How do you Solve a Problem Like Messiah?

Religious extremism is threatening global order, and it's not the one you think.

After a week in Israel, even Tom Friedman is starting to get what Israel has become. In the May 29 edition of the New York Times, he wrote:

And as I’ve told American Jews, you’ve actually never met Jews like this. You didn’t go to Jewish summer camp with these guys. They just walked out of the Second Temple. They’re that extreme, and they now have central positions of power, and their goal is annexation of the West Bank and Gaza. And Netanyahu knows that, and they threaten him constantly. They say: If you don’t continue the war until total victory, we are going to pull out of the government, and that means you could go to jail.

Contrast this with the Leviathan-sized self deception of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY). I wrote Schumer an email demanding that he terminate U.S. support for the genocide in Gaza. Here, in part, is his answer:

I've always said that Israel has 4 goals: Radically reduce Hamas' threat, free the hostages, minimize the loss of innocent Palestinian lives and maximize the amount of humanitarian aid to innocent civilians in Gaza.

Every one of these brain-spinning assertions explicitly contradicts numerous statements by the highest authorities in Israel, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on down. Lest you think Friedman is exaggerating, here is proof that he has underestimated the problem — the speech given by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Jerusalem Day (May 26):

He tells the cheering rally, which would not have been out of place at Nuremberg:

Out of the unity of Jerusalem, out of the sanctity of Jerusalem, out of the joy of Jerusalem, we will be rewarded with the help of God with the expansion of the borders of the Land of Israel, with complete redemption, and the building of the Temple here soon in our days. Amen.

The Hegemony of Messianic Zionism

Friedman refers to the extremism of the Jews who defended the Second Temple during the revolt against the Romans in 66-70 C.E. These Zealots’ “baseless hatred” (in the words of the Talmud) led to the destruction of the Temple and the dispersion of the Jewish people.

The extremism of the Jews leading Israel’s government today is even more dangerous. A moribund political Zionism has been replaced by messianic Zionism. Exploiting the Hamas atrocities of October 7 and the plight of the hostages as excuses, Israel’s leaders are pursuing messianic visions. These are not prophetic dreams of a just and peaceful world, but a nightmarish vision of Jewish supremacy imposed by divinely sanctioned violence. They are prosecuting a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and preparing to annex the West Bank (which they call Judea and Samaria), from which they have begun the ethnic cleansing of the population, while intending to leave any remainder under a harsher form of apartheid than ever existed in South Africa.

Using advanced weapons supplied by the U.S., backed up by an arsenal of hundreds of nuclear weapons, they have attacked Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, and now (added post-publication) with a unilateral attack on Iran, even if it destroys President Trump’s negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear program and leaves Israel more isolated than ever.

The coalition that elected President Trump is also dominated by messianic extremists (Christians in this case), who believe that the “wars and rumors of wars” in the Middle East presage the return of Christ and the conversion (for some) or annihilation (for others) of the Jews. Eighty percent of White Christian evangelicals voted for Trump in 2024, and they constituted about forty percent of his voters. Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, is an outspoken proponent of the doctrine that Israel’s domination of the Middle East is a necessary precursor of the End Times.

In his Jerusalem Day speech, Smotrich was expressing the views of the messianic Zionist movement. Decades ago, Gush Emunim, the political organization of messianic Zionist settlers, gave birth to an underground current hoping to destroy al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam, and replace it with the Third Temple.¹ The mosque, together with the Dome of the Rock, or Mosque of ‘Omar, is built on what Muslims call “al-Harm al-Sharif,” the noble sanctuary, and which Jews call “Har ha-Bayit,” or Temple Mount, where the first and second temples stood. Both religions agree that this was the spot where Abraham proved his faith by showing his willingness to obey God’s command to sacrifice his son, though Jews believe it was Isaac and Muslims claim it was Ishmael.

