“As long as there are still hostages in Gaza, something in me will remain captive.”

— Omer Wenkart, former Israeli hostage in Gaza

“This responsibility for the other is structured as the one-for-the-other, to the point of the one being hostage of the other, hostage in his very identity of an irreplaceable called one, before any return to self.”

— Levinas, Dieu, la mort et le temps (God, Death, and Time), p. 202

I would like to speak of a certain grip. That of messianism as a discourse of “the evolution and finality of history”1 and, at the same time, as a discourse on justice, life in common, responsibility, life and death—a discourse particularly active in political life in Israel and in what, for convenience, is called the Jewish world. Zionism, it seems to me, would have the resources to overcome this grip. This battle will be played out in the near political future, and the democratic future of Israel will depend on Zionism’s capacity to invent a new political path for the country and for the Jewish world.

Let us reflect on how a figure as indeterminate2 and disproportionate in the Torah, and somewhat differently in the Jewish oral tradition3, a notion with an open and “undecidable” resource in Jewish philosophy, came to be embodied in a concept of history—heavily metaphysical—and to impose itself in the Israeli political context, which is charged with a secular history. A concept that is, moreover, largely worn-out, adulterated, and breathless—deployed many times throughout history under various names and various politico-eschatological figures, more or less secularised. Yet, despite its breathlessness, it continues to dominate a certain historico-political discourse and to irrigate the field of political temptations in Israel and in the diaspora. And above all, one continues to think that it does not resemble any of the frightful drifts of the ideologies of the End.

Let us try to understand how a certain political grip of messianism—inseparable from the fixation around an individual figure, whether human or quasi post-human—has taken hold of an entire current of contemporary Judaism in Israel and in the diaspora. How the ritual of anointing (the French translation of the word “machach’,” which gave rise to “Mashiach’”) of priests, kings, or—in a few rare cases—prophets, which very probably sought to “separate” (sanctify) certain biblical figures from the rest of the Hebrew people, so to speak to enthrone them, without making them messiahs for all that, gave rise to the current idea of messianic teleology.

We must attempt to explain how a notion as delicate as this—a figure of withdrawal and transcendence, of which we do not know and perhaps should never simply know to which name, essence, logic, or identity it corresponds, referring in its great subtlety to a temporality without a “tutor present”—monopolises a part of public discourse in Israel, confiscates and diverts it. How this all-but-unnameable thing, turned toward the future and exceeding any full and stable presence, came not only to mingle “effectively” with our lives, to be “put to all uses,” but also to govern the daily political life of so many people in Israel. To say nothing of the fact that it serves and sustains Netanyahu’s project of progressive transition toward a regime with illiberal characteristics whose survival he tries to assure by sowing division. How an idea that signifies in such an improbable manner in the Torah and in Judaism—to put it in Levinas’s terms—has found itself, and finds itself, historially thematised and brought back into the most “perceptible” course of being. I would like not only to describe this situation, dramatic from my point of view, for the country, for its future, for democracy, for the Jewish world, and for Zionism and its democratic impulse, but also—in filigree—to try to explain how such a thing has become possible; better still, how it has come to prosper in this way, in the diaspora and in Israel most particularly. A certain acceleration of the political embodiment of messianism has been flagrant in Israel since October 7.

It is thus a matter of explaining the advent of a claim to know of whom or what one is speaking when it comes to the Messiah: what is his mode of appearance, according to what conditions, modalities, and demands he would arrive “from now on,” “soon”—when it isn’t “rapidly” or “immediately.” This question is perhaps more serious and more urgent for the State of Israel and for the Jews, but it concerns, in a less obvious way, all the Christians of the world, as well as the Muslims and all the peoples of the East.

The messianic reduction

The question of messianism imposes itself undeniably today in the debate internal to Israeli society, whether one claims a traditional Jewish approach (Zionist or not) or a secular, critical, and democratic approach (Zionist or not). The public that is called “liberal” in Israel finds itself drawn into a controversy that often seems absurd to it. For my part, I believe that this question must be posed and debated publicly. Any inquiry into the present and the future of Israel will inevitably have to confront this great Jewish idea with a universal destiny, which has resurfaced in an accelerated manner in recent years in the diaspora and in Israel.

It suffices to engage in research or reflection on the messianic question to realise to what extent the terrain is mined by historial delirium, by the hallucination of the “historical moment,” by the over-interpretation of “stages,” “epochs,” and especially historical “turning points,” by the “sacred” reappropriation of historical becoming, by the temptation of idolatry and the sectarian affect of a certain Judaism, by a conception of God and the Messiah contained within history—a certain Schwärmerei, as the German philosophers would say. But as soon as this question is approached, it is also that of the distress of Israeliness that must be thought: one also turns to messianism out of dismay and a feeling of powerlessness. At the same time, it is also the question of Arab refusal—of the constantly renewed non-integration and non-welcome of the Jews in this region, which is anything but foreign to them (need that even be recalled?)—that is posed. This question is linked to Arabo-Muslim imperialism and to the disproportionate place of the Palestinian question in international public debate, and therefore to the history of Christian expansionism in the region and its relation to Judaism. As soon as it is a matter of messianism, one quickly touches upon mystico-political illusion.

I would like, claiming for myself a Jewish, explicitly Zionist-democratic and critical approach—and one must admit, clearly overwhelmed these days—to show how one can grasp anew this idea that works at the depths of Judaism and Zionism and distance oneself from most of the reappropriations and political and historical diversions made in their name. So-called “liberal” Zionism can and must mark a clear and unreserved distance from religious Zionism and its theologico-historical temptations, which authorise the idea of a process rendering effective and manifest the so-called Jewish messianism.

