cursed war into which you are coming of age justifies everything: injustice and dispossession, discrimination and exclusion. Israel betrays the promises for which it was founded and fulfills not a single detail of the vision it set before itself. The entire national education is turned inward, a nationalist narcissism that seeks to erase the existence of the others, that denies the memories, the wounds and the dreams of the Palestinians. And that denial is the mother of all sins, the force that has turned a great civilization into a contemptible barbarism.

I believe with complete faith that the human being is the glory of creation. Not because we are an overgrown bully or a gifted survivor, but because we remember. Every stray cat can survive, because that is its nature. But the human being was born and destined to carry forward the chain of memory: the language, music, the ideas that began hundreds of years before us. Like philosophy and ethics trying to understand why we are here, and science that refuses to make peace with what is not yet understood. Or literature that gives a name to things that pain alone cannot express. All of this is what we are, human beings, children of a culture that remembers and creates.

War is the enemy of all of that. It is the abolition of memory, the erasure of the other’s name, the reduction of the other to a target. It is the religion of destruction and not the faith of creation. Anyone who participates in unnecessary wars, wars whose only purpose is domination, punishment and conquest, becomes an active partner in the destruction of the most sublime achievements humanity has accumulated, not necessarily because he is evil, but because he chose not to ask, and not to know.

Consider this: Einstein and Hitler, Freud and Eichmann, Hannah Arendt and Else Lasker Schüler, my father and his parents. All of them spoke German, grew up in the same culture, breathed the same air and ate the same food. That made them alike in no sense whatsoever. A shared language and a shared place create no equality and no solidarity. The same is true of Ben Gvir and me, of Smotrich and Naama Lazimi. We all speak Hebrew. We live in the same country, read the same newspapers, sometimes sing the same songs. And yet they are existential enemies, far more dangerous than the enemies outside. Because against external enemies, society mobilizes and knows how to defend itself, and rightly so. But it is hard to define as enemy one who comes from within, who speaks your language and waves your flag and acts in your name. Against the enemy from within we suddenly become passive, confused and submissive, because we find it hard to call him by his name: enemy.

I am writing all of this to you because you are coming of age into all these contradictions, and one day soon they will ask you to choose. I pray you will know how to choose from understanding and not from servile obedience, with conscience and without fear, with respect for all of humanity and not merely blind and lethal loyalty to the tribe into which you were born. Service is no shame; it is a necessary obligation in every society that wishes to preserve its achievements and its soul. There are indeed just wars. These wars of ours at this moment are not among them. These wars are something else entirely. They are fueled by dark religious fanaticism, they pursue the mad visions of dubious biblical prophecy, and they are run by cynical, cruel and racist politicians. Do not serve in their wars. Refuse to obey their orders. Resist their barbarism. Fight for your own humanity and for the human dignity of everyone. At this time, in this Israel, refusal is courage and obedience is a nightmare. Do not be afraid. Be yourselves, and you will have saved us all.

With great eternal love,

Sabba Avrum

Really? Yes, really. Stupidity can flourish in very talented people, those who are brilliant in one domain and complete idiots in others. The stupidity at issue here is the inability to understand complex reality, to learn from experience, to change course when facts contradict the theory. Someone who continues to operate according to a model that reality has already refuted is a perfect idiot, even if he does so with eloquence and self-confidence. Churchill, whom Netanyahu pretends to resemble, defined this type of fool, this zealot of his own mistakes, as “one who cannot change his mind and will not change the subject.” Netanyahu cannot be suspected of being a zealot for any ideology beyond his love of himself, and so he has only one answer to every question: fear and force, force and fear. Repeatedly, without end.

Barbara Tuchman, the historian who studied this phenomenon across the ages, called it “wooden-headedness.” By her definition: “Wooden-headedness is a source of self-deception, a factor that plays a surprisingly large role in governments. It consists of assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It acts according to wishful thinking while not allowing facts to alter its course. Its peak is described in what a historian wrote about Philip II of Spain: no experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.” Tuchman did not know Netanyahu, but his wooden-headedness fits her theory precisely.

Her definition of folly is no less sharp: “the pursuit of policy contrary to the self-interest of the pursuer, even when viable alternatives are available.” Netanyahu’s folly was not born of ignorance. Like all the tragedies of history, it springs from information he deliberately ignores. His folly is not a simple error; it is the stubborn persistence, the zealous willingness, to keep making the same mistake despite clear and repeated warnings. And the foundational question remains open: why do Netanyahu and so many senior officeholders act against the path that reason and logic point toward?

Tuchman wrote about the folly of the Renaissance popes, who contributed their share to the birth of the Protestant Reformation. They were deaf to discontent, blind to the alternative ideas being born around them, impervious to every challenge, fixed in their refusal to change. They grew from rigidity and depended on it. Every one of those sentences fits Netanyahu like a glove.

Netanyahu excels in certain domains. He is skilled at deception, a master of illusion, capable of speaking, persuading, and maneuvering. He is an experienced reader of polls, an astute reader of audiences, and a high-level operator of political language. But all of these are merely tools, and the real question is what he does with them. The answer: essentially nothing. The tools serve a worldview that has compressed all of reality into a single-variable equation: the world is dangerous; therefore force must be applied, always and everywhere, all the time and against everyone. External and internal alike.

That is his conditioned reflex, and it fails time and again. He ignores the differences between types of threats, between different situations, between success and failure. Every outcome, even when it is the opposite of what he sought, is interpreted as proof that more of the same is needed. This is the clearest sign of political stupidity: turning every result into confirmation of the theory instead of examining the theory in light of its failures.

