Israel alone — the self-fulfilling prophecies of Jewish isolation

In the hands of Hashem 

“I think the reason that the forces of darkness are beating us so much,” said Rav Doniel Katz, “is that they are fighting a religious war, and we keep ignoring the fact that it’s a religious war.”

The video, it turned out, had been uploaded on 24 April 2025. At just over 80 minutes in length, it was a conversation between Rav Katz and his much younger colleague, Reb Adam. Both rabbis, I knew, were ba’alei teshuvah — a Hebrew phrase, meaning “masters of return”, for Jews who had been born secular but had later found Torah. Accordingly, their dialogue was aimed at those who were “just beginning” the journey, as well as those who were “already immersed in Torah learning.”

The subjects covered, if one were to ignore the Jewish connection, could have made up a New Age podcast from just about anywhere on the internet. From meditation techniques, breathwork and trauma healing to the laws of attraction and “the rise of the divine feminine”, there wasn’t much that was left off the table.

But, of course, one could not ignore the Jewish connection. At around 22 minutes, Adam asked Katz if there was any place for “external advocacy”.

Katz: “What do you mean by external advocacy?”

Adam: “Advocacy for Israel and the Jewish people … you know, the notion of, ‘Bring them [the hostages] home now.’”

Katz: “I find that a problematic statement. I mean, it’s leveraging a tremendously difficult moment, and kind of politicising it, as if the [Israeli] government has control. And why are we blaming it on them? Shouldn’t we give them back now? Shouldn’t we be turning to Hashem [God], and saying, ‘Hashem, help us heal now’?”

It was then that Katz lamented the fact, as he saw it, that the broader Jewish community had failed to interpret the war with Hamas in essentially spiritual terms. And here, instead of casting shade and derision on what he had come to view as “the forces of darkness,” he was almost complimentary.

“They are fighting with a passionate spirituality,” he said, “but we as a people, collectively, are disengaged. We don’t really think we have a divine destiny, we don’t think we have divine blessing, we don’t think we have a divine mission … and therefore, we are beaten.”

For me, if anything, it was a way of reading the situation that was deeply instructive. Even if I had long since arrived at the conclusion that — far from waging a “war” — the Jewish state had been waging a campaign of revenge and extermination, I could not shake the sense that the horrors in the Holy Land were millenarian at their core. My first piece on the conflict, published in late October 2023, had focused on the End Times prophecies of Judaism and Islam, a subject that had drawn the attention of Judge Dennis Davis on national TV.

It was in this context, in January of 2024, that I first came across the work of Rav Katz. Back then, less than four months after the 7 October event, I had been forwarded a link to a 45-minute YouTube video titled Is This The Kabbalistic Meaning of the Israel-Hamas War? (And Will It Bring Moshiach...?) Aside from the millenarian (or messianic) theme, there was the hit on Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah), which had long been my last remaining connection to the tradition of my birth — and so, I had clicked on the link instantly.

There on stage, exuding an undeniable charisma, was a man around my age, with a black hat, unkempt beard and fathomlessly sad eyes. “There is no hope in our situation, I know,” he had said, as his sermon was reaching its crescendo, “but we’re already dancing in the [Temple].”

For Katz, who was preaching in English to a packed hall in Israel, the offer of immediate solace was antithetical to his point. The collective anger and grief over the hostages and the dead; the sharp rise in the diaspora of anti-Semitic attacks; the lack of an effective leadership to navigate the chaos — all of these things, according to Katz, were proof that the situation was in the hands of Hashem. It was the suffering itself, he informed his audience, that would ultimately bring on the final redemption.

As for the suffering of the Palestinians, over the next 16 months, I would return intermittently to Katz’s various social media platforms — and specifically his YouTube channel, The Elevation Project — to see whether, in the face of Israeli atrocities, he had allowed himself to draw a distinction between combatants and civilians.

To my disappointment, and sometimes even to my anger, it would never happen. His excuse for not doing so, it seemed, remained his aversion to “politicising” the moment. But still, the way I saw it, the political and the spiritual were one thing.