My effort will consist in a certain re-taking of the messianic idea, separating it from the bias according to which the Messiah is “effectively present” in history. It is a matter of thinking a messianicity detached from the idea of a supposedly tangible becoming of Zionism as a religious event. This should yield a messianicity4 incapable of embracing the idea of a Messiah. How then does this idea—rebellious to any historical objectivation, defying “the ontological order”5 of presence, the discourse of being, of the existent, and of its temptations of immanentisation6—look upon us, concern us, solicit and address us—we Israelis, we Zionists, we Jews, and we non-Jews—more than ever? How are we to think the dangers that they constitute for democracy, but also their openings toward another political to-come? At stake here is messianicity as what might condition another politics, another relation to history. We must reaffirm the idea of messianicity with great subtlety, attempting to transform it radically.

Zionism is perhaps an heir of Judaism in this sense: it does not receive messianism as a given object, in the order of a determinate tradition, but rather works to displace it, to transform it, to renew it. By constituting one of the attempts—not always conscious—to think the political as a risk of the infinite (the disquiet of the not-yet, of the unaccomplished), Zionism opened itself to a Jewish messianic thought without messianism and without a Messiah—a thought insufficiently assumed and affirmed in and by political and historical Zionism, and today totally repressed and crushed by religious-Zionist messianism. What we mean here by the word messianic cannot be identified, without betraying itself, with the emblematic figures of a historically determined onto-theology. Yet every Zionist discourse should be anchored both in the Jewish religious tradition (with and despite the known tensions with democracy, with modernity, between the monotheistic religions, between ethics and politics), in the history of philosophy, and in the historical experience of the Jews and of the “nations,” as the Torah says. It should show each time how these “spaces” are dangerously radicalised around messianism and how the relation to messianicity (without messianism) also makes it possible to think them otherwise, to relate otherwise to time, to history, to the political, to the ethical—when it is not outright a matter of authorising a hyper-critical thought.

Let us state in a very schematic way a series of reductions to which the ideology known as religious-Zionist messianism proceeds today, before describing its metaphysical background. The latter unleashes an infinity of reductions, including that of messianicity itself:

The dangerous game of Netanyahu’s government and his people

We must try to explain what is at stake behind the alliance between the Likud, the orthodox parties, religious Zionism (the three blocs that constitute the current Israeli government) and the appalling, persistent, daily degradation of democracy in Israel, the contempt for the political institutions inherited from historical Zionism, and the threat of this front to the rule of law.

Here is a very general framework of the situation, of the status of the religious in Israel. It will make it possible to explain the damage of messianism to the future of democracy and of Israel pure and simple.

We are witnessing, in an accelerated manner, an undeniable neutralisation of the democratic by the orthodox fringe of religious Zionism and by a portion of non-Zionist ultra-orthodoxy, with the opportunistic, open, and manifest support of the Likud. Indeed, the Israeli democratic political space (separation of powers, freedom of the press, independence of the Supreme Court and of cultural and university institutions) finds itself appropriated, reappropriated, and diverted by movements ranging from Sephardic or Ashkenazi ultra-orthodoxy to religious Zionism (in the most combative and ardent manner possible)—despite the nuances and differences between these movements. Between the frenetic engagement of religious Zionism toward the political and the assertion of the interests of the orthodox communities, formerly non-Zionist and apolitical (which one can no longer say in the same way today)8, the Israeli political space finds itself increasingly commanded by a religious—and above all messianic—order, clearly opposed to the preservation of the democratic demand to which the Zionism of the founders laid claim. That Zionism consisted in permanently inventing new possibilities of norms and rules to face the questions, problems, dilemmas, and concrete situations of the life of a multiple, modern, contemporary society.

The distance is today growing greater and greater between the Jewish world that claims orthodox Judaism and democratic Zionism. Indeed, the formula that for a long time organised most Zionist discourses, both left and right—“Jewish and democratic State”—is today explicitly mishandled, when it is not loathed and execrated, as if the very idea of democracy represented a certain threat to what they call “the world of the Torah” or “Jewish identity.”

As if democracy concealed either the intention to turn against the Jews, or a fundamental incapacity to protect them. As if, therefore, the only political possibility for Israel were to be wary of democracy and to draw its orientation only from the contestation of the institutions emanating from it and that allow for its continuity. The consequence is nothing less than disastrous: Judaism henceforth finds itself—daily and publicly—dissociated from democracy. The democratic would be foreign, distant—it would belong to others, to non-Jews, to Europeans, to the naïve. “We Jews” (and increasingly less “we Israelis”) “would have” our own political culture, our own political language, and above all we would be called to a historial destiny: our messianism. I insist on the disastrous consequences: we would have to “decide” between Judaism supposedly foreign to democracy and democracy supposedly anti-Judaic. Needless to add that to questions posed in this “either/or” form, Israeli democracy and historical Zionism cannot bring any answer reassuring to anyone, for either of the two expectations.

By contrast, the return to “ourselves” is described in non-democratic terms: we must return to “ourselves,” to our own values, think of ourselves first, and for that we must also be wary of democracy and of its Western representatives. To fail to think “of ourselves first” amounts to betrayal. We would be flouting our profound identity for the benefit of an abstract and universal and foreign democratic being.