The most glaring example is Iran. For decades he presented it as the central axis of his life’s mission, the threat around which all of Israel’s operating systems must be organized. In practice, Iran entrenched itself, expanded, and grew more formidable, not least because of him. The policy whose purpose was to stop Iran contributed to its strengthening. This is conceptual failure in its purest form. Churchill, “his” Churchill, wrote that war is above all a catalogue of mistakes. The great world war that Netanyahu cultivated and unleashed will be a catalogue of one mistake repeating itself since the 1990s. The Netanyahu mistake.

Hamas grew stronger, the same as Hezbollah, while the Israeli society fractured and weakened. In each case force was applied, outcomes were promised, and the opposite reality was received. And yet Netanyahu and his cult never stop banging our heads against their walls. No examination, learning, reckoning, or any change whatsoever. The fundamental Israeli paradigm was perfected by him: What force did not accomplish, more force surely will.

History is full of similar examples. Napoleon Bonaparte, the military genius, led a million French soldiers straight into the Russian trap he set for himself. His advisors warned him, and the seasons did not rearrange themselves in his honor. But the tactical genius was incapable of reading a strategic reality that contradicted his flawed starting assumptions. Hitler repeated the same mistake, learned nothing, and was defeated accordingly. George W. Bush invaded Iraq, he and his learned advisors fantasizing about a reality that did not exist and could not have existed except inside their own wooden heads. Putin, the cold and calculating strategist, failed at the most basic thing in military planning: assessing the other side. All of them talented, all of them capable in one domain, all of them prisoners of a trap they could not find their way out of. Tuchman distilled what they had in common with precision: seeing the truth and acting with no reference to it.

Israel is the place where the syndrome of the talented fool is most amplified. The Israeli public spent long years grounding its national identity on the assumption that we and our leaders are smarter and sharper than any adversary arrayed against us. That assumption runs so deep that any evidence contradicting it is interpreted as a threat to survival itself. Unpatriotic, verging on treason. Within such a psychological framework, a leader like Netanyahu can survive every concrete failure, sustained by a mechanism of folly-preservation that feeds on itself. The more the policy fails, the easier it is to justify its continuation, and the greater the threat grows, the stronger the legitimacy to return to the same path exactly.

Netanyahu is the foremost fool of Israel. He is the principal architect of the politics of fear from which he profits, and that politics is what feeds the failures that justify its continuation. This circle is not accidental: it is the survival strategy of someone who has nothing else to offer. His political stupidity is the most tangible danger to Israel’s existence.

This is the truth and nothing but: Netanyahu lacks the most basic capacity of a leader, the capacity to learn. And when a leader cannot learn, all his other talents only enable him to perpetuate his failure for longer, at a higher price, not for him, but for everyone. The only proof that Netanyahu does not have a wooden head carved by Geppetto is that his nose does not grow every time he speaks or thinks. Which means when he is lying to us, or deceiving himself. That is to say, all the time.

Before I explain these three claims, I must define the foundation on which my critique rests. The religions and cultures I know, those that emerged from the Bible, are not traditions of obedience to power but of confrontation with it. Speaking truth to power is not a marginal idea. It is the axis around which the entire biblical story turns, from Genesis to the last prophet - Malachi. Abraham did not accept the decree against Sodom. He argued and bargained with God face to face. Moses did not yield when God decreed destruction upon Israel after the sin of the golden calf. The prophets, each in his time, never stood alongside the political power of their era but against it. Not in the king’s court but at its gate. Courageous critics, unafraid for their own lives, without a trace of flattery or concern for reputation. The name of the nation, Israel, does not mean servant of God or flatterer of God. It means one who wrestles with God. This is an identity defined by the ability to stand before the greatest power and refuse to surrender truth and moral conviction. Because they understood that even the Judge of all the earth might fail to do justice, and it was their task to hold even God to account when necessary. Once this is understood, Graham’s opportunism becomes clear and his true face is revealed. He continues no biblical tradition. He betrays it. And he is not alone. Alongside him stand the messianic rabbis of religious Zionism and their enterprises of occupation and oppression. He and they have traded all their values for stolen real estate and dubious messianism. Together they threaten the future of the Jewish people and the peace of the world.

You are shallow

Because you read Scripture the way one reads a fast food menu. The food is over processed and greasy to the point of risking health, and you take what is served, consume too quickly and too much, and discard everything that requires thought. You tell us about David who learned to fight, about a God who listened to him, about victories God sanctioned. It is all written, but in your partial and manipulative way. Because you stop precisely where the story becomes uncomfortable. When David asks to build a house for his God, the house he dreamed of all his life, he is refused in terms that leave no room for argument. “You have shed much blood and have waged great wars; you shall not build a house to My Name, because you have shed much blood on the earth in My sight” (1 Chronicles 22:8). This is the most important verse in David’s story. It dismantles every fantasy of military sanctity. It is the moment the Bible states something simple and piercing. There are things you cannot carry from the battlefield into the sacred. Political violence, even when justified, perhaps even necessary, leaves the leader stained and disqualified until his final day. Even the greatest biblical warrior dies with blood on his hands and is denied the building of God’s house. This is the biblical principle you should have taught. War and peace cannot dwell together. But you took David of the sword and discarded the king who sinned and was wrapped in remorse because he was denied the temple. You abandoned the mission of the true biblical religious figure and chose the most shallow populist position, irresponsible demagoguery. In the White House prayer you delivered on Easter eve, you could have been Nathan the prophet and said to the king, “Why have you despised the word of the Lord, by doing evil in His sight? Now then, the sword shall never leave your house, because you have despised Me” (2 Samuel 12:9). Nathan did not shout, did not argue, did not bring evidence. He stood with courage and spoke truth to power. And you stood there and blessed the atrocities. Not a prophet. A hired court cleric.

