A not insignificant number of Israeli Jews have been euphoric ever since October 7. This euphoria hasn't stopped for a moment. Is it real, or does it just seem that way to me?
Soldiers danced exuberantly to the sounds of a horrifying song about the ruins of the Gaza Strip. Soldiers brought a Torah scroll into a destroyed Gazan home with great rejoicing. The education minister pranced around in a frenzied dance at the scene where a bloody terror attack had occurred not long before. And the peak, of course, was that conference attended by senior members of the government – ministers and Knesset members from the ruling party.
Anyone who watched it might well have thought it was George Orwell's Victory Square, not National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir's "Victory Conference." This ludicrous event, whose participants were urging that Jewish settlements in Gaza be rebuilt even as 136 hostages are still being held there under extremely harsh conditions, was copy-pasted from what Orwell described in "1984."
That conference in Jerusalem's International Convention Center reflected the Israel that is emerging in the wake of October 7. It's a country that, even as it is occupying Gaza, is being brutally occupied by a messianic movement.
And the other side – the side ostensibly opposing the messianists, but whose meager ideological boundaries begin and end with the demand for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's departure – has no original ideas in its bag of tricks that could extricate Israeli society from the mire. On Friday, I scrutinized the advertisement in Haaretz by the Brothers and Sisters in Arms movement. But aside from a few empty, circuitous sentences, this huge ad contained nothing at all.
The late columnist Yoel Marcus once wrote, referring to Haganah leader and left-wing politician Moshe Sneh, that "the following handwritten comment was once found in a printed draft of a speech by Sneh: 'A weak argument, raise your voice'" (Haaretz, July 24, 2009). That's exactly the position Netanyahu's opponents are in. This group doesn't really have anything to say. And in the absence of any sane alternative, Israel is being dragged into the black hole of the messianic right.
This euphoria is the outward aspect of what is going on in people's souls. A sense of urgency hovers in the air, lest a failure to carry out the messianic right's wishes now becomes a tragedy for generations.
Daniella Weiss, a veteran leader of the settlement movement, said in an interview with journalist Amnon Levy that "each and every one of us, myself included, has something called a go-bag. That's the bag with which we're ready to move to Gaza from one minute to the next." And Elisha Ben Kimon of Yedioth Ahronoth wrote that "Daniella Weiss and her team in the Nahala movement, together with Samaria Regional Council Chairman Yossi Dagan and his team, are building a program for the possibility of settling the Gaza Strip."
In his article, Ben Kimon described the multitude of activities taking place, both in the Knesset and outside it, with the goal of realizing the dream of resettling Gaza. This dream seduces the extremists' hearts and minds. It turns out that October 7 brought the day of redemption – i.e., the reoccupation of the land of our forefathers – closer.
"One person's disaster is another's gain," the ancient poet Al-Mutanabbi wrote. You see it, but you can't believe it. A few hundred meters from that euphoric conference in Jerusalem, the hostages' families and their supporters had gathered in the bitter cold to beg for their loved ones to be brought home. One side was hurting, the other was rejoicing. Every nation contains two peoples, as someone once said – I think it was Karl Marx.
But those people rejoicing in the International Convention Center don't bear sole responsibility for this. If you look closely, you'll see that most of the political establishment is sacrificing the hostages, even if it's with "great sorrow." The stench of destruction wafts over the land.
The lords and masters at the Victory Conference gave the world the middle finger. But in so doing, they also gave the middle finger to those Israelis who seek to be part of the normative world and want to bring their loved ones home.
What these "comrades" are doing should be viewed as a version of the biblical Samson's plea, "Let me die with the Philistines." But what they mean by the Philistines is other Israelis, first and foremost the hostages' families. As for the victims in Gaza, they don't even enter into the messianists' thinking.