One understands nothing of the upheaval (I say upheaval so as not to say crisis, which is always passing and surmountable within the democratic framework) that Israel is going through if one does not approach the situation through the question of the importance taken on in Israeli political life by religious Zionism and by its tutelary figure (himself quasi-messianic, by the way) of Rav Kook—who has today become the sole and unique political and religious reference of this movement. This upheaval is clearly accentuated by the political situation in the region and by the worldwide rejection of Zionism—which has nothing objective or rational about it—in our day. The idea is indeed circulating more and more in Israel that it is impossible to live there normally, surrounded by hatred and hostility, without a certain faith, anchored in a historical teleology, capable of surmounting traumas that are difficult to comprehend. The incomprehension, exhaustion, and weariness of Israelis have become the breeding ground for this messianism, and consequently for a certain scorched-earth politics: since the whole world is “against us,” since an important part of the Western elites is henceforth allied with the Palestinian decolonial narrative, there remains for us only the withdrawal into an “imaginary” we that religious nationalism nourishes. The temptation grows to quit the Zionist political space and its ethico-political dilemmas9, to exit from the historicity of history in order to enter into the messianico-historial dimension. It becomes more and more evident that it will be difficult to maintain a democratic stability and liveliness in a state of permanent war. The external enemies of Israel have understood this dynamic very well. Between Israeli religious messianism and the alliance between Islamists and the radical Western left—and now the American extreme right—Zionism is caught in a difficulty without parallel.

One understands little of the rallying of Netanyahu’s Likud to religious Zionism and ultra-orthodoxy without knowing the messianist background that has seized Israeli political life in an accelerated manner since Netanyahu’s return to power. One does not understand that “Zionist” parties admit and endorse the “exemption from military service” for thousands of young orthodox Jews at a moment when thousands of other young people of the same age find themselves at the front, are fighting, “return mute from war” (W. Benjamin), when they do not brutally lose their lives. One understands little of the acceptance of this “law” by the government and religious Zionism, despite the enormous incomprehension and feeling of abandonment that the inequality before the law from which young haredim (those who “fear” God) benefit engenders—at a time of war10.

The motor of the so-called “judicial” ultra-conservative revolution currently underway in Israel is the messianic conception that dominates the milieus of the religious ultra-right. The few secular figures who support it do so either out of opportunism or out of a taste for authoritarianism. This change of regime at work is grounded in an antidemocratic messianic ideology (which intervenes in the educational system) financed by the taxes of the liberal public, of active and secular Israeli citizens. From this ideology the Kohélet Messianic Forum was born in 2012, an ultra-reactionary think-tank, constituted in large part by American Jews, which whispers in the ear of the Prime Minister and his government. This ideology drives and justifies violent, racist passages to the act in the Palestinian territories. It produces the thought of the students of Rabbi Dov Lior, namely Itamar Ben Gvir (Minister of Internal Security), Bezalel Smotrich (Minister of Finance) and their friends, deeply hostile to parliamentary democracy: Simcha Rotman, Amihai Eliyahu, and others… It is also from there that the central concept of “the donkey of the Messiah” comes: liberal Zionists would participate, unconsciously and often against their will, in the advent of the Messiah and would in this sense be “the donkey of the Messiah” (for according to a certain Jewish tradition the Messiah will arrive on a donkey).

The messianist ideology is today becoming the metaphysics behind that great atheist who is Benjamin Netanyahu. It criticises the supposed democratic naïveté, when it is not its moral and political “decadence” or “fall,” which would be incapable of halting the unleashing of violence.

Four combatants of the elite Givati unit were killed on the night of 10-11 June 2024. Eleven of them were severely wounded; the Israeli Prime Minister knew this perfectly well, the members of his coalition knew it perfectly well, but they “celebrated” with jubilation, exultation, and contempt for the bereaved families the adoption by their coalition of the law exempting yeshiva students from military service. The question must be asked: is there nothing un-sacrificeable for these messianists? Will there ever be a senseless disaster? An unjustifiable one? An “useless” one, to speak like Levinas?

I cannot help thinking of the cry of the father of the ex-hostage Elkana Bohbot, a few minutes after the publication by Hamas of a film of his son, having declared on 29 March 2025: “Go out into the streets for me, shout my cry!” This cry, like all the other cries of the relatives of the hostages, ran up against the deafness of the messianic milieus. No cry breaks the supposedly messianic weave of history—that other name for the essential and necessary unity of all things and the perseverance of a unique and profound meaning of history. In these milieus, there is henceforth no responsibility or listening for the other. Nothing prevents the collapse or the sinking of justice into the justification of the suffering of the neighbour—“source of all immorality…,” as E. Levinas said in La souffrance inutile (Useless Suffering). The death of others ceases henceforth to arouse empathy, ceases to call into question, to provoke the awakening of responsibility, becoming something to be dominated, to be surmounted. What Levinas calls the “responsibility of the survivor”11 is absolutely absent from messianic circles. To say nothing here of “the survivor’s guilt”12 supposed to follow it. That is probably too much to ask of them.

For months, we witnessed the guilty silence of members of the government in the face of the daily appeals of Israelis, of the families of the hostages still in Gaza—worse still, their vulgar contempt displayed in broad daylight.

Something of the “first” Zionist gesture must be recalled here, for it puts its finger on the powerful logic of “justification” at work in a certain traditional-orthodox Judaism. Indeed, the latter always promises history the supervenience of a certain goodness and beneficence beyond the evil lived through, the unhappiness and wounds, the mourning and the rending. At bottom, liberal and left-wing Zionism rose up against the very possibility of inscribing sufferings in history within a self-justifying narrative. Everything happens as if it demanded of Judaism (especially after the Shoah) a face-to-face encounter with the singularity of historical catastrophes themselves, marking each time a certain halt as soon as it would be a matter of integrating them into the deployment of a generalised messianic meaning of history.