And the prophets more broadly offer you no comfort either. They do not speak about enemies but about the home. Pope Leo, in his Palm Sunday sermon, cited one of the boldest verses in Hebrew prophecy: “When you spread out your hands in prayer, I will refuse to look at you; even if you offer countless prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are covered with blood” (Isaiah 1:15). Isaiah does not speak to Assyrians or Babylonians. He speaks to the local hypocritical believers and corrupt priests and tells them there is no religious ritual that grants moral immunity to wrongdoing. You cannot offer sacrifices while committing injustice. This is true prophecy, inward critique, moral repair. With you Saint Graham, how convenient, the blood is always someone else’s, always an enemy, this time Iran. The prophets did not operate this way, which is why their words endured for millennia. Yours will not endure a generation, no matter how many millions you invest in marketing them. Because they are not words of truth. They are political propaganda in the service of corrupt power.

You are hollow

Because this entire mechanism is wrapped in grand language with nothing behind it. When you stand in the White House and compare Trump to Queen Esther, it is embarrassing. Before I elaborate, it must be said that many within the evangelical world itself know this. Not all of the movement you claim to represent stands behind you. Because this entire mechanism is wrapped in grand language with nothing behind it. When you stand in the White House and compare Trump to Queen Esther, it is embarrassing. Before I elaborate, it must be said that many within the evangelical world itself know this. Not all the movement you claim to represent stands behind you.

John Stott, whom the New York Times described as the man evangelicals would choose as their pope if they could elect one, publicly opposed Christian Zionism and called it anathema to the faith. Ron Sider, one of the most important Christian theologians of the twentieth century, opened his landmark study of evangelical political engagement with the blunt verdict that Christian political activity is a disaster, because Christians have failed to subject their political commitments to the lordship of Christ and instead succumbed to partisanship and corruption. Jim Wallis, who has dedicated his life to proving evangelicalism can be a moral conscience, called the White Christian nationalism you represent by its true name, heresy.

And they are not alone. When you chose your path, you chose it against a rich internal tradition of Protestant Christianity that knew how to be a conscience. Your choice is not fate. It is a cynical and malicious decision..

And now to the Book of Esther. Your choice of it is not accidental. When you stand in the White House and compare Trump to Esther, you do not just embarrass yourself. You reveal yourself. Anyone who knows the story knows Ahasuerus was not a model of moral kingship, and Esther arrived at the palace under circumstances you would not print in your church bulletin. You chose to compare President Trump to a biblical sex slave. One may ask why. A psychological slip or a hint of coercion. It does not matter, because the choice of Esther reveals a deeper problem than a clumsy analogy.

Tucker Carlson, not my ideological ally, asked the simplest and most devastating question. Why did you choose Esther and not Jesus. The answer is obvious. Because Jesus cannot be recruited into this war. He did not enter Jerusalem on a war stallion as a conqueror but on a donkey, in humility. He did not organize an army, did not justify the killing of innocents, did not bless kings who went to unnecessary and arrogant wars. He did the opposite. He accepted suffering and refused violence even in the face of viciousness and cruelty against him. And so you bypass him entirely and search for another text. But in your eagerness you chose one that exposes you. The Book of Esther is the only book in the entire Bible in which the name of God does not appear even once, not by name, not by title, not by hint. Traditional Jewish interpretation struggled with this absence for generations and asked whether the book belongs in the sacred canon at all. Some see in this absence a profound theological statement, that God refused to be present in a story that ends in massacre, in which human beings (The Jews) massacred seventy-five thousand Persians, as if in the name of survival. Even if they were persecuted and acted out of justified fear, God withdraws and hides from them. He leaves responsibility for the acts entirely with the slayers. You, who came to the White House to represent God, chose the most prominent place in Scripture where God is silent and absent. This is not just irony. It is the essence of the entire story.

You are dangerous

Because shallowness and hollowness never remain as words only. Someone always translates them into policy, money, and wars. You speak to millions who do not check you, do not open a Bible, and do not imagine you are deceiving them. They believe you. Though faith is the most fragile thing a person has, and when it is corrupted, the damage is deeper than any wound. When God becomes a justification for war and a mechanism for legitimizing power, religion becomes the mistress of power, betrays its purpose, and collapses. From a courageous force that stands against power, it becomes its servant. And the one responsible for turning religion into a tool of domination is not a religious man. He is a court submissive Flunky. You Are that Man.

I am not merely an observer of a talented charlatan. I am also a target of your theology. That is why I stand against you. Because there is one thing you do not say publicly, though it is the backbone of your theology. The Christian vision of redemption you sell requires Jews in the land of Israel as a necessary condition for its fulfillment. Your Jew is a temporary Jew, one whose role is to appear on stage, play his part, and ultimately dissolve into another faith. Your enthusiastic political support and that of your followers is not generosity. It is my annihilation. And the Jewish fools who admire you and cooperate with you are the kapos of our time.

You want us here in the land of Jesus, fighting, killing, and being killed, holding every inch of land until the last drop of blood, ours of course. Only then can your story end according to the violent script you fantasize about. Jesus returns, the Jews recognize him, convert, and we all become Franklin Graham. We, the Jews, are not the heroes of this story. We are the cannon fodder, the fuel, the necessary sacrifice for an ending in which we disappear as Jews forever. This is not love of Israel. It is the slaughter of Israel. Once this is understood, all the warm embraces, the prayers in the White House, and the biblical quotations wrapped in Israeli flags reveal their true meaning. You are a slick and sweet enemy, dangerous precisely because of the sweetness of your smile and the softness of your voice, a spiritual enemy in the fullest sense of the word.