Members of this group, called the “Jewish Underground,” were arrested by the Israeli security forces in 1984 for a plot to destroy both al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock. Today this group’s sympathizers hold the balance of power in the Israeli government. The messianic dream articulated by Smotrich, replacing al-Aqsa with the Third Temple, is illustrated in a widely circulated AI-generated video:

The images in the video are accompanied by chanting of the Jewish affirmation of the faith, “Shema’ Yisrael.” The titles appearing at the end say, “Next year in Jerusalem, Messiah now!”

The presidential system in the U.S. now verges on one-man dictatorship, with only parts of the judiciary standing in his way. Trump, unlike Netanyahu, no longer fears prosecution for even the most extravagant corruption. This affords Trump more autonomy from both the country’s laws and the vagaries of coalition politics than Israel’s parliamentary system grants Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s attempt to capture and corrupt the Israeli legal system has not yet fully succeeded, and his coalition partners can overthrow him (probably leading to his incarceration) at any time by withdrawing their parliamentary support, giving them more leverage than Trump’s evangelical followers have. Many of Trump’s supporters believe that the President has been chosen by God to wage spiritual warfare on behalf of America, and they therefore follow his every word, however inconsistent or mendacious it may seem. No one attributes such charisma to Netanyahu.

There is little evidence that either Netanyahu or Trump believes in messianic politics; both are power-seeking supremacist nationalists. Trump’s overwhelming worship of wealth can sometimes outweigh his racism — he courts the Arab oil states, because he hopes for profitable deals from them, even if they are Arab and Muslim. Both leaders rely on messianic extremists for their power, but Trump has more of a margin of maneuver than Netanyahu.

This messianic-supremacist partnership is far advanced in carrying out a genocide in Gaza, and pogroms in the West Bank and Jerusalem are accelerating. Trump has given signs of trying to restrain Netanyahu’s war mongering in both Gaza and Iran in the interests of safeguarding the big deals he hopes for, including for his family, but while he has authorized direct negotiations with Hamas, he has thus far given no sign of willingness to take the effective actions that President Biden rejected, such as cutting off military aid to Israel. His first administration’s recognition of Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights established two principal obstacles to a two-state solution as pillars of U.S. policy. The U.S. remains an active partner in Israel’s war crimes.²

How do you handle a problem like Messiah?

Advocates of military action against Iran sometimes argue that traditional tools of diplomacy are useless to change the behavior of the Islamic Republic, ruled by ideologically motivated religious extremists immune to the tools of statecraft. In his just-published book, Iran’s Grand Strategy, Vali Nasr argues that Iran is following a coherent strategy - “acting on assumptions and calculations that reflect historical experiences, security imperatives, and great power ambitions.” (P. 3). The inconsistent attempts by successive U.S. administrations to engage Iran on the basis of its interests and ambitions reflect a hesitant recognition of this fact, even if it remains contested by Israel and its U.S. supporters.

There is no comparable evidence for a political rationale behind Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing in various parts of Palestine and its expansionist hostilities with its neighbors. The opposition in Israel, far more cognizant of the nature of their rulers than U.S. or European statesmen, diplomats, and journalists, is increasingly and ever more harshly accusing the government of sacrificing even the most chauvinist concepts of national interest to its messianic ideology. Former IDF Deputy chief of staff Yair Golan touched a sensitive point when he recently said:

Israel is on the path to becoming a pariah state, like South Africa once was, if it does not return to acting like a sane country. A sane state does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby and does not set goals for itself such as the expulsion of a population.

If Israel is not a sane state, how do you deal with it? No officials in the U.S. or Europe have dared to recognize the enormity of the danger. Trump is hinting that he is trying to restrain Netanyahu, but there is no indication that he is contemplating actions that might enrage his political base. Other initiatives seem to reflect a willful denial of the reality of what Israel has become.

I just returned from a personal visit to France (May 9-24), where I had the opportunity discuss a French initiative to salvage the two-state solution. France chaired the UN Security Council in April; on April 1 its UN mission announced that the Middle East was one of its top priorities:

The situation in the Middle East will be the subject of a ministerial meeting at the end of the month, chaired by the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, to which international and regional partners will be invited, which will illustrate France’s commitment to peace in that region, and will be part of the preparations for the international conference on the two-state solution co-organised in New York by France and Saudi Arabia.

