You promised spring at home and blossoms; You promised to fulfil promises.

A ceasefire in a perpetual conflict and the battle for Israel's soul.

On the 11th of March 1978, a terrorist cell from Yassir Arafat’s Al-Fatah group of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) infiltrated Israel by sea from Lebanon. They hijacked two buses travelling between Haifa and Tel Aviv and massacred the travellers, killing 37 (including 13 children) and wounding 76. Until the 7th October 2023 attack by Hamas, the 1978 coastal highway massacre was the worst in Israel’s history. Israel responded by invading South Lebanon to destroy the PLO, an initially successful military response but one which ultimately resulted in a unilateral United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 425 requiring the withdrawal of Israeli forces from South Lebanon. This proved to be a short-lived resolution. Continued PLO attacks into Israel staged from South Lebanon, facilitated by ongoing civil war in Lebanon between Palestinian insurgents and Lebanese Christian militias, resulted in a second Israeli invasion in 1982 in what would become “Israel’s Vietnam”. The conflict resulted in the foundation of the Shia Islamist terrorist organisation, Hezbollah, sponsored by Iran, and the power vacuum created by Israel’s full military withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000 cemented South Lebanon as a Hezbollah-controlled Iranian fiefdom.

The 1978 PLO coastal highway terrorist attack was an attempt by Arafat to disrupt the pending peace and normalisation of relations between Egypt, led by Anwar Sadat and Israel under Menachem Begin. For his efforts, Sadat would be assassinated just four years later. Similarly, the October 7th Hamas terrorist attack appears to have been strongly motivated by the progress of the Abraham Accords and the normalisation of Israeli relations with the Gulf States. In both instances, the realisation on the part of the Palestinians that their Arab brethren may pay lip service to Palestinian nationalist aspirations but are ultimately more concerned with their state interests in a volatile Realpolitik region generates another spasm of vainglorious violence to inspire another generation of hopeless “martyrs”.

As of the 19th of January 2025, yet another ceasefire has been reached after over a year of carnage that began with the worst massacre in Israel’s history on October 7th, 2023. The tentative exchange of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners has already begun, but to what extent the fragile agreement holds remains to be seen. Pay close attention to the details in the foregoing paragraphs: history in the Middle East appears somewhat cyclical. The current cessation of fighting allows one to think through certain recurrent themes and motifs.

Through the dynamic between the Arab states, the stateless Palestinians, and Israel, we can glean two fundamental ideological shifts that occurred almost simultaneously. The first shift saw the pan-Arabist doctrines that had defined inter-state conflict post-1948 supplanted by the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the ideological evolution of Palestinian nationalism from pan-Arabism to theological Islamist revolutionary nationalism. The second shift saw the secular Labour Zionist movement toppled with Begin’s 1978 election triumph, driven by the Mizrahi (Jews from the Middle East and North Africa), then on the peripheries of Israeli society, and the ascendency of Right-wing messianic Zionism and the settler movement in the territories occupied after the 1967 Six Day War. The temporal overlap of these shifting tectonic plates has defined the conflict over the past 30 years in ways distinct from the pre-1973 Yom Kippur War.

“Uprooting the Zionist Entity”, From Marxism to Jihadism

Returning to the tendency for Palestinian terrorist attacks to coincide with normalising inter-state relations in the Middle East is an appropriate point of departure. The first aforementioned shift is crucial to understanding the raison d'être of Hamas and, consequently, October 7th. In September 1967, in the aftermath of the Six Day War, the Arab League issued a declaration confirming “...the main principles by which the Arab States abide, namely, no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it...” Such bluster was consistent with the position adopted by the Arab League in 1948 in response to Israel’s declaration of independence, in which the Arab League articulated a vision of territorial maximalism for the region defined by the eradication of the nascent state of Israel.

By the end of the Yom Kippur War, however, the Arab states had tried and failed four times to defeat Israel with conventional warfare, and no amount of Soviet tanks could overcome the sheer incompetence of the Arab militaries. The pan-Arabist dream died in the Sinai Peninsula in 1973. The difference between the Arab states and the Palestinians is that the states, from Egypt to Jordan to Syria, long ago realised that there would be no military defeat of Israel. While the Arab states may have had Soviet tanks, the Palestinian militant groups in the 1960s-1970s were, however, deeply infused with Soviet ideas of “anti-colonial struggle”.

