In the days of the Second Temple, at the height of internal strife and the zealots’ incitement to revolt, Jerusalem was destroyed and the Temple fell. A delusional messianic fantasy led to a true apocalypse: an end and a finale of space and of time. To destruction. Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, who foresaw what was coming, departed the city in a coffin, in order to establish a new place, a new language, and a new understanding of what Judaism could be. A fundamental moment of beginning a new after a great catastrophe is bound up with the quieting of visionary fantasies and the silencing of their violent imposition upon reality. The beginning of the historical exile, two thousand years long, also followed the destruction of the Second Temple.

Over those two millennia, Judaism developed in the Diaspora and drew the contours of its symbolic language: A language of the diminishment of physical power, and the intensification of spiritual presence.

On October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched its assault on Israel, it was immediately clear to many that this was the act of a brutal terrorist organization, determined to annihilate Israel both physically and symbolically. Jihadist terror in its most extreme form sees the enemy as a fusion of symbol and substance, seeks to destroy both simultaneously. Over time, it became clear that for this goal it was willing to sacrifice more than could have been imagined, of its people’s blood and sustenance, and of its collective body. The physical destruction is undeniable.

The symbolic annihilation is expressed in the utter degradation of human dignity and in a rhetoric of total destruction: the State of Israel will not exist, Jews will be thrown into the sea, Palestine will be liberated from the river to the sea. Slogans like these surfaced across the globe, whether fully understood or simply chanted. The combination of these two forms of terror constitutes a declaration of war aimed at annihilation and goes far beyond any reasonable form of resistance to colonialism.

A quarter of a century ago, on the threshold of the new millennium, the September 11 attacks in the United States marked the opening shot of this kind of annihilatory warfare. Since then, new foundational patterns of failure and success have emerged in the confrontation between global powers and terrorist organizations. That was the first slice of the three-layered cake composed of religion (Judaism, Islam, or Christianity), regime (democratic, totalitarian, etc.), and the interactions between political entities: colonialism, terrorism, and messianic imperial dreams.

That slice marked a new global distribution and signaled the end of the postmodern era. Postmodern and postcolonial insights will continue to accompany the critique of the new age, but not only have they failed, as overarching worldviews, to provide an adequate explanation for unfolding events, as we have seen since October 7, they also bear no small share in amplifying a global catastrophe.

Following 9/11, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard distinguished between two forms of terror: one whose goal is rooted in realpolitik and could, in theory, be considered tolerable, and another whose aim is the destruction of spiritual and cultural assets, which is utterly intolerable. I will say this without hesitation: from my point of view, neither form of terror is acceptable. I have never seen a guide for the individual or for society in figures like Frantz Fanon or Malcolm X. Martin Luther King Jr. and Thich Nhat Hanh are my teachers. Yet as a citizen of the State of Israel (my only citizenship), a state that exists under the condition of occupation, I must be vigilant against a situation in which opposition to violent terror might be interpreted as support for ongoing injustice. I oppose the occupation, and at the same time I do not see opposition to occupation as a license for murderous terror in any form, especially that which produces a discourse of total annihilation. Unlike segments of the progressive left, I reject this entirely.

The establishment of a Palestinian state is a clear, just, and necessary objective. It is a realistic and political aim that successive Israeli governments, across the political spectrum, have persistently denied, resisted, and obstructed. Yet Hamas has set before itself a second goal: the annihilation of the Jewish people, not merely in the physical sense, but through a totalizing erasure aimed also at spiritual and symbolic heritage. And in recent days, with unsettling precision, it is this symbolic dimension that appears to be advancing.

For the Jewish people and the State of Israel are now undergoing a process of symbolic destruction, a disintegration not only of lives but of meaning: the erosion of spiritual values, of collective memory, of identity markers that once defined their historical continuity. What is vanishing is not only presence, but resonance; not only speech, but the voice that carries it. This is a moment not just of physical siege, but of metaphysical threat.

