Israel’s Triple Cult of Death

In Israel today, death has become the country’s true government. It storms through our streets, howls from our screens, and drowns out the voice of life. After nearly two years of revenge driven war, blind rage, and cynical politics, it’s impossible to ignore. We speak endlessly of the sanctity of life, while remaining entirely captive to a culture that worships death. A triple cult of death.

First, a total moral blindness to Palestinian lives. Second, a constant invocation of the dead of the past from biblical times to the Holocaust to the wars of Israel as justification for today's relentless killing. Third, the sanctification of all Israeli deaths, soldiers, civilians, even those killed needlessly, as holy martyrs in a national epic.

This cult is not the result of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. It is one of its prime engines. The mourners speak of those who fell on the “Altar of the Nation and the Land”. And they are right. The land has become an altar of enormous proportions, and we, our children, are the sacrifices laid upon it daily. Human sacrifices that will never satisfy the priests of Greater Israel, the rabbis of racial hate, and the God of vengeance they serve.

Every fallen Israeli is instantly drafted again. Their death becomes part of a political emotional machine, a kind of perpetual motion mechanism that ensures the more that die, the more must die. “How can we stop now, after paying such a heavy price” we ask, and so each funeral becomes a minute of silence. This is how thousands of funerals become a national silence that suffocates our ability to question the blood toll the Israeli government continues to extract.

Palestinian Lives

Next to the glorified Jewish dead, Palestinian lives are not really lives, and their deaths are not mourned. They are routine. Data in military spreadsheets. The language of moral laundering refers to them as collateral damage. That damage now numbers in the tens of thousands.

Many of them, children, elderly, entire families, were likely killed by shells signed ceremoniously by Israeli leaders. Not even the worst atrocities penetrate the iron wall of Israeli emotional detachment. After all, “there are no innocents in Gaza”, right?!

In the other occupied territories, Jewish settler terrorism runs rampant with the support of ministers and soldiers. Within Israel, the murder of Arab citizens barely registers with the police or politicians. Since October 2023, over fifty thousand Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, many of them children, and yet not a second of silence was observed, no public reckoning, no genuine national grief. Palestinian death has become automatic, inevitable, and for many, morally acceptable.

This is not obliviousness. This is ritual. Palestinian life and death are stripped of moral significance, so they don’t interfere with the self-justifying machinery that crushes both peoples’ hopes for reconciliation between the river and the sea.

Weaponizing the past

In Israel, history is not the background, it’s a weapon. The traumas of our past are summoned repeatedly to justify the brutality of our present. The destruction of the Temple, pogroms, the Holocaust, the Yom Kippur War, suicide bombings, and other national calamities are played like cards in the political Squid Games of Netanyahu and his disciples cult.

When Hamas committed the atrocities of October 7th, the instinctive Israeli response was not only horror, but identification. This is the Holocaust again. The phrase expressed deep fear, and just as much, it carried a message. History has returned, and this time all bets are off. No moral boundaries. No restraint. This time, unlike eighty years ago, we will win. At all costs.

We have deliberately erased the line between past and present. We no longer learn from history; we wear it like armor. Maurice Barres, the far-right anti Dreyfus French nationalist, once said: “To build a nation, all you need is a cemetery and a history lesson”. Our cemeteries keep expanding. Our schools have been enlisted for this mission for over seventy years. The machine works. The next generations are being molded to keep killing and be killed on its behalf.

Not all of them are heroes.

In Israel, death often leads to a promotion. There is no such thing as dying in vain. Every fallen soldier, every civilian victim, is immediately hailed as a hero. Eulogies sound like national anthems. And every death retroactively becomes a sacred act, complete with a final testament and tales of saving the nation.

But the truth is harder to bear. Many of the dead did not want to die. Some opposed the war. Some resented the cynical leaders now celebrating them. They did not command us to continue the death ritual. They died due to poor planning, political cowardice, and a refusal to end the occupation its endless cycles of violence and settlers.

To turn their deaths into a commandment to perpetuate the very blindness that killed them may comfort the bereaved, but it makes our responsibility so shallow. The myth of noble sacrifice chokes any alternative discourse. It prevents us from the simplest truth. Death is not glory. Death is a failure that could be prevented.

Quo Vadis

This triple cult of death is not destiny. It is the result of an educational, political, and media system that glorifies victims and heroes to serve impure ends. It has turned life in Israel into a reality possible by permanent death only.

To dismantle this cult, we need a new language. A mourning that is not a recruiting office. A memory that is not military. An understanding that every person, Jewish or Palestinian, was born to live, not to die for a myth.

To truly live, we must stop sacrificing life on the altars of deceit, fear, and collective indoctrination. It is time to say, clearly and apologetically: Death is not a moral command. Death is a tragedy. And it is not “good” to die for the country. And recently no longer justifiable to kill on its behalf.