Israel alone: the self-fulfulling prophesies of Jewish isolation

Israel's war in Gaza has ignited fierce theological debate, challenging religious leaders and laypeople alike to reconcile faith with unfolding atrocities, rising global outrage and a crisis of moral clarity.

- Kevin Bloom

“I think the reason that the forces of darkness are beating us so much,” said Rav Doniel Katz in a video uploaded on 24 April, “is that they are fighting a religious war, and we keep ignoring the fact that it’s a religious war.”

The video was a conversation between Rav Katz and his much younger colleague, Reb Adam. Both rabbis, I knew, were ba'alei teshuvah — a Hebrew phrase meaning “masters of return” used for Jews who had been born secular but had later found Torah.

At about 22 minutes, Adam asked Katz if there was any place for “external advocacy”.

Katz: “What do you mean by external advocacy?”

Adam: “Advocacy for Israel and the Jewish people ... you know, the notion of, ‘Bring them [the hostages] home now.”

Katz: “I find that a problematic statement. I mean, it’s leveraging a tremendously difficult moment, and kind of politicising it, as if the [Israeli] government has control. And why are we blaming it on them? Shouldn't we give them back now? Shouldn't we be turning to Hashem [God] and saying, ‘Hashem, help us heal now’?”

It was then that Katz lamented the fact, as he saw it, that the broader Jewish community had failed to interpret the war with Hamas in essentially spiritual terms.

"And even then, after the images out of Gaza were drawing comparisons to the Nazi death camps, the extermination campaign would continue"

“They are fighting with a passionate spirituality,” he said, “but we as a people ... are disengaged. We don’t really think we have a divine destiny ... and therefore, we are beaten.”

Even if I had long since arrived at the conclusion that, far from waging a “war”, the Jewish state had been waging a campaign of revenge and extermination, I could not shake the sense that the horrors in the Holy Land were millenarian at their core.