The fact that on October 7th a brutal system of actual annihilation resounded here, one that also strove for symbolic destruction, granted days of compassion and a certain period of time in which at least part of the world showed mercy toward Israel and the severe harm inflicted upon its people, which evoked memories of the pogroms of the Holocaust and of the essential existential threat that Israel faces. This also provided the initial justification for going to war, a war perceived as a war of existence. People went to war with a sense of a day of reckoning, of a war for survival, with no alternative. In a country of third- and fourth-generation descendants of Holocaust survivors and immigrants from Islamic lands, the sense of trauma pulses and percolates within the existential DNA.

Where are we now, nearly two years later? We are still inside the great catastrophe: families of hostages left unanswered, victims, both civilians and soldiers, whose deaths remain open wounds, and circles of displacement and exile, some of which are only now coming to closure. And beyond all this, broad and deep ripples of disaster continue to move through the body of the state.

The destruction of Gaza, the expulsion of Gaza, is of immense proportions. If one is to discuss this coldly, in terms of gain and loss, then the more one harms the most exposed reality of a group of people, the greater the risk of constructing and solidifying its symbolic existence, its identity markers. In this sense, the sacrifice of Gaza’s population by Hamas “succeeded.” It involved Israel in the deepest possible way, at least from Hamas’s perspective, in completing the annihilation, in the dulling of sensitivity to human life, and in the loss of proportion. The victim has brought and continues to bring far-reaching results and “successes.”

The monstrous phenomenon of leaders sacrificing their own people is historically rare. Still, one may argue that what was carried out through Hamas’s political-religious worldview, embedding itself among civilians during wartime with full knowledge that the opposing side would strike, finds a parallel in the Khmer Rouge’s sacrifice of the Cambodian people. That terrorist regime pursued a policy of deliberate harm to the Cham, the Vietnamese, and to educated and urban Cambodians in general, in order to construct a homogeneous and atheistic society. The number of people killed in Cambodia through such means is estimated to be between hundreds of thousands and one to two million.

There is destruction that builds, and there is construction that destroys. This theological principle has surfaced more than once in the convulsions of the heavenly and earthly Jerusalem, between Judaism and Christianity and within Judaism itself during the Second Temple’s destruction, echoed later by the Satmar Rebbe in the context of Israel’s establishment and his critique of the Six-Day War. From this vantage point, even those aligned with the far-right could have been expected to recognize the damage caused by this war, not only by humanitarian and solidarity standards but also from a self-interested, right-wing perspective: when a phenomenon fails on every level, moral, military, political, it all collapses on the Israeli side, and simultaneously contributes to the amplification and construction of the other side.

The destruction of Gaza, the bombardments, the starvation, these amount to the construction of Gaza as a victim. To render the other into the victim, to the point of pushing their actual existence to the edge of vast dimensions, is to strengthen their symbolic being. This has occurred steadily throughout the war and reached a critical intensity with the collapse of the population from hunger.

The immediate response to the war of annihilation that erupted on October 7th triggered an uncontrollable discourse of annihilation within Israel. Increasingly, it appears that this trajectory is deliberate and unrelenting. Hamas’s attack not only led to war in Gaza; it dragged an entire public, even those who were not right-wing, into an aggressive symbolic language: “flatten Gaza,” “a field to the sea,” “closure,” “starvation,” and more. These days, the process continues, with refusal of any deal and a move defined as the conquest of Gaza, pushing 1.5 million people into a state of displacement, with unimaginable casualties.

This is fatefulness: the Jew, on his side, charges the entire history of his own victimhood, and before him stands the naked humanity of a starving population, capable of breaking even a heart of stone, standing as the most severe indictment Judaism has known in generations. This disaster renders void the ability and right of Jews and Israelis to continue conducting their own Holocaust discourse. For two years, Israel has been constructing its own destruction in the form of the destruction of the other and actual annihilation, all while managing a discourse of “total victory.” All of this brings about an escalating annihilation of our symbolic self, our political and ethical identity, toward utter loss.