Unlike you, I do not call for your obliteration, nor for the conversion of your beliefs. I invite you to a confrontation. Anywhere you choose, in any format you prefer. You, the Bible, and me. One Bible on the table, Mr Graham. Are you coming?

I am writing what may be the most painful letter of my life. Words from the heart of a father and grandfather to you, the parents of soldiers who are still alive.

Like you, I have not slept through a full night in more than three years. There is no rest. The thunder of planes tearing through the silence, and the sound of blood crying out from the ground. Every day brings more funerals. The circle of bereaved families keeps widening. Eulogies that break the heart, for the best and most beautiful among us, who will remain young forever, while those who loved them aged overnight and will never know comfort again. I weep for them in the night, and for the fact that they are forgotten almost at once by political mourners who have made mourning their trade and war their deepest longing.

I write to you at an hour that is neither night nor day. In a little while, four fresh graves will be opened in earth already soaked through. The holiday is approaching, and there is no joy in it. There is no home without death, without injury, without fracture, without fear. The slayer does not distinguish between firstborn and the rest of our children. It kills without mercy. I am like you, and my child is no different from yours, and that makes us closer than we have ever been. We are fathers and mothers hollowed out by dread for a child who only yesterday was a baby, a teenager, and today stands at the front of a brutal war. Your child, like mine, is not a data point or a news item. He has a name and a nickname, a small tender mark on his face, a voice, a smell that belongs to him alone. And nothing is coming to save him. The knock on the door or the ring of the phone will come. There is no escaping them.

Gently, carefully, I ask you the question that is tearing me apart: why, and for how long?

Do you also know, somewhere deep inside, that these wars have no purpose? That there is no solution in them, no salvation. Only an endless cycle of violence, hollow promises, and after them a long procession of mourners and graves. You, like me, are the victims of yet another damaged generation that could not break free from the cycles of hatred and terror. And despite every word of pride and bravado, each of us knows how fragile this reality is, and how small we are before the clash of forces we pretend to control. You were there with me in the Lebanon wars. We entered Gaza time after time. So why, Master of the Universe, did not one of those wars end in peace, or even in the quiet of “and the land had rest”? How many more times can we hear “this time is different” before the words themselves lose all meaning and the cemeteries fill again?

You promised your children something else. Not a perfect world, not absolute security, only a simple hope, almost elementary: that they would grow into lives better and safer than ours. You remember what your own parents promised you, and what you swore to yourselves as young parents when you held that beautiful infant and made him a vow with a full heart. How many generations have carried that promise? And now it turns out to be hollow. How many grandparents believed that this is what the future would look like, and then buried their grandchildren? And when you look now at the last photograph your child sent, you ask yourself quietly: how did it happen that we too promised, and did not deliver?

And when our children come home, if they are lucky enough to come home alive, we who brought them into this world know that something inside them has died. They have seen immense death. They have killed and faced death themselves. Sometimes at close range, sometimes from a distance, through screens and joysticks. Their hands have been washed in blood. Their souls have been stained and altered. And their love is no longer innocent, no longer what it was.

These are not dilemmas about the enemy, real or imagined. They are about us. Our political allegiances matter, but they are secondary. Above them looms a problem far larger and far darker. Why do we walk, half blind, after a man whose own children will never be asked to pay the price that ours do? What have we done to deserve these ministers who sustain entire populations that have exempted themselves from sacrifice, while sending those dear to us to sleep in field tents and die in killing fields? You see this, as I do. You wrinkle your nose, you suppress it, you refuse to look it straight in the eye because it is too hard. I understand. Perhaps you still tell yourselves the old Israeli story, whispering that it is good to die for our land. But deep in your heart you have known for a long time that it is not even good to live this way in our land.

And this too you know, perhaps more than anyone: there were other moments. There were other possibilities. There were crossroads where a different path could have been taken. Not one paved only with force, blood, and revenge. There were leaders who were not corrupt, who opened other paths. Not perfect ones, not without risk, but they did everything in their power to prevent the next war rather than lead us into it. Hands were extended in peace and refused. Through murder and fanaticism, the doors of peace were slammed shut and the gates of war swung open. Each time such a door closed, we were told it was for security. But what kind of security is this, when each generation only adds more layers of grief and stockpiles of vengeance? The security we long for is not growing stronger. It is only moving further away and becoming more costly. And the price, every single time, is our children who have not yet been killed. We, the anxious parents, have become pieces on a board, pawns marching in formation in the procession of folly and grief, and even cheering as we go: Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant, hail Caesar, those who are about to die salute you.

I am not expecting an answer from you. Because there is no single answer. Perhaps there is no answer at all. But I am asking that you ask, together with me: what is the price we are no longer willing to pay? And when will a parent’s love for their child become something else. Not the willingness to send them, but the courage to stop them before they charge once more into futility. I plead with you, as a father, as a grandfather, as a friend: dare to ask. Dare to demand another way.

Because beyond every ideology, every argument, every strategic analysis, there is only one thing that cannot be replaced. Life itself. The lives of our children.

Save them. Do not let them go. You can.

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When everyday life is normal, Israel is a chaotic society that kicks against law and order, quick to act and impatient with process. But when reality turns threatening, its default is always one thing and one thing only: war. Why? The short and very complicated answer is the Bible. Yes, the very same book that has inspired some of the highest and most humanistic creations in the history of the West is also the cornerstone of Israel’s war psychosis.

