Redemption through genocide

BY BARNETT R. RUBIN 

The ICJ ruled that Israel’s Gaza campaign poses a plausible and urgent threat of genocide. Future historians of Jewish messianism may recount how in 2024 "redemption through sin" became "redemption through genocide," with unconditional U.S. support.

On February 24, Yaakov Godu, an anti-government demonstrator in Haifa, Israel, whose son Tom was killed by Hamas in Kibbutz Kissufim on October 7, told a reporter from Haaretz that members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government are “deranged messianic envoys.”

This is the government that President Biden treats as a friend and ally with whom the U.S. has a few differences. He and his envoys show no sign that they understand whom they are dealing with or what it would take to stop them from dragging the world into the conflagration that they and their apocalyptic Christian allies in the U.S. are praying for. 

Calling members of Netanyahu’s cabinet “deranged” and “messianic” is not a figure of speech. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich came out of Gush Emunim, a movement that, after 1967, preached that Jews must conquer and rule the Land of Israel (Palestine) from the River to the Sea to hasten the coming of the Messiah. Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been convicted of terrorism in Israeli courts, comes out of Meir Kahane’s racist Kach Party. He lives in Kiryat Arba, a settlement that hosts a memorial to Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron in 1994, and whose portrait Ben-Gvir displayed in his home until he entered politics.

These are not marginal figures. With no hindrance from Netanyahu, they are leading a movement to expel Palestinians from Gaza and settle it with Israelis. They are also overseeing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank through pogroms, expulsions, and assassinations. 

The rabbis of the Talmud forbade trying to hasten the arrival of the messiah, but heretical movements have sought to force the redemption. Gershom Scholem, a historian who devoted his life to studying Jewish mysticism, warned that “The Jews have always had a fatal attraction to messianism,” and “Zionism is no exception.”1 As early as the 1920s, Scholem compared the far-right Zionist predecessors of Netanyahu’s Likud party to Sabbatai Zevi, who proclaimed himself the messiah in Smyrna (now Izmir, Turkey) in 1648. Scholem warned that these false messiahs “Infuse our youth with a spirit of new Sabbatianism, which must inevitably fail.” 

Scholem showed how the mystical-Kabbalistic concepts developed by Rabbi Isaac Luria of 16th century Safed, a center of Jewish scholarship and mysticism in Ottoman Palestine, provided a theological framework for messianism. Luria taught that during creation the light of the creator broke the vessels into which it had been placed, creating only a shattered world. Jews could bring redemption through “tikkun,” the repair of those vessels, by keeping the commandments. The Sabbatians invented a darker version of tikkun, which required its believers to plumb the depths of evil to rescue the sparks of creation. Scholem called it “redemption through sin.”

Such desperate Messianic movements arose in the wake of calamities like the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the 1648 massacres of Jews in Ukraine by the Cossacks of Bohdan Chmelnicki. The Holocaust, swiftly followed by the establishment of the State of Israel, and then Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, supercharged the messianic undercurrents of Zionism that Scholem had warned about. 

In the wake of the 1967 war, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook’s teaching that the commandment to “conquer and settle” the Land of Israel was equal to all the other commandments inspired Gush Emunim. Fulfilling that commandment is the greatest tikkun and will hasten the footsteps of the Messiah. “The army of Israel,” Kook taught, “is the army of Hashem [God].”2

While these messianists have some followers among American Jews, their most powerful supporters in the U.S. are White Evangelical Christian Zionists, who have become a hegemonic force in Donald Trump’s Republican Party. They believe that the conquest and settlement of the land of Israel by the Jewish people will set off a world war, for which they pray as the precursor to the second coming of Christ. 

In a 1980 interview in the New York Review of Books, Scholem compared Gush Emunim to the Sabbatians and warned, “In the seventeenth century, . . . the failure of Sabbatianism had only spiritual consequences. Today, the consequences of such messianism are also political.” The messianic Zionist agenda, he said, “can only lead to disaster.” 

Shock at the atrocities of October 7, messianic beliefs, and unconditional U.S. financial and material support have combined to produce the apocalyptic cruelty of the current campaign in Gaza. For messianist Jews and apocalyptic Christians, the very existence of the Palestinian people has become an intolerable obstacle to the realization of the divine plan. As HaRav Kook taught, “We have absolutely no right to relinquish control over any piece of Eretz Yisrael.” As for those non-Jews living in the land, HaRav Kook cites Deuteronomy 7:2: “Show them no mercy,” which means, he explained, “Not to give them (gentiles) a place on the Land.”3 Only ending material support for the assault on Gaza and triggering new elections in Israel might have a chance to halt the juggernaut.

The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel’s Gaza campaign poses a plausible and urgent threat of genocide. Future historians of Jewish messianism and American failure may record that in 2024 redemption through sin became redemption through genocide, with the unconditional support of the United States.