And if we ask what the Holocaust actually granted us, the answer is clear: it did not grant us the right to abuse others, only the obligation to prevent victimhood. From now on, every discourse we conduct on the Holocaust will be interwoven with mourning for the other. And every act we take not only fails to stop the war or advance the return of the hostages, but rather deepens the rift and the hatred within our people, a dynamic that fits seamlessly into the blindness perpetuated by television screens.

From the moment the war began until now, we have been generating a rolling catastrophe whose meaning is a vast trauma across the region, a trauma whose significance we have yet to fully grasp. Its cursed fruits will be eaten for generations. While many of us believed we were engaged in healing intergenerational trauma inherited from Holocaust survivors and from our immigrant parents, we have created a new intergenerational trauma that will be placed on the shoulders of our sons and daughters.

There are two forms of destruction in which we are entangled at this time. The first: we are destroying the reality of the other. The second: we are destroying our own symbolic standing in reality. That symbolic standing is our political, national, and ethical identity. Never before has Israeli-ness undergone such a degree of symbolic erosion. I am speaking of the pendulum between the real and the symbolic, and of the fact that the massive destruction of the other’s reality is, at the same time, the destruction of the symbolic value of the self: the destruction of the value of Judaism, the destruction of the value of Israeli-ness.

The willingness to destroy moral values within us and towards the “enemy” ,  Gaza ,  when this willingness is broadcast live before the entire world, renders Israel as a state and Judaism as a body of spiritual values and ethos into a general liquidation sale in the eyes of the world. This process can only be halted through the stopping of the war, the cessation of the occupation and bombardment campaign, and a professional, systematic intervention to prevent the collapse of the starving population in the Gaza Strip.

The approach to reality must be pragmatic. Precisely from a spiritual position, we must understand that the complexity of human beings and the ideological complexity of groups will never converge into a unified ideological consensus from which shared reality can be derived.

The backbone of such a framework depends on perceiving the state as a tool that must remain neutral. Only thus can the State of Israel be a home for the Jewish people, fulfill its mission of being a light unto the nations, and live with and alongside a homeland for the Palestinian people. Both Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz recognized the state as a tool: Rabbi Yosef from the traditional Sephardic position, and Leibowitz as a European-born philosopher and intellectual who knew well the collapse point of modernity and Enlightenment discourse.

Postmodernism made visible the fact that the globe is one, and media and artificial intelligence have processed and reproduced this reality to such a degree that the imagined plane (screen, television) is now the very infrastructure of the real and the symbolic. The genocide of European Jewry was not documented in real time by media technologies made fully available to the public. What power do written words, however shattering, have compared to the world of smartphones and social networks? Hundreds of thousands of diaries collapse before a single image of a mother holding her child. And the shock of the word “genocide” accumulates different weight in different mouths.

The four “Sonderkommando photos” secretly taken in August 1944 inside Auschwitz are the only visual documentation of the actual moments of extermination in the gas chambers. Aerial photographs taken by the American military in 1944 did capture Auschwitz during bombing raids, but image analysts claimed they failed to identify the nature of Birkenau camp, which lay adjacent to the industrial facility being targeted, despite recognizing it as a concentration camp. The rest of the visual material comes from the liberation of the camps, not from the acts of atrocity themselves.

In 1945, Sidney Bernstein, together with the British Ministry of Information, initiated a documentary film to show the German public the Nazi crimes in the camps. Alfred Hitchcock was brought onto the project. Yet the British government shelved the film before it was ever screened. The film’s director, Andre Singer, later said that after the war ended, “The government’s priorities had shifted. What seemed like a good idea in May 1945 became a problem by June and July… The British had issues with emerging Zionism and felt the film would not be helpful.”