One of the things I love most about the Bible is its imperfect characters. The founding fathers and mothers of the nation are full of flaws, far removed from images of saints and the righteous; adulterers, betrayers, liars, the weak, the sinful, far from perfection and that is the secret of their magic. Anyone, in any generation, can identify with them. But that very same Bible is also an inexhaustible source of dangerous toxins. For centuries, Jewish thought labored to refine them. Harsh commandments were nullified, decrees were diluted, unacceptable norms were deliberately ignored. At times it seems as though the entire Oral Torah and the vast literature that grew from it were devoted to the deep transformation of the biblical text. Generations thus committed themselves to the idea that the Jewish people hold two intertwined teachings: the Torah given from above, and the Oral Torah devoted to interpretation and refinement. Because the written Torah alone is a genuine danger to life.

This was the Jewish spirit until the birth of the Zionist idea. Zionism created a rupture between the original Bible and the Talmud and rabbinic literature. Ben-Gurion and his generation returned to the literal Bible. Not all of it: commandments such as an eye for an eye, the cutting off hands, and slavery remained abolished even for the Zionists. But the grand ideas returned with a paradoxical and almost pathological intensity. The founders of Zionism were, almost without exception, secular nonbelievers who did not believe in the existence of God, yet still embraced with both hands the promises of that nonexistent God to grant the Jewish people this particular land. Zionist biblicism sought to return to places, names, and ancient mythologies as the foundational frameworks of a renewed national consciousness. With them returned the most troubling commands: the supremacy of land over human life, conquest, wars, and even genocidal commandments from the Torah.

This is also the deep foundation of the bond between Jewish fundamentalists and their Christian Zionist partners. Both movements share the same premise: the biblical text is not a story of the past but a plan of action. History is not a process but the realization of a promise. From such a premise, political decisions take on almost theological meaning, and every conflict becomes both a holy war and a commanded war at once. This is Judeo-Christian jihad at its worst.

The question arises naturally: we know the great prophecies of peace and justice, the moral calls that shaped the humanistic West; so how does a culture of war emerge from all this? There are two simple answers, one numerical and one interpretive.

The numbers speak clearly: both War and Peace appear hundreds of times in the Bible, but war is mentioned more often, across more verses, and with greater intensity. Peace in the Bible exists at two distant poles. On one hand it is immediate, every day, deeply human: Shalom, greetings, how are you. On the other there is a different kind of peace, distant and elusive: the peace of prophetic utopia: “He will bless His people with peace”. Not as concrete relations between individuals but as a promise of a new and theoretical world order. War, by contrast, is almost always bound to place. It is tied to this land. The wars of Canaan, those of the House of David, the conflicts with Assyria and Babylon. All are rooted in territory, control, and the threat to this specific piece of earth. The land is the cause, the prize, and the danger. And above it all reverberates the martial command: “The Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.”

This gap reveals something deep about the biblical understanding of the world: peace requires no territorial space for its existence, while war never ceases to ferment in this place. The prophets understood this well. They did not merely describe reality but sought to break it. To take that same space which repeatedly generates war and place it within another language, one of vision, justice, and peace not only between individuals but among peoples. So far, without great success.

And if that were not enough, whatever the militant Bible fails to accomplish in its aggressive Zionist interpretation, the news completes. Every day, all day, for decades, all Israelis hear only one kind of news: we killed, we eliminated, we struck, we destroyed, we crushed, we attacked. Leaders who understand the political alchemy of war feed this mechanism and inflame it. Is it any wonder that from these two forces; the Bible and the media, there emerges the distorted vision of a “super-Sparta,” born of the imagination of the greatest inciter in the history of the Jewish people, Netanyahu? And behind him, a blind public that instinctively supports every war and every act of aggression.

This is how people grow into war. War is always hungry for more, not ever have enough victims, and it never leads anywhere else. Wars have become something like the weather forecast: endlessly discussed and never truly addressed.

Yet this cycle is not fate. History teaches that societies are capable of change. Not through a single dramatic declaration but through the slow transformation of language, agenda, and what is considered important and existential. To stop fighting the wars of the Bible, which from then until now have done nothing but wash hands in the blood of the fallen and give birth to the next and worse violence. To stop listening to generals and charlatans who each morning are eager to exact “the price of war in the name of peace”. Preferably our blood rather than that of their own children and loved ones. The time has come to erase the wars of the Bible and move toward the vocabulary of peace and the visions of the prophets. This is the most urgent political task of our time: to shelve the chapters of biblical violence and finally attempt to realize those dreams we have never truly tried to fulfill.

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His recent controversies, on Chabad, on Netanyahu’s influence, on the contemporary meaning of Amalek and more, demand engagement, not dismissal. His podcast episode on the causes of the war, on who stands to gain and who will pay the price, and his rejection of a theology of hatred, is nothing short of brilliant. The essence of his argument is painful and, I believe, largely correct: American soldiers have already died, and more may yet die, in Netanyahu’s war. A war that bears little relevance to genuine American interests. And, I would add, just as little to Israel’s true interests.

And so, I find myself in a strange position. I, a man of the absolute left, am in conversation with the work of a conservative voice moving steadily rightward. Perhaps this is what that Jewish sage had in mind when he wrote that opposites, the further apart they grow in their practical expressions, the closer they come at their root. Who knows. Perhaps it is precisely there that the foundations of a new Israeli American alliance may yet be found.

Carlson’s position on the Iran war is simple and consistent. This is Israel’s war, not America’s. It has been imposed on Washington through a long and methodical process in which Benjamin Netanyahu succeeded in reframing Israel’s strategic interest as an American one. In his reading, the Iranian nuclear threat has served for decades as a justification, yet the present war barely concerns nuclear questions at all. It is, rather, an Israeli attempt to reshape the Middle East and emerge as the region’s sole hegemon. The problem, in his view (and I humbly agree), is not only Netanyahu, but also the willingness of the American political elite to adopt this framing, out of fear that criticism of Israel will be cast as hostility or antisemitism. An undemocratic Israel, led by Netanyahu and his messianic circle, has frightened and silenced open public debate in the United States.