At that ministerial meeting of the Security Council, on April 29, UN Secretary-General Guterres called for that conference, now scheduled for June 18, to “take irreversible action towards implementing a two-State solution,” which he described as “Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security, with Jerusalem as the capital of both States.” The promise of that solution, he said, “ is at risk of dwindling to the point of disappearance.”

He cited many danger signs:

• Israel’s continued occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza, which “the International Court of Justice has found unlawful.”

• “Unrelenting conflict and devastation in Gaza — including the utterly inhumane conditions of life imposed on its people who are repeatedly coming under attack, confined to smaller and smaller spaces, and deprived of life-saving relief.”

• “In the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Israeli military operations and the use of heavy weaponry in residential areas, forcible displacement, demolitions, movement restrictions and settlement-expansion are dramatically altering demographic and geographic realities. Palestinians are being contained and coerced. Contained in areas that are subject to increasing military operations and where the Palestinian Authority is under growing pressure — and coerced out of areas where settlements are expanding.”

• “Settler violence continues at alarmingly high levels in a climate of impunity, with entire Palestinian communities facing repeated assaults and destruction, sometimes abetted by Israeli soldiers. Palestinian attacks against Israelis in both Israel and the occupied West Bank also continue.”

• “For nearly two full months, Israel has blocked food, fuel, medicine and commercial supplies, depriving more than 2 million people of life-saving relief. All while the world watches.”

The SG called on Member States to “go beyond affirmations, and to think creatively about the concrete steps they will take to support a viable two-State solution before it is too late.” Yet despite the urgency, the only concrete proposal I heard in France was that at the conference France and other states might announce their intention to extend diplomatic recognition to the State of Palestine. The U.S., which has most of the leverage over Israel, has already stated that it will not attend the conference, and is putting pressure on others not to attend.

There is an air of unreality about deploying declaratory diplomatic tools to establish two states living side by side in peace, one representing the perpetrators and the other the victims of genocide. Israel does not merely oppose the two-state solution: the Nation-State Law passed by the Knesset in 2018 declares unlawful all claims to self-determination in the “State of Israel” other than that of the Jewish people. That State of Israel, in official Israeli parlance, includes at least all of the land between the river and the sea, the territory of British mandatory Palestine. As the SG stated, Israel is accelerating actions including armed violence up to genocide, to make the two-state solution impossible. Indeed, it has arguably succeeded in doing so. The path to a “one-state solution” is equally difficult to discern, but what is not hard to discern is that the starting point for any policy must be what Ian Lustick has called the “One-State Reality”³ — which consists of a single Jewish supremacist apartheid state in all of mandatory Palestine plus the Golan Heights.

As long as Messianic Zionism prevails in Israel with the full backing of the United States, no diplomatic initiative is possible. Those European states that are belatedly starting to distance themselves from Israel, including France, Germany, and the UK, will have to go beyond halting, timid steps and impose as much of a blockade as they can of military support for Israel, including by the United States. Not just Israel, but above all the United States, must be the object of relentless pressure at the upcoming conference and beyond. Such a step would most likely force decisions that would lead the most extreme messianists to quit Israel’s government, removing Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister and prompting new elections. During the election campaign the entire world would have to make it clear to the Israeli electorate that the result of reinstating messianic expansionism will be total isolation. The shameful charade of instrumentalizing one genocide to legitimate another must end, if only so that humanity can once again feel a minimum of self-respect.

1. Defenders of Israel claim the charge that Israel or Zionists plan to destroy al-Aqsa mosque is “an antisemitic libel.” Even if this was true in the past, it is now a goal openly advocated by the most powerful members of the Israeli government.

2. Israeli advocates accuse the pro-Palestinian movement of hypocrisy for protesting Israel’s war crimes but not Sudan’s. The U.S., however, is not a partner in the war crimes committed in Sudan and does not arm or fund any of the parties. In Sudan the U.S. has already met the demonstrators’ principal demand: it is not funding or arming any of the parties to the conflict. What would American demonstrators demand of the U.S. government in Sudan?

3. Ian Lustick, Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).