How Israel’s Belief Fuels Their Hardline Politics

https://www.youtube.com/live/wvic5jmqbKk?si=ZPq1OKixfrsZWsbG&t=618

TRANSCRIPT

The problem we have is that the mindset of Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and Netanyahu—if you’ve never dealt with people like that, you don’t understand that you can’t reach them with reason. They are beyond the reach of reason and logic. They are so caught up with their own emotion and have settled in their belief that nothing’s going to dissuade them from that until they actually set the whole place on fire.

The head of Shin Bet, one of his concerns, was that they are in the thrall of a rabbi with his eschatological vision. When we talk about eschatology, the doctrine of last things, they literally believe that they are going to bring about this battle of Armageddon and that it will usher in the appearance of the Messiah. Because remember, from the Jewish tradition, the Messiah has not yet come. For the Evangelical Christians, it is all about Jesus, the Messiah, returning. But this particular branch of Judaism in Israel, with their extremist views, believes that they’re actually going to usher in and prepare the conditions that will bring about the appearance of the Messiah.

Does Netanyahu and his crew have an academic or theological guru, a rabbi who preaches all of this while preaching blowing up mosques and busloads of Arabs?

Not Netanyahu. Netanyahu, you know, he’s all about power and taking care of himself. But Smotrich and Ben-Gvir? Yes. This Rabbi Dov Lior—he’s been quite influential and quite extreme.”

Uh, it is, it’s, there’s a religious dimension to this. We can’t discount that. I think the tendency is for many Western pundits not to delve into the religious aspects of this, but they’re real as far as these people are concerned, and that’s what’s driving them. And, I mean, part of their premise is that they actually have a covenant with God, and that was established 3,000 years ago. They believe they have a right to this land and the right to do whatever they need to do to eliminate those who are not chosen by God to live there.

So when you take a religious belief like that and then translate it into policy, of course, you can kill Palestinian children because they’re just refuse in the way that you need to clear out. And so that’s part of what has the head of Shin Bet so alarmed in his comments. He said, ‘Look, I grew up in a family of Holocaust survivors, and we believed in ‘Never Again.’ But, my God,’ he says, ‘what I’m seeing coming out of these Jewish mouths about Jewish supremacy, and not just that ‘Hey, we’re smarter, we’re more accomplished,’ but that ‘We are human beings; you are not human beings.’ He says that mindset is what alarms him and has taken hold among a big segment within Israel. That’s the danger.

Is this a majority view, this Messianic belief? ‘God the Father gave us this land, and we can crush and destroy any person who stands in our way. We can establish our own morality because we are the chosen.’

Apparently, at least it’s over 50% now within Israel. And again, part of those numbers may go up as Israelis who were secular are leaving Israel, coming back to the United States, going to Europe, or going to other places because they don’t embrace that. As they leave, that means those who do believe that become a larger percentage of the population. So it’s sort of naturally gravitating that way.”

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