God is Back

And He is a member of the Israeli government

The recent Gaza war was unlike any previous round of violence. This was not another military campaign but a full fledged religious war. A theological confrontation disguised as a self defense conflict. Hamas’s side was explicit in its faith. Israel’s side fought no less in the name of God, even if it refused to admit it. Beyond the initial days of shock and vengeance, every stage of the war rested heavily on religious rhetoric and deeds: the PM and his government ministers invoking the command to wipe out Amalek, soldiers’ graffiti on Gaza’s walls, rabbis sneaking into the battlefield, and plans for redemption and the resettlement of Gaza. This was a war fought under a divine banner. It ended only when the most cynical secularist of our time called it to a halt. In Gaza, Israel crossed a threshold and acted for the first time as a religious state.

This raises the central question: where do we go from here? Toward a theocratic state where God becomes a cabinet member or towards a secular republic envisioned once by Israel’s founders? Who holds Israel’s ultimate authority: the rabbi or the sovereign, the Knesset or the Beit Haknesset? The slow and cold civil war over the country’s identity is heating up toward a boiling point, unless we find the courage to finally disentangle religion from the state.

To understand this moment, one must look back to its roots. In the monotheistic world, two distinct models emerged for governing the relationship between heaven and earth. Both derive from the lives of their founders: Jesus and Muhammad. Jesus, executed by Roman authorities as a potential opposition to the imperial order, left behind a principle that would eventually reshape Western politics: Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s. Whether he intended it or not, this planted the seed for what would later become the separation of church and state. Muhammad, by contrast, was both a prophet and a statesman. The unity he forged between faith and governance became the foundation of the Islamic political order, where divine authority and civil law became inseparable.

From these two origins grew two political traditions. After centuries of religious wars and bloodshed in God’s name, the Christian world gradually evolved toward separation. The process was neither quick nor peaceful. It required the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and rivers of blood before religion was confined to the personal and communal spheres while the state assumed responsibility for public life. Islam, by contrast, largely preserved the unity of divine and political authority. God remained the source of law and justice, and faith never fully parted from power.

This is not to say that Christianity always practiced separation or that Islam never did. Byzantine emperors claimed divine authority for centuries. The Catholic Church wielded temporal power well into modernity. And the Islamic world has seen its share of pragmatic rulers who kept religion at arm’s length when convenient. But the ideals each tradition articulated differed fundamentally. And ideals, even when violated, shape how societies imagine legitimacy and authority.

Israel stands on the fault line between these two traditions. A modern state built on Enlightenment foundations, it nonetheless leans heavily on religious myth and biblical claim. It speaks the language of civil rights while thinking in terms of destiny and divine chosenness. It maintains a secular legal system yet submits identity, marriage, divorce, and conversion to extreme religious institutions. It insists on being both Jewish and democratic, even when the two definitions collide.

The tension is not only ideological but sociological. Half of Jewish society descends from Western cultures that internalized the Christian principle of separation between religion and state as natural and necessary. The other half hails from Muslim regions where faith and politics were intertwined for centuries. This internal split runs through every institution of Israeli life, from parliament to the army, from schools to the courts. The question is no longer whether Israel can balance these contradictions, but whether it still wants to try.

Over the past few decades, the bigger worldly picture has reversed. After the twentieth century, the most secular in human history, God has returned to the political arena. Not only in Israel but across the world, religion has reemerged as a central force in public life. In the United States, evangelical Christianity has become the backbone of the Republican Party, shaping policy on issues from abortion to foreign affairs. In Turkey, Erdogan restored Islam to its place as a pillar of national identity, dismantling decades of Kemalist secularism. In India, Hindu nationalism under Modi has transformed faith into an instrument of majoritarian rule. In Poland and Hungary, Catholicism provides moral cover for authoritarian populism. In Russia, the Orthodox Church has become a full partner in state corruption and imperial war. And in Israel, belief in the chosen people has evolved from a spiritual concept into a political supremacy.

Jewish Israeli religion is no longer the voice of conscience calling power to account. It has become the operating system of power itself. Rabbis do not challenge the state; they staff it, exploit its funds, and sanctify its wars. Religion does not speak truth to power; it whispers approval into its ear. When religion and politics merge, both are corrupted. Religion loses its critical voice and becomes a concubine of the state. Politics ossifies into sacred dogma, immune to criticism or reform. As history repeatedly shows, when faith becomes a mechanism of state control, it forgets mercy. This is an age of moral confusion in which one can no longer tell genuine belief from opportunistic piety, religious ethics from coerced sanctity.

The challenge of our time is not to restore some imagined golden age when religion knew its place. No such age existed. The challenge is to redefine the entire operating system of Israeli public life, to build an identity that does not depend on political coercion and a politics freed from religious entanglement. One that can once again serve as a space of human responsibility rather than Godly destiny. This distinction between faith and power is not merely a constitutional principle. It is a condition of survival.

Achieving it will require a double revolution. First, political courage: to free state institutions from clerical control, to redirect the billions of shekels currently funneled to religious authorities, to return education and religious services to the civic sphere. Civil marriage. Transportation on Shabbat. Equality for all. Constitutional protections for minority rights. These are not radical demands but basic features of every functioning democracy. Second, theological courage: for religious leadership to renounce dependence on state power and money. For rabbis to admit that faith does not need an army or a budget to endure, that it may be stronger without them. For redemption to cease being a political program and return to being a personal and communal hope. True faith should not fear the loss of governmental backing. If it does, it was never faith to begin with. The state must be blind to the beliefs of its citizens. Only then can all citizens be equal.

History has already shown what happens when that boundary is erased. When the spiritual and the temporal fuse, the state loses its flexibility and its citizens lose their freedom. Neither survives for long. Consider Rome. For eight centuries, the empire endured as a pagan state, pragmatic and adaptable in its religious tolerance. But when Christianity became the official religion in the fourth century, something fundamental shifted. Citizens then believed there was a higher authority above the emperor and a holier law above the state. Theological disputes became political crises. Heresy became treason. The unity that had held the empire together dissolved. Within a century, the western empire collapsed.

This is not to blame Christianity for Rome’s fall; the causes were many and complex. But it demonstrates a pattern: when the state ties its legitimacy to a single religious truth, it becomes brittle. It cannot compromise or adapt. It becomes a regime of believers, not a republic of citizens. Israel, if it continues to blur the line between God and government, risks the same fate. The Jewish identity will devour the democratic. It will not be a military defeat, Israel’s army remains strong, but internal fracture. A society divided into the faithful and the heretical, the chosen and the excluded, cannot sustain democracy. It can only sustain domination. And domination breeds resistance, resentment, and eventually collapse.

This is no prophecy, only a historical warning. The question is whether we have the wisdom to heed it, or whether we will insist on learning the lesson ourselves, at a cost we cannot yet imagine.