Whether the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Palestinian Liberation Front, or the Abu Nidal Organisation, Palestinian militant groups in this period were primarily Marxist-inspired and secular. Violence against civilians in this context was primarily politically motivated, steeped in Bolshevik doctrines of terror in the pursuit of “anti-imperialism” and “anti-Zionism”. However, the fracturing of pan-Arabism in the 1970s created an ideological vacuum into which theological Islamism stepped, most notably with the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Theocratic Islamism held that only with a return to religious purity and conviction could the “Little Satan” of Israel be defeated and eradicated.

Pan-Arabism was gradually replaced by a combination of self-interest (e.g., the Gulf States), self-preservation from further military defeat and territorial losses (e.g., Egypt, Jordan, and Syria), and the embrace of Islamist doctrines of jihad by non-state actors and paramilitary groups. Through the 1980s, the doctrines of Palestinian nationalism shifted from the secular Marxist “anti-colonialism” of the PLO groups to theological revolutionary Islamism, defined by the doctrine of jihadism. Violence in all its forms shifted from the politically-motivated violence of the PLO to the religiously-motivated violence of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, sponsored by the Islamic Republic.

Understanding this dynamic, it is difficult to understate Israel’s military successes over the past 15 months. Hamas’ military capacity, which consisted of the 24 battalions of the al-Qassam Brigades, has been substantially weakened both in terms of loss of manpower and in the destruction of much of the tunnel network and weapons manufacturing facilities. Hezbollah has been crippled in South Lebanon, with its military, political, and spiritual leadership wiped out. And behind all of this, the Islamic Republic has never appeared weaker and more ineffectual, its pan-Islamist bluster more bark than bite. The Islamic Republic largely watched as Israel systematically incapacitated its regional proxies, with none causing more reputational damage to the regime than the defanging of Hezbollah. Israel embarrassed the Islamic Republic in ways that the regime’s two missile strikes against Israel failed to do, most notably with the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas; political leader, in a military guesthouse in Tehran. And the Islamic Republic’s military presence in Syria was decimated in a series of airstrikes as Assad’s regime was falling.

Since supplanting pan-Arabism in the 1980s, theocratic Islamism has never suffered a defeat like this. However, the reality that faces Israel, as America found out in Afghanistan and Iraq, is that while a state can be defeated, ideologically motivated non-state movements die far harder. A state has self-interest to preserve, which can be cajoled and appeased. Ideological movements must protect the central tenets of the ideology or their authority crumbles. In this respect, the salient similarity between the revolutionary Marxism of the PLO and the revolutionary jihadism of contemporary Palestinian nationalism is their shared ideology of territorial maximalism. Consider the language of Arafat in 1970 when he declared three years after the Six-Day War:

“We are not concerned with what took place in June 1967 or with eliminating the consequences of the June war. The Palestinian revolution's basic concern is the uprooting of the Zionist entity from our land and liberating it.”

Juxtaposition Arafat’s rhetoric with the words of a Hamas suicide bomber in 2001 recorded in their will, which Hamas (used to) publish online:

“We are proud that we are engaged in God's path,

May all the calls for a cease-fire come to an end,

May the sound of bombs grow louder,

It's either victory or martyrdom,

God is great,

Victory to Islam.”

As the two quotes reflect, Marxist-inspired revolutionary zeal may have transcended into Islamist-inspired jihadist bloodlust, but irrespective of the guiding ideology, the maximalist aspirations in Palestinian nationalism remained a unifying characteristic. Both iterations of Palestinian nationalism see participation in politics and violence as mutually complementary. While a ceasefire may be in place now, the fractured landscape of intra-Palestinian politics almost guarantees that Hamas, or another Islamist-inspired movement, will retain influence over the inevitable post-war resurgence of Palestinian nationalism.

Fundamentally, support for Hamas has always reflected Palestinian disillusionment with the incompetent and corrupt Palestinian Authority and the resulting vacuum of political leadership. Hamas’ rise to power reflected not only political leadership but spiritual and ideological leadership and renewal, inherently appealing to a beleaguered people. As the scenes of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters in their balaclavas and headbands following the ceasefire were intended to suggest, they may be bloodied but they remain unbowed.

Death is an incentive.

