The mood that prevailed in Israel after the October 7 attack was not only one of grief and rage but also of genuine elation.
Elation was evident, for example, in Minister Orit Strook’s description of the period as a “miracle,” in the words of an officer who told his soldiers before entering Gaza that when he set aside the dead and the captives, he was “left with the happiest month of my life… We were reborn after 75 years”; and especially in the song Harbu Darbu by the hip-hop duo Ness & Stilla, which was released at the beginning of the war and immediately became a hit. The song celebrates the revenge that military units would unleash on Gaza, while erotically relishing the total mobilization and describing the war in a way that has been characterized as an “euphoric, ecstatic event.”
This Israeli elation is often interpreted as an expression of messianism. The war and its casualties, according to this common interpretation, are the birth pangs of the Messiah—a painful but necessary and desirable stage on the way to fulfilling a longed-for goal that is both political (ethnic cleansing, settlement) and religious (salvation).
However, I argue that the mindset characterizing a significant portion of the Israeli public perceives the war not merely as a means to an external end—to be achieved after “absolute victory”—but as a good in itself, possessing intrinsic value.
The messianic perspective regards war as an essential aspect of meaningful life precisely because war places life itself at stake. While this approach has a clear theological dimension, it is not strictly messianic: it is more excited about the present moment and attributes a redemptive character to the immediate experience rather than anticipating a future resolution.
This theological dimension, which does not exclude messianism but coexists with it, is not new to Zionism and has been present in it from its inception; articulating it will therefore contribute not only to understanding the history of Zionism, which is far from being as peace-seeking as it often tells itself, but also to understanding the wide Israeli support of the genocidal war on Gaza.
The approach that attributes intrinsic value to war is not unique to Zionism, although it is no coincidence that one of its most radical manifestations appears in the Jewish state. The clearest and most profound formulation of this idea can be found in the writings of the German antisemitic jurist Carl Schmitt.
In The Concept of the Political (1996 [1932])), Schmitt writes that the distinction between friend and enemy, and the willingness to fight to the death for the former against the latter, is what defines political life. War, in his view, is not a means to advance economic interests or a clash between different moral perspectives; rather, it is the very condition that enables political life and gives it content. Without an enemy to fight, there is no political community.
The motivation for political life on Schmitt’s terms—for a life defined by the presence of an enemy—extends beyond mere survival or the defensive response to potential threats. Its deeper significance lies in the intensity that the political dimension injects into human experience, imbuing life with a sense of meaning and purpose unattainable through other social spheres—a meaning derived from the willingness to stake one’s life, to spill the enemy’s blood, and to sacrifice oneself for one’s friends.
The ever-present possibility of war allows political life to transcend mundane, self-serving existence, offering opportunities to experience an elevated sense of heroism and devotion to something larger than individual self-interest. Political life, therefore, has a distinctly theological character, as it allows life to transcend the trivialities of this world.
Indeed, even in neo-liberal times, when the pursuit of self-interest penetrates every sphere of human existence—and perhaps precisely because of this—not a few people seek a life charged with more than mere survival and are willing to sacrifice not only comfort and economic well-being but even their own lives and those of their loved ones.
This phenomenon is not absent from Israel. The desire of Jews in Israel for a life imbued with meaning—and their willingness to sacrifice to achieve such an existence—has been integral to Zionism since its inception. Theodor Herzl, the founding figure of political Zionism, emphasized that national revival and introducing Jews into historical and political discourse was far more than a pursuit of material interests; it represented a fundamental transformation of the self, aimed at creating a new Jew and offering redemption from what he perceived as the idle and meaningless existence of diaspora life.
Herzl sought to transmute antisemitism—the historical source of Jewish vulnerability—into a wellspring of unique strength. The gentiles brought calamities upon them, but their very existence as enemies could unify the Jews into a people in the full, political sense: “We are one people—our enemies have made us one without our consent, as repeatedly happens in history. Distress binds us together, and, thus united, we suddenly discover our strength. Yes, we are strong enough to form a State, and, indeed, a model State” (The Jewish State, p. 24).
For Herzl, the possibility of war was not merely a last resort but a value in itself, a crucible that could forge meaning and political identity. He believed that confronting an enemy could transform what he saw as the “weak and degenerate Jew” into a cultured, political subject, famously declaring that “[t]he enemy is essential to man’s greatest efforts” (p. 98, translation modified).
Zionism, then, was never merely a movement of rescue and survival; it was also an attempt to infuse Jewish life with new content, to imbue it with profound meaning and purpose— to become an exemplary society, but also to be a fully realized political community, one that knows how to distinguish between friend and enemy and act accordingly. Herein lies the secret of the Zionist narrative’s compelling power: it was never peace-loving, as it often portrays itself.