Today, it is the rabbis of religious Zionism who put in place an infinity of strategies for justifying suffering, presenting numerous perspectives for glimpsing in suffering—essentially unjustified and absurd and apparently arbitrary—a signification and an order. Perhaps not necessarily out of embarrassment at the absence of God in catastrophes, but perhaps also because there would be an incapacity to link messianic hope to an absence of telos and to the indetermination of the to-come.

What halts the movement of history? What renders impossible the realisation of historical meaning? It is these innumerable lived experiences in those very bodies exposed to the singular historical event, where their corporeity finds itself fragilised and mutilated before any rationalisation, overturning the order of history. To confront oneself with the irreducible nakedness of the human body is, first and above all, to learn to say the unassumability of suffering, and then it is to mark the senseless foundation of pain in order to signify it otherwise than as one more spring or essence of history. This is what Levinas, we know, calls “the uselessness of suffering” and what, for him, obliges and constrains history to deploy itself otherwise: that is to say, messianically. A word that takes on here an entirely other meaning than that given to it by Rav Kook and so-called religious Zionism. Messianicity as turning back into responsibility for others, dead or living.

Need we recall here that Zionism elaborated itself in exile against the background of radical destruction and of the unjustifiable, with the political project of never transforming singular lives and deaths and irreplaceable events of human experience into moments generalisable historically or historially? Zionism formulated itself at the moment when the traditional Jewish work of mourning—like the work of mourning in general—no longer sufficed. In a certain way, Zionism emerges when the Jews refuse to incorporate, to interiorise the Jews dead from antisemitic violence. When the Jews understand that messianic completion and its interiorisation of suffering will never come. Zionism emerges when one can no longer persevere in existence with its customary logic of interiorisation of “our assassinated ones,” who will no longer be simply the disappeared. Political responsibility at the heart of Zionism here is capital: it gives access to an idea of cultural and national renaissance without the forgetting that traditionally accompanies every renaissance, and without the habitual placing into the past of the work of mourning. This plunges into great embarrassment ultra-orthodox Judaism, which would want the sufferings of the pogroms to be commemorated within the framework of rituals on the same basis as, for instance, the “destruction of the Temple,” which would have one invoke the divine in the same manner and address oneself to the Most High in the same terms, catastrophe after catastrophe. But for Zionism (revolutionary in this sense), there would be a newly political manner of speaking to the dead, and above all of letting them speak to us, of being obliged by them, which will imply a form of political reinvention for an Israeli Judaism.

“To do politics”: Zionism devotes itself to this as no other current emerging from the Jewish world has done. It engages a radical reconfiguration of the politics of memory and of commemoration13; it throws itself into the historicity of history. It puts to work an entirely different engagement toward the past dead and the dead to come—that is to say, another relation to life-death. And the Zionism of the founding fathers most particularly. Indeed, it sought to avoid several pitfalls: first of all the theologico-political, in its two “Judaic” facets: religious-Zionist messianism and diasporic apocalyptic (a form of salvation proper to the tragic exilic experience). And indigenism, the infinite and insoluble abyss of “we were the first.”

Thus, not only does Zionism not wait for the messianic event in order to emancipate itself, but it refuses any idea of apocalyptic redemption, of redemption through suffering. The idea that the Jew is condemned to suffer eternally and that there would be a compensation in this pain.

Yet what one observes today is that the greater the dismay, the more the idea of a redemption through unhappiness imposes itself, and the more political messianism resurfaces. Indeed, in this sense, political and liberal Zionism is perhaps more Jewish than any diasporic Judaism bathed in an apocalyptic-redemptive culture (marked by Christian or Sabbatean culture). In many respects, post-Zionist diasporic Judaism, very much in fashion among the young generations and among numerous Jewish intellectuals, in fact returns to the idea of an apocalyptic redemption, whereas political Zionism is more attentive than ever to the idea of a tragic without redemption. For political Zionism, no Jewish suffering is acceptable. Diasporic post-Zionism reiterates the apocalyptic analyses of Jewish life in the diaspora, which have become necessary again for the maintenance of Jewish life in exile: “we suffer, but we are pure of any experience of institutionalised and frontal violence.”

Thus, one does not understand much of the rise of daily violences in Israel without taking the messianic phenomenon into consideration. It explains the indifference of the proponents of this ideology toward the suffering of certain Israelis and toward the sufferings of a part of the Palestinians, and it explains the moral disconnection demonstrated by the religious-Zionist members of the government coalition.