For his defiant positions Carlson has paid a price familiar to anyone in Israel who is not aligned with Netanyahu. Trump himself declared that Carlson had “lost his way.” Yet he has not broken. He continues, mapping with consistency the tectonic fractures within the America First movement. His critique of the Israeli tail wagging the American presidency marks a boundary that, until now, no one had dared to draw explicitly.

The uproar surrounding his remarks about the spell Netanyahu cast over Trump was entirely predictable. His critics heard echoes of antisemitic tropes; his supporters saw proof of courage. But the argument missed the truly essential question: not whether Israel seeks to influence American policy, every state in the world does precisely that, but how did such an extraordinary system of influence come into being? One that binds together politics, money, religion, and identity across both sides of the ocean.

To understand this, one must begin with an uncomfortable fact. Israel is not merely a small ally of the United States. It is, above all, the most skillful player in the American political system. Netanyahu himself testified that he knows what America is and that it is possible to “move it easily in the right direction.” One need not accept the provocation of that phrasing to recognize the reality it points to. Over decades, Jerusalem, through its American Jewish allies and associates, has spread deep networks of influence throughout Washington. A powerful political lobby, close ties between donors and elected officials, think tanks, personal relationships with lawmakers, and broad-based support cultivated across American society. All of this operates in the open, as a recognized and legitimate part of the American political game.

In continuing my own “conversation” with the challenges Carlson raises, I want to expand on one of his central insights. One of the most striking phenomena in recent American politics is the alliance between American Christian messianism and its Israeli Jewish counterpart. It is both a religious phenomenon and a formidable political coalition, shaping the foreign policy of the world’s most powerful nation. Carlson did not create this alliance, but by pointing to it openly he did something rare in an increasingly suffocated public sphere: he opened a necessary discussion that many prefer to avoid. The current Iran war is the first world war of monotheistic fundamentalism; Christianity and Judaism fundamentalist confronting Shiite Islamic fundamentalism. Each arriving with its full weight of fury, bloodlust and hatred. In a world where religious fanaticism became the political identity, Israel sits at the very core of the DNA of this extreme religious political right.

This influence does not rest on lobbying and political donations alone. It is built on a far deeper transformation. In recent decades, evangelical Christianity has become one of the most organized and influential forces in American politics. Evangelicals constitute roughly a quarter of the population and vote at particularly high rates. For millions within this movement, Israel is not simply another geopolitical ally. It is a central element in their theology of history. The return of the Jews to Zion is understood within the evangelical tradition as a necessary stage in the redemptive drama of the end of days.

A parallel process has unfolded in Israel. Messianic conceptions of history have gained strength within Israeli politics. Segments of religious Zionism and the settlement movement see the State of Israel as a stage in a broader redemptive process. Within wide circles of the Chabad movement as well, a similar vision of history persists. As an ongoing and immediate messianic unfolding. And so, when Jewish messianism meets Christian messianism, an unusual political alliance is born. Grounded not in full theological agreement but in a deep resemblance in the way both sides read history. In both camps, history is purposeful, political events are interpreted as chapters in a redemptive narrative, and the State of Israel stands at the heart of that story. This alliance extends far beyond governments. It lives in churches and synagogues, in civic organizations, media networks, and political communities on both sides of the ocean.

Into this system enters Donald Trump’s distinctive style of leadership. He has never concealed that he leads through personal intuitions and direct relationships. He sees himself as unbound by the mechanisms of Washington. There is a certain strength in this, leaders not captured by institutional consensus can break entrenched patterns. But there is also a danger. When decision-making becomes too personal, it becomes far more vulnerable to external influence. Democracies build mechanisms of balances, representation, and restraint because historical experience teaches that personal intuition becomes dangerous the moment it presumes to replace public accountability.

This is also where Netanyahu fits into the picture. He is one of the foreign leaders most deeply versed in the American arena, profoundly attuned to the psychology of American politics and to the place of religion within it. It is for precisely this reason that Netanyahu, years ago, stepped back from American Jewry as Israel’s strategic rearguard and chose instead to cultivate the evangelical base, telling them plainly: “Israel has no better friend in America than you”.

This is the real context of what Carlson was trying to say. Not a conspiracy, not some shadowy ethnic power. Rather, the convergence of several murky yet visible political forces: a highly skilled Israeli influence system operating within American politics, a capricious president, a vast evangelical network that anchors Israel theologically, and an ideological alliance between Jewish and Christian messianism. All of these are connected not only through visions of the end of days but through present-day practical reality. One that promotes, I say with sorrow, a politics of hatred and bloodshed, in the name of “love of God,” of course.

The controversy that erupted around Carlson teaches one important thing: the problem is not the existence of this or that political force. The problem begins when democratic society grows afraid even to speak about it. A democracy incapable of discussing openly the forces shaping its policy gradually loses the ability to understand itself.

This is where Tucker Carlson’s real contribution lies. Not because all his arguments are correct. But because he says aloud what American politics has long known and preferred to leave unsaid: that the alliance between American messianism and Israeli messianism is today one of the most politically damaging forces shaping America’s relationship with the Middle East. This force demands condemnation and resistance. But first, it demands a conversation. Without it, we will be unable to build other alliances: between the United States and the Muslim and Arab worlds, with Europe and its Muslim minorities within it, with Muslim Americans and with Israel. Alliances grounded more in humility and less in swagger, in shared values rather than delusional visions of redemption and annihilation, and altogether free of the embarrassing ego crusades accompanied by the intolerant hatred of all who are not them.