This narrative of power was formative for the generation of Jews who established the state, but in the decades that followed, it gradually faded—not because all Jews in Israel were content with “ordinary” lives of earthly, day-to-day existence. Many did not give up on the feeling that they were a chosen people and instead adopted other narratives through which they sought to imbue their collective lives with meaning, purpose, and uniqueness—from the Startup Nation and high-tech innovation to positioning themselves as a haven for LGBTQ+ individuals or a destination for culinary enthusiasts.
But these narratives ultimately proved to be pale imitations of the original political vision, dissolving into neo-liberal self-interest and leaving most Israelis without a shared framework that could provide their lives with significance beyond a bourgeois-consumerist existence.
Long before October 7, religious Zionism entered this void. Within a relatively short time, it grew from a marginal subcurrent of the movement into a dominant force shaping the path of Israeli society. While the ideological father of this movement, Rabbi Kook, viewed Zionism as necessary to expedite the redemption, which for him lay in the future, his followers after 1948, and especially after the victory in the 1967 war, understood redemption as something happening here and now. “Perhaps then, in the settlement, we thought we were living in the time of redemption—not as a theoretical promise, but in practice, in the erasure of the gap between means and ends,” writes Moti Fogel about his childhood in a religious-Zionism settlement in the territories occupied in that war. “The construction was no longer a means but a goal in itself… It was an absolute, total way of life.”
In this perspective, life in the settlements derives its value not solely from its potential contribution to the future realization of an exclusive Jewish sovereignty between river and sea. Instead, it carries absolute meaning in the present precisely because its provocative presence in Palestinian territory positions it in constant danger and embodies an existential willingness to sacrifice. This represents a political theology in which war against the enemy is not merely a painful yet necessary stage toward hastening redemption, but holds intrinsic value as a fundamental way of life.
One can debate the relative significance of this political theology within the complex landscape of contemporary Israel, but without understanding it, comprehending the unrestrained violence Israel has unleashed in Gaza and across the Middle East since October 2023 becomes impossible. The prevalent explanations for this violence—rooted in concepts of victory (over Hamas or the Palestinian population as a whole) and opportunity (for ethnic cleansing and imposing Jewish sovereignty)—are fundamentally future-oriented.
These perspectives perceive violence as instrumental and critically fail to grasp the intrinsic value many Israelis attribute to it. Examining Zionism through the lens of this political theology reveals how it derives meaning from the fundamental distinction between friend and enemy, and acts accordingly toward each component of this dichotomy.
On the one hand, Israel applies the category of “enemy” indiscriminately to all Palestinians, regardless of age, gender, organizational affiliation, or individual actions. The possibility of distinguishing non-combatants in Gaza becomes irrelevant—the enemy’s blood is considered permissible simply by virtue of their identity, solely because they are the enemy. On the other hand, the war itself serves as the ultimate redemption for Zionist Israelis from the dire situation in which Israel found itself before October 7, when the struggle over the judicial overhaul exacerbated divisions within Jewish society and threatened to unravel national cohesion, and, of course, on October 7 itself, when Israel’s national honor and self-image suffered an unprecedented blow.
War, first and foremost, is an opportunity to restore this honor, to reconstitute the political community, to reaffirm the bond between friends through the willingness to kill and be killed. These two aspects converge in the concept of revenge, which is both indiscriminate—indifferent to whether its targets were involved in combat as long as they belong to the enemy camp—and an end in itself, reveling in violence as such and finding meaning within it.
Thus, October 7 has led to the “happiest month,” as the officer told his soldiers, and the war has been experienced as a “euphoric, ecstatic event” as in Harbu Darbu, not because they present an opportunity for a final and absolute victory. Arguments that such a victory is unrealistic miss the point: the victory is the war itself—the total mobilization, the rallying together under the banner of so-called unity.
Victory is eternal when war is perpetual: in war, the individual becomes a Jew, and the Jews become a people, precisely through their willingness to fight the enemy shoulder to shoulder. In this logic, the grief and pain over the dead do not serve as reasons to halt the bloodshed but as forces that justify and retrospectively validate it. Their deaths imbue their lives with meaning, even if they did not choose this death or this meaning. Others charge forward in their wake, storming the battlefield or creating one, striking the enemies while cultivating them (Landau 2025) —ensuring that there is always someone to fight and always someone to fight back.
Such an identity-giving war does not contradict the desire to destroy and expel Palestinians, which undoubtedly exists among many in Israel. It simply means that alongside an all-out war against one enemy, new enemies must be sought, new fronts must be opened, or at the very least, the potential for escalation in additional arenas must be constantly maintained—something Israel diligently ensures even as it wages its war in Gaza.
This mass violence is not driven by a messianism that looks to the future and is willing to pass through the fires of hell to ultimately reach paradise. In creating hell for the Palestinians, for many Israelis, paradise is already here and now.
Share This
Share this post with your friends!