It is this ideology that explains the explosions of joy, the sacrificial enthusiasm giving meaning to the 1,500 assassinated, as well as to the hostages in Gaza, to the more than a thousand soldiers killed since the beginning of the war, to the thousands of wounded (not counting the disabled), probably tens of thousands of those suffering from post-traumatic conditions, deeply affected psychologically, to the 68,000 people displaced, having lost their homes, among whom 42 percent are unemployed, to the tens of thousands of small businesses closed, to the industries that have left the country or have simply evaporated, to the exodus of part of the intelligentsia and of vital economic forces, to the absence of tourism… Let us add to this sombre picture a terribly degraded image of Israel abroad, an unprecedented loss of support in the democratic world, judicial proceedings against Israeli leaders and probably against army officers in the near future…

In certain milieus (religious Zionists and Orthodox), one speaks openly of “miracle,” of “salvation,” more than ever since October 7. Manifestly—in these milieus—one believes one is witnessing an acceleration of history. While the combatants, reserve soldiers, are summoned “to the colours” for the fourth and sometimes fifth time this year, Aryeh Deri, the leader of Sephardic ultra-orthodoxy, and Orit Struk, leader of the Religious Zionist Party, speak of the “miracles” we would see every day. If one is to believe them, the Greater Israel would call for the sacrifice of the lives of soldiers, both male and female. The other finality of religious messianism is a halakhic state (based on ultra-orthodox Jewish law) from the sea to the Jordan. For, for religious Zionism, lodged in the concrete history of Israel is a powerful sacrificial modality: history sinks into the abyss and rises again from its abyss, rises from the “finitude” of its historical events and at the same time, toward the infinity of Israel’s promise. It is a certain “end of history” that would be realised in the return of the exiles and the appropriation of the land of Israel.

Obviously this “end of history” does not mean that there will no longer be historical events for the messianists, but rather that history does not cease to remake itself, to reconstitute itself, to renew itself, according to the divine promise, in and through the caesuras of historical events that are always momentary, episodic, temporary.

Why did this government wait so long before signing a negotiated agreement for the return of the hostages? Many assassinated hostages could have returned alive and be among us today. The liberation of the hostages, as is evident to anyone who knows the terrain even a little, could not be obtained by military means. The government’s actions aimed far more at realising the messianic vision of Israel and at undermining democracy than at saving the hostages. The liberal public regularly mobilises to defend the country, in the army, on the socio-economic terrain more than anyone, but it is cynically exploited with the aim of the self-destruction of Israel’s democratic way of life. Secular and liberal people have never been so weakened. Nor have the democratic institutions. After two years of a growing nightmare, we are arriving at the moment of truth. Must we continue our routine and lose everything dear to us, or must we engage further in democratic contestation?

How did we arrive here? Is it necessary to cite the words of Yitzhak Rabin, Minister of Defense during the so-called “Jibril” agreement, in the framework of which 1,151 Palestinian prisoners were exchanged for three Israeli hostages: “We have the firm will to bring every hostage home, by virtue of what we are, by virtue of our attachment to democracy, by virtue of our commitment to the families and to the suffering that the families live through, a moral suffering that no one can and must ignore, much less if that person holds a key post within a government. We will ultimately have to pay a heavy tribute.”

How then did we pass from these words of Rabin to the greatest contempt, to the nameless disdain of the members of the government coalition with regard to the families of the hostages and the victims of October 7? To a form of sadism of the type “they really deserved it, those leftists…” which we witnessed daily at the Knesset, or again, faced with the cry of Ayala Metzger14: “we hear you all too much, get out! bye-bye and not au-revoir,” from Smotrich. The latter and his accomplices no longer hid their will to drive out everything that recalled the victims and their families, to make sure that the past dead did not return to haunt the Israeli public space to claim justice. Religious Zionism has become the first instance denying the Israeli trauma. While children, elderly people, female and male soldiers died in the tunnels dug under Gaza, what became of these watchwords that have always accompanied civilian life in Israel: “We never abandon a soldier,” “We abandon no Israeli to the enemy”?

Where does the perpetual accusation of infidelity and treason that one hears with ever-growing violence in Israel with regard to the liberal camp come from? Changing the name of the war from “Iron Swords” to “War of Resurrection,” which one might also translate as “War of Rising” (Tekumah), is not a simple semantic gesture, but a deliberate attempt by Netanyahu and his government to reshape public consciousness. This decision seeks to obscure the traumatic reality of October 7 and of the war that follows it by presenting it as necessary to the pursuit of “rebirth,” of “national regeneration.” Thus the public is pushed to believe that the war is a natural stage in the historical process. Loss, pain, and catastrophe are denied within this process. Political Zionism imagined and conceived itself around the idea of responsibility against the background of loss without redemption. Today, this idea is targeted by this nationalist messianism.

The government has imposed the name “War of Resurrection” while seeking to divert attention from its failures and omissions in managing the catastrophe. Instead of engaging in critical work on the security conduct of the government and of the security forces, the “new name” describes the war as part of the historical struggle of the Jewish people by giving it an inflection of victory and success. It is an attempt to shape a collective memory that justifies the government’s military and political measures. To say nothing of its refusal to allow an independent commission of inquiry, which will not be able to avoid noting the government’s failings or the compromising of those close to Netanyahu with Qatar and the money paid by it to Hamas.

On the political plane, Netanyahu benefits from this by ensuring his position as leader in this struggle, while stifling the criticisms about the failures that led to October 7. Language becomes a tool of control of public awareness, while reducing the feeling of failure and the real price paid by many families. The war is used to attain Netanyahu’s survival objectives: escaping justice, colonisation, annexation, and crushing of civic, democratic, and Zionist contestation.

The figure of Rav Kook

Religious Zionism imposes a certain “jargon of authenticity” in Israeli public debate: between “true” and “false” Jew, between “more” Jewish and “less” Jewish, “full and replete” Jew and “empty and superficial” Jew, Jew “alongside himself” or “in accord with himself” and Jew “secularised, profane, and profaning” so to speak, removed from what he would really and deeply be. Moreover, it is the founders of Zionism (the pioneers and the socialist and liberal nomenklatura), those who are called “the Tel Avivians,” who find themselves accused of approximation, of being partial Jews, and worse, of having founded the country on foreign foundations imported from the European Enlightenment, and so to speak inappropriate. They would be “ashamed Jews.”