These clichés are not merely a television habit. They reveal a deeper condition of mind. The world is changing rapidly, yet the way many Israelis and their commentators imagine war has hardly changed at all. They still speak about it in the vocabulary of a strategic universe that has largely disappeared. And when they run out of military language they drift into areas they understand even less well — government, ideology, democracy and theocracy. Since retired generals now feel free to wander into politics, I allow myself to wander briefly into their territory. Not because I enjoy it or claim expertise, but because a simple conclusion keeps returning. War does not only kill in vain. War itself is slowly losing its meaning. If it is not quite dead yet, perhaps the time has come to help it along and Kill the Wars

The gap between military power capabilities and political outcome continues to widen. In earlier eras victory was a recognizable event. Regimes collapsed, borders shifted, and a new order emerged. Today victory is a far more ambiguous idea. Wars end with ceasefires, mutual exhaustion, or simply fade until the next round inevitably arrives.

When was the last time a war truly reshaped political reality? For the United States the answer probably lies in 1945. For Israel it may be 1967. Since then, there have been many wars and countless military operations, yet very few have produced a stable political outcome.

The United States toppled Saddam Hussein within weeks, yet Iraq did not become a stable democracy. Afghanistan offered an even harsher lesson. After twenty years of war the Taliban returned almost to the exact position from which they had been removed. The strongest military power in history won most of the battles and still lost the political result.

Israel’s experience is not entirely different. The war of 1967 was a decisive military and political moment that transformed the strategic landscape within days. Since then, most of Israel’s conflicts have ended in prolonged stalemate; Lebanon, the intifadas, repeated rounds in Gaza, the current war. Technological superiority may be impressive and operations often sophisticated, yet the political reality barely shifts. Confidence in television studios, devastation on the ground, and eventually a ceasefire that usually contains more fire than cease.

Gaza offers perhaps the clearest illustration. Despite enormous destruction and complex military campaigns, the underlying political reality has barely changed. The same organization continues to rule the same territory. It lost most of the battles, yet in a deeper sense it won the war, because the political structure remained intact.

A similar logic applies on the regional level. As long as Iran remains governed by the same regime, military achievements against it will always be limited. Facilities can be struck, commanders eliminated, airspace controlled. Yet if the political order in Tehran remains untouched, the strategic result remains largely unchanged.

This is the central paradox of modern war. Military capability has never been greater. Satellites, real-time intelligence, precision weapons and artificial intelligence now enable levels of destruction that earlier generations could hardly imagine. Yet the political realities these tools are meant to transform increasingly resist transformation.

The war in Ukraine has made this painfully visible. Cheap drones, sensors and digital networks have turned the battlefield into something close to transparent. Any concentration of forces quickly becomes a target. Traditional armored formations suddenly appear less like instruments of power and more like clusters of vulnerability. The implications extend far beyond Eastern Europe. For decades Israel’s military doctrine assumed rapid decision through concentrated ground maneuver. In a world where the battlefield is increasingly exposed, such maneuvers become far more dangerous and rapid decision far harder to achieve.

The transformation is not only technological. It is also political and psychological. War now unfolds simultaneously on the battlefield and in the information sphere. Every strike is filmed , shared and distributed within minutes. The struggle over narrative has become inseparable from the fighting itself. A state may achieve tactical success and simultaneously lose legitimacy in the eyes of the world. Tanks can conquer territory, but they cannot conquer perception.

This raises a question that rarely enters the public conversation. If war is becoming less effective as a tool for shaping political reality, why does investment in it continue to grow? In 2023 global military spending reached roughly 2.4 trillion dollars. Israel devotes close to one fifth of its national budget to security. The United States alone accounts for a vast share of the world’s military expenditure. An immense ecosystem of research, industry and innovation has developed around the machinery of war, dedicated to making destruction more efficient. Israel itself has become a significant exporter of weapons; an economic achievement and a troubling moral reality.

The uncomfortable truth is that these technologies often generate impressive tactical advantages but limited strategic outcomes. The multiplier of force grows, while the political influence of force steadily declines. The investment increases while the return diminishes.

This invites a different question. What might happen if the same resources, the same creative imagination and the same determination were directed elsewhere. Not toward technologies of war, but toward technologies of peace.

War persists partly because it fills a vacuum. We have not yet developed institutions or mechanisms powerful enough to manage conflicts, reduce threats and regulate competition between states. Technologies of peace would attempt to fill that gap.

One field would involve early warning of crises. Just as sophisticated systems were built to identify targets on the battlefield, similar systems could identify social and political tensions before they erupt into violence. Economic indicators, population movements, water scarcity, sudden waves of online incitement, all of these are early signals of approaching conflict. Intelligent global systems could detect such patterns early enough to allow diplomatic or economic intervention before violence begins.

Another field lies in shared economic infrastructure. Many conflicts are rooted in competition over resources; water, energy, land and trade routes. Large regional projects in energy, water, transportation and agriculture can create deep economic interdependence. Such interdependence alters the cost calculation of war. When economies are tightly connected, war becomes prohibitively expensive.

A third field involves information and communication. Many conflicts are sustained by propaganda and misinformation that amplify fear and hatred. Advanced analytical tools can identify patterns of escalation and study previous peace agreements to understand why some succeed while others fail. New communication platforms and real-time translation technologies could allow citizens on opposing sides of a conflict to hear one another directly, bypassing the filters of political propaganda.