In the Western liberal conception of the conflict, all radicalisation is portrayed as a consequence of occupation and oppression, rather than a causal factor in and of itself. This is because Western liberals cannot fathom religious extremism and ideology, a feature discussed in more detail in this previous essay. Yet the depths of Hamas’ Islamist ideologies are not a mere consequence. An ideology cannot be killed if death itself is the primary incentive, the highest calling, of the ideology. Only when the people subscribing to that ideology realise that there may be more to life than death¹ will an opportunity arise to quell the ideological chokehold.

This won’t be easy. Hamas’ political project extends to indoctrination in mosques, and in Dar al-Quran, or “Kuranic Memorisation Centres”, and their media glorifying “martyrdom” expressly targets children and adolescents. While one can have little doubt that Israeli offensives inspire a new generation of would-be “martyrs”, the reality of Islamist ideology is that in the absence of any intervening factors, those “martyrs” would be nevertheless be produced, incubated in the warped doctrines of religious hate. One wonders when, if ever, it will finally dawn on the Palestinians, or the Islamic Republic, that the state of Israel is not an aberration. It is not one “glorious martyrdom” away from disappearing. It is not a matter of time, nor a matter of will. Israel is not trembling before any wrath of Allah.

The Triumph of Revisionist Zionism

Nevertheless, the 2023-2024 Gaza war (which may continue in 2025) also represents a profound ideological moment in the evolution of the Religious and Messianic Right in Israeli politics and society. Conceptually, Zionism has always encompassed competing visions for Jewish self-determination and the characteristics of a Jewish state. From Theodore Herzl’s inception of the Zionist movement through to the foundation of Israel in 1948, and for the first 20 years of the existence of the state, secular political Zionism constituted the predominant strain of thought. Religious Zionism retained a presence, however, primarily in the form of the Mizrachi movement founded in 1902, which held that any future Jewish state required religion to be at its core for Zionism to provide the Jews with both self-determination and spiritual renewal.²

Yet within religious Zionism lay a competing tension, which differed substantially from the secular national idea of Zionism, the latter of which was primarily concerned with statehood, in whatever form, in its vision. Within Religious Zionism were two ideologically distinct positions: one rejected the realisation of any Jewish state as inconsistent with religious doctrines, holding that the Jews could only be redeemed in the land upon the return of the Messiah, while the other interpreted the national idea of Zionism and the establishment of the nation-state of Israel as itself a messianic act. The strict religious view of the Haredi (i.e., ultra-Orthodox) who opposed secular Zionism found expression in a rejection of the legitimacy of the state of Israel, the foundation of which was considered an “anti-messianic act.”³ However, it was the conception of Israel’s foundation as a messianic act itself and the fusion of religious ideology with political Zionism under the doctrines of Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook that would alter Israel’s political landscape with far-reaching consequences up to the present moment.

The 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War unleashed the messianic Religious Zionism of Rabbi Kook; the territorial acquisitions following the respective wars were not merely the result of military victory but sanctified as the will of God. The fervour of the messianic Zionist movement found expression in the emergence of the Gush Emunim, who believed it was their religious duty to establish Jewish sovereignty over the entirety of Eretz Israel, the historic lands of Israel, in particular, “Judea and Samaria” (the West Bank) given its biblical importance to the Religious Zionists. Gush Emunim began to establish Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, based on their Messianic interpretation that no Israeli government held the right to give away any land as a political compromise; the settlement of the land constituted redemption under God. In this regard, the Messianic Zionism of Kook both acknowledged the legitimacy of the state of Israel while simultaneously holding that the power of the state was secondary to the authority of God. Thus understood, settlement in the newly occupied territories may have been illegal even under Israeli law, but that was irrelevant; it was sanctified as a messianic act, which superseded man-made laws.

The expansion of the religious settlement movement represented a point of departure in Israeli domestic politics, the moment when the policies of the democratically elected government became open to defiance if those policies were interpreted as inconsistent with the legitimation of territorial expansion under the doctrines of messianism. Begin’s 1977 election victory with Likud, driven by the embittered Mizrahi, fused messianic Religious Zionism with politics under the banner of Likud, which leveraged Gush Emunim to settle strategically advantageous regions of the West Bank to sever contiguity in the land and, consequently, any possibility of a future Palestinian state. The settlement movement thus became the religious wing of political Right-wing ultra-nationalism. However, the religious underpinnings of the movement were dealt a series of political blows with the secession of occupied territories, none more devastating and consequential for the settlement movement than the root-and-branch withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. To the settlement movement, this represented the ultimate betrayal by the state, which in the eyes of many on the religious and settler Right became suspect in itself.