Heir to the Haskala (Enlightenment, Jewish version), but already beyond its rationalist limits, socialist and liberal Zionism is vilified by the neo-religious Zionists who claim to realise a perfect synthesis, or an absolute reconciliation, between Jewish orthodoxy, the halacha, and ethnocentric nationalism, in the terms of Kookism: God of Israel, Eretz Israel (the land of Israel), and Am Israel (the people of Israel) unified. This religious Zionism of Rav Kook serves as “mediation of everything”15. Now, it is not only the secular and liberal Israelis who find themselves excluded from this purist definition of Jewish identity—it is also an entire pragmatic political culture, a relation to history and to humanity, an infinite responsibility for Jewish history, a certain idea of the past dead and of the dead and lives to come, that find themselves put to the pillory. It is also a large part of secular and liberal Jews in the diaspora who are excluded from Jewish-being—without their yet understanding it. Their engagement alongside political Zionism today is urgent.

Religious Zionism, in its capture of the army and of national education, has succeeded in spreading the idea in Israel that the concrete history of the State of Israel would effectively meet messianic temporality. All historical events, happy or unhappy, the worst catastrophes that have rhythmed the existence of this State—1948, the War of Independence and the establishment of the State; 1967, the victory of the Six-Day War, the reunification of Jerusalem—but also the failures of the Oslo agreements and of the peace process in general, the assassination of Rabin, and now, with a most dubious exaltation, October 7, or again the return of Trump to power—are read in the light of a teleological “promise” centred on the blossoming, given in advance, predetermined, of the advent of a truth proper to oneself, our accomplished self-realisation.

In truth, for this so-called religious current of Zionism, which was marginal for many years after the founding of the State, reality, historico-political becoming, and messianic temporality have never been distinct from one another. And when “history” pushed these two indissociable pendants toward a separation (emancipation, secularisation, democracy), this will only have been contingent, accidental, and of mere appearance. Of course, this dialectic could not avoid moments of crisis, catastrophes, and so-called historical misfortunes that Rav Kook, the tutelary figure of this movement, does not fail to interpret in his own manner: they are passing, simple transitory phenomena. In the exalted terms of Rav Kook’s French prefacer, Benjamin Gross: “Thus it is finally in adhesion to the irrepressible movement of History (with a capital here) that Rav Kook tries to go beyond systematic antinomies”16. Whatever the case, the presupposed dialectic of his reflection on history—bearing on the caesuras, on the breaks in the “fundamentally” positive evolution of Judaism—commands that they be treated as “empirical accidents” or “temporary,” “transitory,” “passing” declines that never come to contradict the “vitalist essence” of Jewish history, of the always “ascending” and already realised deployment of Judaism, even of Zionism, of an essentially Zionist Judaism henceforth. Better still (or should one say much worse still): the majestic beauty of the laws of decline is celebrated. They never come to contradict the “messianicity of Israel,” fundamentally and always already reparative17. Everything repairs itself in itself and by itself. This “vitalist essence,” this “réparance”—a neologism aimed at saying that it does not cease to repair itself organically—could not be interrupted. In other words, however “attentive” to the traumatic event it may be, the messianic logic always intends to transform and convert the event into a passing moment, to be traversed in order to overcome it18. Everything that seems to contradict the divine telos, the orientation decided for Israel and for humanity by the “heavens,” by “the free divine will”19 (which, bizarrely, Jews claim to understand) would belong to the episodic event, to vulgar empiricity—in other words, to the non-event. An ahistorical telos of history, both transhistorical and historical, gives rise to the most violent deafness to historical events and to the sufferings of mutilated and destroyed lives—which they themselves engender. The past dead and those to come, the sufferings, the traumas no longer mark a stop, do not truly interrupt or suspend the march of so-called messianic history and the advent of its “kingdom.”

This history claims to animate itself from death. It is a movement that would go from death to life, from finitude to infinity. Life would persevere in its identity with itself up to and including in death. In this sense, death (sufferings) as the fundamental contradiction of life furnishes, enriches, accomplishes the deployment of life itself. Which therefore means that life returns to life from out of what annihilates life, or again, that life comes back to life by passing through and across death. Messianic history is in this sense what succeeds in incorporating, in appropriating death, and thus in raising up death into what we might also understand—by widening it well beyond its borders, the Freudian concept—as a “work of mourning” accomplished and consumed. Historical truth finds itself here modelled on an entire sacrificial discourse capable of vanquishing and surmounting death.

For the first time in the history of Judaism, vitalism and teleologism merge into one another in such an ordered, harmonious, necessary manner, without reserve and with a totally blind confidence. For the first time in the history of Judaism, they would nourish one another, signify themselves through one another, would have one common source. Yet every chaining-up of messianic teleology marks a quite particular unchaining of violence. This is how a thought of the “permanent becoming of the surging-forth of life”20, a “general interdependence”21 of life and death, tips over into the most violent sacrificial logic. Such is the infinite movement that underlines the unity of life (and of death) and accordingly confers upon it that sort of power supposedly indestructible by Rav Kook, which would be characteristic of the Spirit of Judaism. What is destroyed repairs itself, restores itself, in destroying itself or in its very destruction.

Thus, for an entire movement of orthodox Judaism today, wishing to be at once orthodox and modern, catastrophes are never to be conceived only as negative moments, as a simple impasse, but also, and at the same time, as that instant which—dynamic—opens onto the possibility of operating a reversal, a transformation out of the negative and toward a positive resolution, a certain conversion, a certain “healing”22, a certain therapeutic horizon23—in any case, a logic of “conciliation.”