The extermination of six million Jews was not documented on smartphones and in live broadcast, but the starvation and bombardment of Gaza is. As a result, it is easier to conduct a radical genocide discourse based on a potent mixture of data, facts, alongside campaigns and curated images. Every word, every sentence, every image gains equal status as testimony, constructing a narrative of genocide while simultaneously erasing the Jewish story entirely among some global communities, along with the historical responsibility owed to it.

While Israel clings to its role in enabling Hamas’s decision to sacrifice its own people, it mass-produces narratives of victimhood that will nourish generations of television and film creators and eternally enshrine the Israeli as destroyer. When the real and the symbolic touch each other at such a high frequency, a wave of the imagined is generated, beyond the representation of truth, that will be very difficult, if not impossible, to halt.

The essence of all racism is that each individual is painted with the color of the rejected and ostracized collective. The essence of antisemitism is that beneath this foundational logic lie additional and deeper strata, leading all the way down to the rupture between Christianity and Judaism and to the myth of the murder of Jesus, the foundational narrative of the Christian West. The residue of this myth has been used to drive a political scapegoat mechanism imposed on Jews across generations (certainly in Nazi Germany).

In an age where the local is global, any leader with a local agenda can easily inflame the Muslim (or leftist) population under his command to save himself or his legacy from political collapse (see the case of French President Macron, which involves far more than a gesture toward the Palestinians), or to increase his vote count (in Australia, there are approximately 1.25 million Muslims). When the scapegoat mechanism is activated on a global scale, it can spark flare-ups in any country against Israel and Jews, often as a cover for internal political issues.

Israel’s breach of responsibility toward the Jewish diaspora is greater than ever. The extreme and reckless behavior of a state that defined itself as a home for the Jewish people, and by virtue of this maintained a symmetry between religion and nationality, is now leading to the symbolic annihilation of the State of Israel in the eyes of the world. And the destruction of the political, national, and ethical value of the state brings with it the destruction of the symbolic value of the Jewish people as a whole.

When one considers the already-existing foundation of antisemitism, the Israeli revealed as a perpetrator on such a level and scale turns the Jew into a victim-in-waiting in every diaspora community. The discourse of annihilation against Israel in the Muslim world already exists. Blindness to the hunger in Gaza, to the suffering and the death, has created the empty eye, the one at the center of every storm, and dragged Israel and the Jews into a serious vortex. Once this conflict becomes a global one, Muslim diasporas around the world will outnumber Jewish communities in the same spaces, and this will translate into violent struggle in the streets and into voting power at the ballot box.

The most prominent figure in the space is the victim. In Gaza, hundreds of thousands of people are victims of the Israel-Hamas war. The hostages are victims of Hamas, and at the same time, victims of Israeli behavior. The ultra-Orthodox are seen as sacrificing the soldiers. The state is perceived as sacrificing the hostages. Israel is seen as sacrificing the Jewish diaspora. Some voices of the progressive left are sacrificing Israel and Zionism. Voices of the far-right are sacrificing the symbolic value of the state in the name of symbolic religious values (that do not exist in the tradition).

The willingness to turn the other into a victim has also come to shape the sectarian discourse: each sector races to turn the other into a victim, especially those well-represented in the government. To collect yet more political capital, the representatives and spokespeople of the Haredim, the national-religious, and Mizrahim are ready to sell off every symbolic value found in their ideological “base” ,  from Rabbi Shach to Rabbi Ovadia. Even Rabbi Kook would not agree with the current national-religious agenda. That is, the symbolic representatives are victimizing their own sectors, just as the leaders of the state are victimizing the state itself for their own political survival.

Personal reality sacrifices collective reality and erodes or constructs symbolic values, this is now the name of the game. While the IDF and those still committed to the idea of the state as a home for the Jewish people, a state that protects its citizens, are condemned to sacrifice the residents of Gaza, it can be argued that the sacrifice of a people by its leaders is not necessarily carried out through physical annihilation, but through the management of patterns of victimhood and sacrifice among segments of the nation to the point of civil war.