The once-cohesive messianic movement fractured into disparate groups, including the Hilltop Youth Movement, a religious extremist settler group which establishes settlements in the West Bank and terrorises Palestinians in attempts to drive them out of towns and off their farmed lands, and the anti-Zionist Hardal, which grew out of disillusionment with territorial secession, explicitly rejects the authority of the state and calls for the establishment of a Jewish theocracy. The religious extremism of these groups remains fused with politics through their shared aspirations with secular ultra-nationalists. However, the flagrant violence of the religious extremist groups in the West Bank represents something much deeper as it pertains to the competing visions of Zionism: the fusion of religion with militarised Zionism. This latter emerged with the Revisionist Zionist movement and its spiritual leader, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and traces back to the Irgun, the Jewish paramilitary group that operated in Mandatory Palestine, carrying out attacks against both the British and Arabs, which embraced the use of force to achieve a territorially maximalist vision of Israel.

The varied visions of Zionism, both before and after the foundation of the state of Israel, have engendered a deep moral philosophical debate on the use of force and violence, military or otherwise, in the context of Jewish national self-determination.⁴ To many observers who see a state perpetually at war, this discourse is not immediately evident. Yet this debate was central to the development of secular political Zionism and the principles of the nascent state. To the early secular Zionists, to inflict unnecessary and unjust violence was to inflict the pain and humiliation of exile on another. In a popular Israeli novel, Khirbet Khizeh, which centred on the fighting in an Arab village during the 1948 War of Independence, the narrator states:

“Something struck me like lightning. All at once everything seemed to mean something different, more precisely: exile. This was exile. This was what exile was like. This was what exile looked like.”⁵

None of this reflection was inconsistent with the desire for self-determination; it was a discourse on what moral values a Jewish state should epitomise. To the early secular Zionists, such as David Ben-Gurion or Berl Katznelson, Zionism only had legitimacy and meaning if it was grounded in the moral standards of the Jewish tradition and with specific regard for the experience of Jews in Europe, a tradition of contempt for injustice and oppression. For religious Jews, such as the “conscience of Israel”, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, with the realisation of national self-determination and victory in the War of Independence, i.e., with political and military power, came the burden of exercising moral standards over the use of that power. Both interpretations of Zionism viewed occupation as a violation of the moral standards of Zionism; Leibowitz predicted, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, that sustaining occupation of the territories would corrupt the moral foundation of Zionism. Ehud Luz captured the essence of the debate and militarised Zionism:

“…the moral force of Zionism was derived from its positive, different, moral standards of behaviour for military struggle… Uncontrolled use of violence would necessarily lead to the moral corruption of those who practice it and consequently it would completely undermine the foundations of Zionism.”⁶

In many respects, the 2023-2024 war represents the triumph of Revisionist Zionism, the inevitable endpoint of the doctrines of Jabotinsky and his disciple, Begin, manifest in Netanyahu’s coalition of religious extremists and ultra-nationalists. Of course, Israel had to respond to Hamas’ grotesque attack on October 7th, and the war was justified on that basis. The debate within Zionism on the role of military force never equivocated with the reality that force may be necessary. It did, however, deliberate on the aims through which military force may be the required means. During this war, those aims were made plain by ghouls like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, namely the cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank and the establishment of Greater Israel. Make no mistake, the hostages were an afterthought to the zealots of the religious far-Right and were viewed as a political inconvenience to their desired ends.

The 2023-2024 Hamas-Israel war precipitated an explosion of settler religious extremist violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, which is often undertaken with active assistance, or at least acquiescence, from the IDF. Viewed through the Western gaze, the status quo view of the West Bank is as an occupied territory that exists outside of Israel, distinct from the currently defined territorial boundaries of the state. Yet in reality, the West Bank constitutes a liminal territory, existing at a threshold between the values of secular Zionism upon which Israel was founded and the militarised vision of Revisionist Zionism infused with religious extremism. Thus conceived, the West Bank is not merely an “occupied territory” distinct from Israel; it is “Judea and Samaria”, representing a competing vision of Israel that is opposed to the parent state. Where Israel is secular, Judea and Samaria is fanatically religious; where Israel is state-limited, Judea and Samaria is expansionist and maximalist; where Israel counsels caution with the use of force, Judea and Samaria revels in unrestrained violence; where Israel offers citizenship and equal rights to Arabs, Judea and Samaria seeks to cleanse Arabs from the land. Judea and Samaria is the Jungian Shadow of Israel.