The catastrophic event of October 7 (but this is true of any other past event) can only be approached according to two (inseparable) modalities: either it would participate in messianic eschatology; it would realise it, so to speak; it would be—since 1948 in a “flagrant” manner—on the path of its completion; or it would announce its realisation. At no moment for religious Zionism (this is also true for the Lubavitchers) would the messianic logic gesture toward a thought of the event that would necessarily exceed this binary logic or its historico-essential dialectical alliance. Nothing, strictly nothing, can suspend, interrupt this essentialised, divinised historical time.

This means that the “empirical accidents” (the Shoah and now October 7) or the “empirical events” (the creation of the State, the various wars) rhythming the history of the Jewish people will only have been produced on the basis of the full and entire resource of this essence, which does not cease to justify itself, to regain legitimacy and power, to return to itself. Above all, they will not prevent messianic eschatology from triumphing sooner or later. Not only are they never thought outside the “divine presence” in the world, but they mark, each time more strongly, its “return” into history. Thus, for Rav Kook, there is nothing outside God’s manifestation in history, nothing that remains outside its grasp and its messianic grip, and thus nothing that can interrupt its unveiling in and through history. A history that never ceases to incorporate historical events into its messianic narrative. This narrative claims to be at once Zionist (political, modern) and worked through by highly theological motifs such as salvation, redemption, sacrifice.

What does this mean onto-theologically? It means that this logic would have already arrived; its structure (in its completion) would already have presented itself. When catastrophe supervenes, it is thought in function of what it has not yet realised, accomplished, effectuated—and therefore in function of an already completed history. This is aberrant from a historical and theological point of view when one knows even a little about Judaism, for which the messianic event is never the advent of what has already been.

It is at bottom unnecessary to come back to all those sentences that punctuate Rav Kook’s text and that illustrate the culminating point of history, namely the political and Zionist realisation of what is now called Jewish “messianism.” It suffices to remark that at the most critical point, at the very centre of the most terrible catastrophe, there always lies what Rav Kook calls “return,” “repentance,” or again “love”—that is to say, the “existential light of the world of unity, where every thing integrates itself into an entity, illuminates it at once. In general interrelation, there is no more evil, for evil joins itself to good in order to accommodate it and still further bonify the excellence of its value.” Evil will always integrate itself “into an organic ensemble”24.

One would abandon oneself—just for once, among Jews too henceforth—to love, to the world, to the cosmos, to the universe, to the earth, no longer being on one’s guard? If all this is necessarily “for good,” God, or the Messiah for that matter, no longer have any meaning.

Today the messianists accuse the liberals of thinking according to non-Jewish European categories, but one must note that messianic nationalism is nourished by readings of German and European Romanticism, by notions of love and reconciliation proper to Christian thought, by nationalist theories, and by the project of sovereignty properly European, which differs radically from that of Zionism.

Thus, Rav Kook enounces the announced effectivity of a reconciliation between God and his people in and through the historico-political deployment of Zionism, in which every interruption would attest only to vexing inadequacies that will be filled in sooner or later in the course of historical becoming. For Rav Kook and those who claim his current, the liberal camp would already participate, and despite themselves25, in this messianic realisation of Judaism (which will progressively extend to all of humanity). The political implications of this dialecticisation, of this immanentisation of God or of the divine, are politically disastrous. This messianism must be contextualised and radically demystified. We must do so in Israeli public debate in the name of another Judaism. It is a matter of showing how Zionism can, in the name of another messianicity, an indeterminate messianicity, perhaps still—how it can be said, written, or thought.

We observe a growing incapacity to resolve the juridico-socio-economico-political problems of Israeli society, but also of the Palestinian question, forgotten in its historical and human dimension and immediately referred back to a theological conflict and imaginary. We are witnessing, for example, a growing popularisation of theologico-political arguments justifying the perpetuation of the control of the territories. This theological competition between Islam and Judaism, this reinforcement of theological discourse on both sides, engenders a situation politically insoluble.

Yet, if it is true that Netanyahu paralyses many Israelis in fear, many Israelis show lucidity, courage, and the faculty of renewing themselves. I insist on saying it here: it is for this that we must build an alliance between liberal and democratic Jews in the diaspora with those of Israel who so much need this support. If we are so right to rise up against the essentialisation of Israel by the European far left, what are we waiting for to rise up against the one effected in the most vulgar manner by religious Zionism?

It is not the moment to exit from history, which is what religious Zionism and the antizionist far left wish for, by fantasising a messianic entry into history. It is the moment to enter into it. This also means going to confrontation. The antagonisms within the Israeli political space inaugurated by Zionism are infinite, multiplying, and to come: what constitution? what borders? what status for religion, minorities, non-Jews, women? Zionism has projected the Jewish world into the politico-historical space: it is time to confront oneself with it.

It is just as urgent to recall that there is never a perfect, absolute, proper, and pure appropriation of a simple origin. Rage and jealousy are inherent in every fantasy of appropriation and risk turning back against the one who claims to realise this fantasy. It is easy to perceive where the exalted imprecations of “home,” of one’s own language, of the fascination for the appropriation of the land, of the place, and of the return to what we supposedly “were before,” precipitate us. It is precisely this that today threatens certain religious and messianic currents of Zionism. The great democratic and social advances of Zionism are literally on the path of destruction by these currents.