Signs and portents  

In the early hours of 2 May 2025, in international waters off the coast of Malta, the Conscience — a ship belonging to the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, a group of NGOs that aimed to break the Israeli siege of Gaza — was crippled by a drone strike. Although Israel would neither claim nor deny responsibility for the attack, the evidence of culpability was overwhelming.

‘According to Maltese parliamentarians, the Israeli government had requested — mere days before the attack — that Malta refuse entry to the ship. Also, according to Drop Site News, an Israeli military aircraft had circled the vessel within hours of the strike.

The truth, by almost any (non-Zionist) account, was therefore biblical in its savagery. For exactly two months at that point, no food or humanitarian aid had been allowed to enter Gaza. Half a million Palestinians were at immediate risk of starvation, according to aid agencies, with the newswires releasing a constant stream of horrifically unpardonable images — children, in the grips of acute malnutrition and cystic fibrosis, with sunken eyes, yellowing skins and shockingly skeletal frames.

Outside of the most denialist Jewish enclaves, the analogy between these images and the photographs of living skeletons in the death camps of the Nazis was impossible to ignore. Equally difficult to ignore was the symbolism of the attack on the ship called Conscience — Israel, whether or not it cared, was demonstrating to the world that it did not have one.

And yet, only two days before, an event had occurred that was arguably even more awash in biblical symbolism. On 30 April, on the eve of Israel’s Yom Ha’atzmaut — Day of Independence — wildfires had erupted on the outskirts of Jerusalem, reportedly the largest in the country’s history. Almost instantly, news spread (aided by the reliable support of Hindu nationalists in India) that the fires were the handiwork of Hamas-supporting arsonists. An Arab citizen of East Jerusalem, who happened to be carrying cotton wool and a lighter, was the first to be arrested.

By 3 May, with the Conscience still attending to its wounds, the leftist Israeli newspaper Haaretz would run a commendable investigation titled, “How Conspiracy Theories About Palestinian Arsonists Spread Like Wildfire in Israel”. The national scapegoating campaign, the piece concluded, had been driven by old videos, misleading maps and political rhetoric. “Many people saw the lie,” one expert told Haaretz. “Fewer saw the correction.”

But it wasn’t until 7 May that a South African Jew by the name of Ronnie Kasrils, a former Umkhonto we Sizwe freedom fighter and erstwhile Cabinet minister in the post-apartheid ANC government, would properly bring the symbolism home.

In an opinion piece for Mail & Guardian, Kasrils would note that “the forests that cover the demolished Palestinian villages of the 1948 Nakba” were ablaze at a time when the Jewish state was meant to be celebrating its founding.

“Those like me,” he wrote, “who were seduced as innocent children by the thieving Jewish National Fund (JNF) into providing pocket money to plant trees ostensibly to make the desert bloom, can feel redeemed by whatever cause is now wiping the stolen terrain of its camouflage.”

Kasrils, whose vehement anti-Zionism had for decades drawn the bitter contempt of the vast majority of South African Jews, happened to be including my own experience in his “like me” qualifier — the white and blue moneyboxes of the JNF had stolen my pocket money too, a fact I would only discover decades later.

As detailed in the remarkable documentary Village Under the Forest, written and directed by Heidi Grunebaum and Mark Kaplan — another two members, heroically despised, of the South African Jewish community — these pine forests, aside from concealing Palestinian villages razed in the Nakba, were also non-indigenous. They had never, in other words, rightfully belonged on the land.

To my mind, then, whatever force had caused the terrain to be wiped clean, an appropriate term for it was indeed “redemption” — and particularly so because of the “scapegoating campaign” that had fallen so hopelessly flat.

And in such an Old Testament context, perhaps even the atheist Kasrils would have reverted once more to biblical language to describe what transpired on 8 May, the day after his piece was published.

Because, to be clear, 8 May 2025 was significant for two easily observable reasons: first, it was the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE) day; second, it was the day on which the winds shifted in Britain with respect to an institutional recognition that the modern Jewish state had gone too far.

