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.
Notes
- David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah (Jewish Lives) . Yale University Press: New Haven, 2018. Kindle Edition. Chapter on “A University in Jerusalem.”
- Torat Eretz Yisrael: The Teachings of HaRav Tzvi Yehuda HaCohen Kook, based on the Hebrew “Sichot of HaRav Yehuda,” compiled and edited by HaRav Shlomo Chaim HaCohen Aviner, English Translation and Editing by Tzvi Fishman (Jerusalem :Torat Eretz Yisrael Publications, A Division of Ateret Cohanim,1991), pp. 299-300.
- Op. cit. p. 181.
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Comments
11 responses to “Redemption through genocide”
Let’s hope people around the world will start replacing Nazism with Judaism and the wiser Adolf Hitler with the criminal when they intend to refer to human history most barbaric violence. The Nazis never bombed refugee camps, schools, synagogues and hospitals full of Jewish (or others) children and women. The Nazis never tortured and deprive prisoners of food and water. Jews are enjoying it every day, murdering Palestinian women and children en masses. Jews are perpetuating barbaric violence because they control the U.S. regime and its army.
The U.S. has vetoed three UNSC Resolutions demanding ceasefire, and is refusing to condemn Jews mass murder of Palestinian women and children because the U.S. is complicit and is directly participating in the Palestinians Genocide, mass starvation of women and children and ethnic-cleansing. Can you imagine the U.S. decides tomorrow it will stop supplying Israel with weapons, including firebombs, artillery shells, bullets and warplanes (eg., F-16) to kill Palestinians?
You again, with your admirable Nazis. Are you bone ignorant, or a just lunatic Nazi fanboy? You deny the documented vile atrocities of the Nazis from their taking power to the bitter end, when a million Nazi Wehrmacht grunts were slaughtered all the way to Berlin, which Russians pulverized, liberated their torture/death camps, and forced Hitler’s suicide.
Why advertise your contemptible mania? It’s indefensible.
Zionist Nazi Israel must be destroyed because its brutality mimics those evil bastards.
For those few who know US history and are honest to accept its implications, today’s events that find again America involved in war crimes and genocide, should not be surprised.
Just omitting any US crimes prior to 1945 at the end of WWII, in Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, the tally runs in the tenths of millions. In Vietnam alone, it is estimated that carpet bombing and the effects of Agent Orange, whose victims produce until today birth defects where children are born with two heads, no legs or arms and other niceties, the tally is 2.5+ million people. The total of these numbers, is dangerously close to the number of victims of Nazi Germany in WWII. How many Americans are capable of feeling responsible for the atrocities committed in their name, to defend “Democracy and human rights”? The reason why I don’t mention the Zionist regime in Israel is very simple. Is due to the fact that Israel would not exist today surrounded by justifiably deadly enemies, without US unlimited support. As MLK told us and died for it: “The biggest purveyor of violence in the world, my own country the United States of America”. Today the US claims to honor the memory of a man who like JFK, was killed by its own government. Utterly disgusting show of hypocrisy.
Good comment. Remember, all the names you mentioned were ardent Zionists. They were murdered because the did not crawled enough to Jews. Trump is a good example.
For US and Israel ethnic cleansing of native population to colonize the land is a normal procedure and not a sin. Read:
Zionism’s ethnic cleansing has been accomplished through the sword and the gavel By Amjad Alqasis
Since its founding, Israel has crafted legal tools to advance the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The current judicial overhaul is part of this process and shows the state’s colonization plans are accelerating.
August 11/12, 2023 – “Mondoweiss” Political Zionism, as laid down in the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, has been brutal from the beginning — a colonial racist movement aimed to take someone else’s land for its own exclusive use. The only way to accomplish this goal was through forced population transfer. This crime, so hideous that it is deemed a war crime and a crime against humanity, served as the foundation of Zionism as well as Israel, where the forcible removal of Palestinians and the installment of its own identified privileged settler group on that same land formed the basis of the state. …
https://mondoweiss.net/2023/08/zionisms-ethnic-cleansing-has-been-accomplished-through-the-sword-and-the-gavel/
An interesting glimpse into the mindset of fanatics currently committing war crimes in Gaza. Their dysfunctional beliefs are responsible for widespread death and destruction in Gaza, all in the name of Hashem.
Tribalism is not uniquely Jewish.
Nor is messianism, the wish for a leader to ‘save’ the tribe from the earthly horrors inflicted by exclusivist tribalism.
The actual solution, in my own aging opinion, is to identify not with some protective sect or national club, however defined (notoriously by pigmentation with the European strain of the collective psychosis) but with the inclusive human tribe. I believe most religious founders were attempting convey this kernel before their acolytes colonised their ideas for self-advancement and power.
This does not stop the horror show, but it prevents us from exacerbating the knuckledragging b€$tia£ity.
The current most dangerous tribe is the parasitic g£oba£i$€d pillage idiots who covertly worship at the shrine of Mars while ma$KKKing their fascism in the cloaks of the various subsects, KKKri$tian, I$£amiKKK, JudaiKKK or fundamenta£i$t Hindu like Modi’s India. Most believers do manage to pierce the shrouds of myopic tunnel visionary bu££$hit, but enough followers is all the misleader needs.
These white-collar crimina£$ deliberately sow mayhem via their ‘divide et impera’ doctrine preached at their We$t Point, Sandhurst and assorted cath€dra£$ and exemplified by their ca$ino circus g£aditorial contests for ‘top-dog’ status. They are more canine than human in their behaviours and mentality as a result. The emblems they choose to represent themselves, such as the lion (king of the jungle), or eagle (king of raptors) betray their arrested development stagnation in the ongoing evolution of humanity towards sanity and away from our natal animal ignorance.
I hope is more useful than some of the delusions being pumped by some of the serially confused commentators above, who seem impervious to sense and sanity judging by their recidivistic lockstep marking time on square #1, delusional certitude.
2 Books that I have read on the subject of redemption through sin ,if anyone should be interested ,related to this article for a further understanding of the forces at work :
“Forcing God’s Hand”-Grace Halsell and “1666 redemption Through Sin”-Robert Sepehr
Good timing for this article .Thank you ICH .
I recommend this as a useful analysis of the politics of the Israeli war on Gaza.
https://bolsheviktendency.org/2024/03/06/for-a-bi-national-workers-state-in-palestine-israel/
How can anyone in their right minds even begin to try and explain what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians. Barbarity would be an understatement. But barbarity – while trying to justify the inexcusable … well, only devil-worshippers, or the devils themselves would do it. I would volunteer to do a straight 72 hour-shift without taking a break if I could be nominated to operate the guillotine to ‘euthanize’ these MF devils. It is NOT only the Israelis that are guilty of this inhuman-butchery, but also every single one of the Western Democratic political suck-holes who are just as culpable as these phucking lunatics.