In a situation where reality surpasses all imagination, the true reality is unfolding in Gaza, while the messianic fantasy edges toward a nightmare of a slaughterhouse. A kindergarten teacher on the screen holds the same visual space as the destruction of Gaza and the simultaneous destruction of Israel. In a country where the entire nation is an army, the rupture and pain pass through every household; victimhood and death are daily presences. To such a degree that one might expect even opponents of the war to adopt the slogan: “We shall die but we shall not enlist.”

Regardless of any consideration of self-annihilation or symbolic empowerment of the adversary, or the mirrored dynamic of self-devaluation alongside the real destruction of the adversary with its symbolic glorification, the fundamental issue is a balanced stance grounded in doing what is right. One can understand everything, explain everything, judge this way or that, but right now, one must stand firm on what is the morally correct action and attempt to reach it.

The Jewish diaspora is small compared to the Muslim one. A mutual destabilization is currently unfolding: Israel is undermining the Jewish diaspora globally, and key forces within that diaspora are in turn challenging Israel’s legitimacy and confronting Zionism.

The squandering of every political and military gain, and the realization of Hamas’s symbolic fantasy of Israel’s destruction, is manifesting as a realpolitik achievement: unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state (instead of such recognition emerging through long-term arrangements that distinguish between Palestine and Hamas, between civilians and terrorists). The culmination appears in Saudi Arabia’s warning that it may withdraw support for the Abraham Accords. This closes the full circle with regard to the massacre of October 7th, which, according to some in Hamas, was carried out to return global attention to the Palestinian issue, supposedly forgotten after the signing of the Abraham Accords.

The State of Israel was established as a result of the Holocaust. It is a political-theological structure rooted in victimhood. The Holocaust was a political project, its antisemitic foundations backed by regime and religion. Most European nations played an active or passive role in that atrocity. Now, under the auspices of its own government and in the convergence between messianic visions and being strategically manipulated by Hamas, to the point of almost becoming its agent, as Hamas intended when it knowingly sacrificed its own people, Israel has become the sacrificer of the Palestinian people. And as a result of this sacrifice, the Palestinian people are gaining political recognition.

But this is not only about political recognition for Palestine. It is also about the erasure of Israel from the community of nations. The Palestinian people are being recognized through the delegitimization of Israel, thus fulfilling the symbolic goal, with Israel’s own help, and bringing us back to the starting point: the delegitimization of the Jew as such.

Recognition of Palestine in itself has long been discussed as a legitimate step. But when such recognition comes in the wake of real and symbolic annihilation, its moral and human weight is grave. The world may not yet grasp its meaning, but it will eat its bitter fruits, not only Israel.

Within Israel, even the most right-wing interests are working against themselves. The narrow interests of every sector are managed by political leadership also preoccupied with personal survival. But independent of all considerations of self-annihilation and symbolic strengthening of the adversary, we must now understand what the morally correct act is, and strive toward it.

The practical, moral, pragmatic point must stand. Human, social, and religious convergence is always a convergence toward morality. This is the decisive point of departing Jerusalem in a coffin. This is the choice of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai. This is the choice of Jeremiah. This is the call of Isaiah: to take the nations into account and prefer the minor key of “For as much as this people refused the waters of Shiloah that go softly,” and to warn against imperial visions. It is a diminishment of power that contains within it a form of empowerment. For without preserving the core of the self, what is the purpose of existence?

The hope and the correct path in Israel lie in tempering the national-religious constructions. It is essential to unravel and reweave the concept of nationhood. Responsible leaders in the religious-Zionist public must take this upon themselves as guides and interpreters, out of responsibility for the collective of Israel. If we succeed, we will be at the dawn of a new construction.

It is also essential to return to what Haredi and Sephardic thought have to offer: frameworks in which the state is neither sacred nor impure. These are frameworks that recognize the need to temper the impulse of “messianism now” and to manage political processes rationally, through negotiation, in the world that Maimonides defined as “the era of subjugation to kingdoms.”

Translated by Alexandra Weil and edited by Betsy Rosenberg