Put another way, exactly eight decades after the Nazis had been defeated, an editorial in the Financial Times titled “The west’s shameful silence on Gaza” was going viral; an editorial in The Economist titled “The war in Gaza must end” had just been published; and British media was alight with the news that a succession of conservative parliamentarians — former Israel supporters — had withdrawn their backing for the “rogue” Jewish state.

By that Sunday, 11 May, The Guardian’s editorial board would ask the pivotal question: “What is this, if not genocidal?”

Falling silent    

“I don’t care about saving the Jewish soul at this point,” said the journalist Nora Barrows-Friedman, a staffer at the essential Electronic Intifada podcast, on 6 May 2025. “I don’t care about anything that has to do with preserving anything of my inherited genetic identity. It makes no difference to me about the future of Jewish society, because what it has been reduced to right now is horrific.”

It was a sentiment that I could easily understand, and on some days — most days, lately — it was a sentiment that I probably agreed with. Like Barrows-Friedman, I had concluded that what “Jewish society” had been “allowed to promulgate in Palestine” was “irredeemable”.

Still, a 4,000-year-old tradition — if one counted from the life of the patriarch Abraham — wasn’t about to disappear just because a handful of its members were disgusted by what it had become. In Israel itself, beginning in early May, a small but growing group of dissidents would begin to transmute their self-disgust into something life-affirming: protests not for a ceasefire deal or the release of the hostages (which happened weekly, and were life-affirming only insofar as Jews were concerned), but protests against the indefensible slaughter of Palestinian children (which had not happened at all since 7 October, and were inclusive in a way that upended the Zionist creed).

A report on the new phenomenon, aired on NPR radio on 7 May, said it all:

“Every Saturday night, throngs of protesters march down a main street banging on drums and chanting. But last weekend, they fell quiet as they streamed past another group of protesters who've brought something new to the Israeli debate over the war in Gaza. They're holding photos of children smiling. This new protest group says these are the children killed by the Israeli military in Gaza.”

And yet why, to scream it from the rooftops, had it taken so long?

The question was as urgent as it was legitimate — and the answers seemed to stretch from the dehumanising censorship of Israeli media to the “murderous solipsism” that, according to the arch-dissident Ori Goldberg, lay at the very heart of the Jewish nationalist project.

But there was, to my mind, a much older answer. Like Islam and Christianity, Judaism had always been inward-focused; its essence had always been based on the division between “us” (the chosen; the saved) and “them” (the masses; the damned). Like the fundamentalist imams in Mecca and the conservative cardinals in Rome, our orthodox rabbis in Jerusalem were still heavily invested in the message — often subliminal; mostly not — of an exclusively ordained mission.

On 13 October 2024, the day after Yom Kippur, when The New York Times had just released a report — based on the observations of 65 doctors, nurses and paramedics — that Israeli snipers had been deliberately shooting Palestinian children in the head, Rav Katz did a piece to camera (as posted on his Facebook page).

“So in summary, this is how the year begins,” he said, “it’s like the ‘Hero’s Journey,’ right? Here we are standing up, fighting for our lives, against the most dark, evil, maniacal forces and people in the world. And we have been left alone by all our allies, abandoned, and we are the last ones …. overcoming all the obstacles, to stand up for what is good and right and pure in the world…”

At the time, of course, Israel had the unqualified backing of the largest military coalition that the world had ever known. No matter what Katz — who presented as a genuine Kabbalist; a compassionate soul — had to say about abandonment, almost every human being with a smartphone was seeing the opposite.

It would, unfortunately, take many more months for the institutions of the West to begin to place some daylight between themselves and the Jewish state. And even then, after the images out of Gaza were drawing comparisons to the Nazi death camps, the extermination campaign would continue — even then, after US President Donald Trump had terrified the Israelis by negotiating with their enemies without them, the carnage from the skies would not stop.

Rav Katz, in other words, by suggesting that such events were in “Hashem’s hands,” was explaining the inexplicable. And the final redemption, while it was becoming the last resort, had never seemed further off. DM