“You Promised to Fulfil Promises”

As the dust settles in Gaza and the ceasefire creaks like a damp, rotten floorboard, it is hard not to notice the instability within Israel for the nation’s sense of self. This is not new; Israel is a deeply reflective country, and periodic self-reflection is ingrained into the nation’s DNA. The quote in the subheading above is taken from a song entitled The Winter of ‘73, written about the generation born in the year of the Yom Kippur War. The song reads:

When we were born the elders blessed us with tears in their eyes

They said: “May these children never have to go to the army”

And your faces in the old picture prove

That you said it from the bottom of your hearts

When you promised to do everything for us

To turn an enemy into a loved one

You promised a dove,

an olive tree leaf,

you promised peace

You promised spring at home and blossoms

You promised to fulfil promises,

you promised a dove

The Yom Kippur War was transformative, the final nail in the coffin for the Labour Zionist movement and precipitating the Right-ward trajectory of Israeli politics, while sowing the final seeds of zeal in the ascendency of Religious Zionism and the settler movement. It also sparked introspection in Israeli society, reflected in the lyrics of The Winter of ‘73. The song embodies the lament of a generation conceived in war, born into a country perpetually threatened and at war, and rueing the promises of their parents to find a way to peace. Viewed from the vantage point of 2025, the lyrics appear quaint and naive. In a tragic twist of irony, the song was released in 1994; a little over a year later, Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by an Israeli religious extremist opposed to the peace process. Israel in 2025 is a very different country from 1995, one in which the minority of militant Religious Zionists hold disproportionate sway over the trajectory of Israeli democracy. In hindsight, Rabin’s assassination was a foreboding omen.

The recent Hamas war came at a time when Israeli society was at war with itself over judicial reform and the fight to preserve a secular democracy with separation of powers between the branches of state. This was possibly another factor in Hamas’ calculus to attack on October 7th. There is a familiar pattern to periodic outbreaks of war: Israel is attacked; Israel retaliates; Israel is immediately accused of genocide and apartheid, “condemned” by the hypocritical democracies of the West and the UN, which calls for an immediate end to the Israeli retaliatory offensive; some ceasefire agreement is reached, and the status quo ante resumes; repeat. The difference with the recent Hamas war is that, unlike previous acute wars with Hamas, Israel was determined to largely ignore America and the West and pursue its war aims. In doing so, the fundamental distinction is that the status quo ante, which included a hegemonic belligerent Islamic Republic, a full-strength Hamas, and a looming threat of Hezbollah’s rockets, is no more - at least for now.

Yet the response of many Israelis and diaspora Jews to the ceasefire echoes the lament of The Winter of ‘73, of the psychological impact of the Yom Kippur War. The pain of October 7th lingers; the two primary war aims - destroying Hamas and returning all hostages - are not even fully achieved. Netanyahu also stands accused of leveraging the war to hold on to power, a claim not entirely without substance. The hostages, which should have been the top priority, were politicised as an inconvenience by the ultra-nationalist ghouls in Netanyahu’s entourage of thugs. For Israel, victory over its enemies is now, given their military strength, a relative certainty. One cannot help but wonder, however, if the conflict that Israel was fighting before October 7th and continues to fight now - the conflict within itself - is more important and consequential, because it is the war of Israel’s soul. Netanyahu encourages and enables forces hostile to Israel’s secular democracy purely for his own short-term political ends, but the dormant Israeli Left has also failed to articulate any positive vision for Israel.

And so the trajectory of Israel remains, at least for now, dominated by demagogues, sectarians, and Messianic lunatics willing to destroy the secular, principled democracy upon which the state was founded and built. For those of us in the West who admire what Israel has achieved in its short history, if Religious Zionism in its militarised, violent form prevails, I, for one, will be out of excuses. I won’t excuse the lunacy of the settlers with their biblical bullshit and Glocks anymore than I abide the insanity of jihadis with their death-cult and dreams of Paradise.

1. Hat tip to Shaun Ward for this phrase.

2. Waxman, C.I. Messianism, Zionism, and the State of Israel. Modern Judaism. 1987 May;7(2):175–92.

3. Ibid.

4. Luz, E. The Moral Price of Sovereignty: The Dispute about the Use of Military Power within Zionism. Modern Judaism. 1987 Feb;7(1):51-98.

5. Gordis, D. Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn. New York: Ecco Press; 2016.

6. Ref. 4.