A fourth field would involve new international institutions. Many existing institutions were designed for the geopolitical reality of 1945. Digital technologies now allow new mechanisms of transparency, verification and mutual accountability. Global monitoring systems could verify agreements in real time, while digital arbitration systems could allow faster and more credible resolution of disputes between states.

None of these ideas appear as dramatic as fighter jets or guided missiles. They are difficult to campaign on. Military victory photographs well, same as a conquered city, a captured tyrant, a flag raised in triumph. Peace leaves no footage. No camera can capture the war that never happened, or the generation that grew up without trauma.

And yet this may be the defining challenge of our time. Humanity has invested immense creativity in perfecting the instruments of destruction, and remarkably little imagination in building the foundations of durable peace. The next great revolution may lie not in making war more efficient, but in finally learning how to make it unnecessary.

The psychology of those who believe they can topple regimes is one of the most fascinating and tragic subjects in international politics. Again and again intelligent, experienced leaders, surrounded by intelligence agencies, advisers, data and immense resources, persuade themselves that they can bend history to their will. In their imagination history can be changed with a few decisive moves. Apply force in the right place, remove the right head, and the entire structure will collapse. The idea returns repeatedly, and it almost always fails.

The mistake begins with projection. These decision makers imagine that the societies they confront operate according to the same rules that govern their own political world: personal interest, flexible loyalties, the instinct to protect one’s safety and wealth above all else. In their imagination, leaders like Netanyahu and Trump embrace a modern version of Louis XIV’s absolutist instinct, the belief that the state and the ruler are indistinguishable. “The state, it is me.” And they assume their adversaries must think the same way. In this mental model a regime appears as little more than a pyramid of fear. Remove the apex and the structure collapses. But this assumption shatters when it encounters regimes built on belief. Some political systems are not held together primarily by fear or by personal interest but by an ideological narrative that gives meaning to the lives of millions. In such systems loyalty is not only to the man at the top but to the story the regime tells about history, sacrifice and destiny.

The United States should have learned this lesson long ago. Instead, it has repeated the same error across continents. In Afghanistan it spent two decades, trillions of dollars and thousands of lives trying to construct a liberal democratic state in the image of the West. The assumption was that Afghan society was waiting to be liberated, that elites would adapt, and that the public would eventually adopt a new political model. What followed was a vacuum into which the very forces the war had been meant to eliminate returned. The same logic shaped the invasion of Iraq and several other interventions where American power arrived with great confidence and left behind deeper instability. Israel has its own experience with this illusion. In 1982 the Israeli leadership believed that removing the PLO from Beirut and installing a friendly Christian leadership would usher Lebanon into a new political era. Instead it created a vacuum from which a new force emerged, one that would become Israel’s most formidable enemy on its northern border.

The reason is straightforward. Ideological regimes do not function like pyramids. They function like networks, sometimes like belief systems, sometimes like collective consciousness. When attacked from outside, the attack itself can strengthen the internal narrative of struggle and mission. Iran is an especially revealing case. Many Western analysts assume that the Iranian elite is loyal mainly to itself and that once personal risk rises high enough the system will fragment. Yet that assumption may reveal more about the observers than about Iran. Within Iran there exists a real ideological core. Not necessarily a majority, but a sufficiently large group of people who genuinely believe in the religious and revolutionary mission of the regime. For them the system is not merely a structure of power but a structure of meaning. Around them are many others who resent the regime deeply yet recoil at the idea of foreign intervention in their national life.

Here lies the painful irony of the present moment. The same political figures who speak most enthusiastically about bringing democracy to Iran are simultaneously pushing both the United States and Israel further away from liberal democratic norms. Instead of defending institutions, law and the restraint of power, they cultivate a politics centered on personal authority and deep suspicion of liberalism itself. They want Iran to become more Western while making the West under their leadership look increasingly Iranian.

A simple thought experiment exposes the weakness of their assumptions. Imagine that one morning the entire political leadership of Israel disappeared: the prime minister, the senior ministers, the coalition leaders and the extended family that circles around power. Would Israel collapse? Of course not. Schools would open, hospitals would operate, courts would convene, the army would function and civil society would continue its endless arguments and imperfections. The real life of the country would go on. This is not a political fantasy but a reminder of something that those who dream of toppling regimes often forget. Societies are larger than governments. Networks survive the collapse of individual nodes. When a regime is organized around belief rather than mere personal interest, the removal of a leader does not end the story. Sometimes it only begins a darker chapter.

The fantasy of regime change through the elimination of a leader is not always a strategy. Often it is a mirror. It tells us less about the societies others wish to transform and more about the psychology of those who believe they can engineer history. They assume the entire structure stands on one person: themselves. History is rarely impressed by such architects. It moves forward like a slow and stubborn river, ignoring militant spokesmen, manipulative politicians and second-rate strategists. It leaves behind ruins that no one intended and for which no one accepts responsibility. And the cruelest lesson of history is that the people who try to reshape the world through violence are rarely the ones who pay the price.

And yet I find myself unable to stay silent. Not because I am certain I am right, but because the questions that keep me awake at night seem to me too important to leave unasked. What happens the morning after? What does victory actually look like here? Or is it enough to celebrate the killings? And if we believe in deterrence as the foundation of our own security, how do we argue it means nothing when applied to our enemies?

I have no illusions about the Iranian regime. But I have equally few illusions about the political calculations driving this particular war at this particular moment. That combination, a ruthless adversary and leaders with their own survival uppermost in mind, is precisely when a citizen’s duty to ask hard questions becomes most pressing, and most unpopular.

This piece in the Observer is my attempt to do that.
https://observer.co.uk/news/opinion-and-ideas/article/i-wont-remain-silent-on-this-cynical-wa

I Won’t Remain Silent On This Cynical War The Observer

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