  1. R. Kook, Les lumières du retour (The Lights of Return), Paris, Albin Michel, 1998, p. 36.↩︎

  2. It is certainly not indeterminable as God would be.↩︎

  3. Judaism develops as a religion beyond the biblical origins, both chronologically and metaphysically.↩︎

  4. A multidimensional phenomenon, messianism addresses the questions of the philosophy of history and its end, of right and politics, of violence and eternal peace, of tradition and its rupture. Jacques Derrida, who reflected at length on the relations between philosophy and history, proposed replacing the over-determined and onto-theologico-politically loaded notion of messianism by a more complex conception of messianicity, stripped of any religious and explicitly dogmatic connotation, and thus to understand it as an essentially philosophical and hyper-critical concept.↩︎

  5. Contrary to what Benjamin Gross thinks in his preface to the French translation of Rav Kook: “in the Torah, there is no thematic and no attempt at definition, but rather lived experiences that give us to think (…). It is there that what one might call an ontological order (emphasis ours) is revealed, a concreteness different from natural reality, an imperative call to a normative ideality.” R. Kook, Les lumières du retour, Paris, Albin Michel, 1998, p. 12.↩︎

  6. Beyond this or that Maimonidean attempt at thematisation (the twelfth of the thirteen articles of faith): “I believe with complete faith in the coming of the Messiah, and even if he tarries, I will await his coming each day.”↩︎

  7. Is it even useful to remark here that the vocation of Israel has never—never ever—been imperial, but ethico-politico-social, so to speak? Since when does a “people of priests” wish to constitute an empire?↩︎

  8. In a certain way, “Israeli” ultra-orthodoxy still remains apolitical. It continues to refuse the risks and constraints of the modern democratic political space, even to the point of a certain use of violence. It is, however, clearly engaging in political politicking today. Is it placing one foot in political life as expressed in Israeli democracy? It is difficult to say at the moment.↩︎

  9. With Zionism, the Jewish world enters actively into the concrete of the political. It finds itself exposed as never before to the problematics that shape the Israeli public space. New socio-politico-economic and theological stakes emerge. I am thinking of the role of national identity in democracy, of the definition of what constitutes a people in the light of the encounter of different national and religious communities, of the necessity of a more or less active secularisation in the construction of a just and egalitarian democracy, of the status of women, of non-citizens, of minorities, of gender, of ecology, but also and today more than ever, of the necessity of finding solutions to the dramatic situation of the Palestinians.↩︎

  10. The problem raised by the ultra-orthodox communities is their absence of integration into Israeli society and into the real world. They live disconnected from the socio-economic and political reality of the country. Their existence is rhythmed by “the miracles of Hashem and the study of Torah.” Zionism was born in many respects in rebellion against this very concept. The future of the Jewish world cannot be thought without taking the risk of its political realisation and of its secularisation. Taking the risk of its political realisation means for Judaism not perceiving or conceiving itself as a religion withdrawn into itself, but actively penetrating into present political concreteness and exposing oneself entirely to the questions that shape and constitute public space, with all the interrogations relative to it that they presuppose.↩︎

  11. E. Levinas, Dieu, la mort et le temps (God, Death, and Time), Paris, Grasset, 1993, p. 26.↩︎

  12. Ibid, p. 21.↩︎

  13. From this point of view, October 7 marks a turning point: for the first time, the dead were not recognised as the dead of the entire nation. Something of the idea of “national mourning” was lost, no longer imposes itself with the same evidence. Funeral rites always serve as a good barometer for evaluating the cohesion and solidarity of a society.↩︎

  14. Wife of Yoram Metzger, kidnapped on October 7 and assassinated in captivity.↩︎

  15. Blanchot on Hegel, to which Blanchot adds—something that resonates strangely after Rav Kook—: “only Judaism is the thought that does not mediatise.” M. Blanchot, L’écriture du désastre (The Writing of the Disaster), Paris, Gallimard, 1980, p. 104.↩︎

  16. R. Kook, Les lumières du retour (The Lights of Return), Paris, Albin Michel, 1998, p. 66.↩︎

  17. “All the forces of the universe, including the most negative, in reality participate in the process of repair: the will that animates the world is a Will oriented toward the good.” Ibid, p. 44. Or again: “(…) every fault is ontologically called to repair itself, just as every degradation in the cosmic process is ontologically promised restoration.” Ibid, p. 65.↩︎

  18. We are here at the antipodes of the messianic as marking the “wound of incompletion,” to speak like W. Benjamin—as situating the messianic event somewhere in the un-cicatrisable, in what does not let itself be raised up, understood, or annulled in the narrative of the incarnation or deployment of God in history.↩︎

  19. R. Kook, Les lumières du retour (The Lights of Return), French trans. B. Gross, Paris, p. 44.↩︎

  20. Ibid, p. 37.↩︎

  21. Ibid, p. 39.↩︎

  22. Ibid, p. 76.↩︎

  23. Ibid, p. 77.↩︎

  24. Ibid, p. 49.↩︎

  25. At the beginning of Zionism the religious-Zionist rabbis were not what one calls today “messianic.” Thus Rabbi Reines even supported the idea of creating a State in Uganda. It is clearly Rav Kook who introduced ideological messianism (the reduction of Judaism to a historically incarnated messianism) into the Zionist and religious discourse. Fairly quickly, for reasons of operativity or conceptual fluidity, of global ideological context (Marxist teleologies, the birth of nationalisms), of the profound distress of the Jewish condition, his approach imposed itself, becoming sole and exclusive in religious Zionism.↩︎

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