On the Warpath
Messianic Zionism, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and Israel's War Without End
Here is a conundrum. While stock exchanges across the world react nervously to the onslaught on Iran, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange is booming. Here is another: while millions of people in the region dread the US-Israeli military operation and its consequences, Israeli society is jubilant. According to the latest polls, 93 per cent of the Jewish population support the war. Writing in Yedioth Ahronoth, one journalist captures the euphoric mood:
While we are getting rid of the monstrous Iranian Octopus, I walk down the street, the shops are open, Wolt couriers are rushing to deliver sushi, shawarma and overpriced chocolate cakes to Israeli citizens, people are jogging in the park, and at home I have electricity, hot water and internet. The Pilates studio is open, and the Israeli stock exchange is breaking records. And at this very moment, over my head in the lowlands, Air Force fighter jets take off for another sortie . . . They destroy with impossible precision another home of a mid-ranking officer in the Revolutionary Guards . . .
This is what the most critical war since the founding of the state looks like? This is what it looks like because the State of Israel is a miracle that cannot be explained.
He goes onto suggest that Israel has the great leadership of Netanyahu to thank, along with the exceptional qualities of its people and divine assistance. In Israel Hayom, another prominent journalist offers another jingoistic encomium to Israel’s Prime Minister. Even Netanyahu’s detractors must admit that he is possessed of ‘patience, cunning, determination and unwavering focus’ in his steady destruction of the enemy—total war on Hamas, then Hezbollah, now Iran—and curtailment of Trump’s foolish attempts to negotiate with the Mullahs and devise a peace plan for Gaza.
The strategy certainly seems to be one shock and awe campaign after another. Iran is currently in the crosshairs, but the message is directed at all Middle Eastern states: do not dare challenge Israel’s bid for regional hegemony or ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Achieving the first would give Israel the immunity it needs for the second: rectifying the mistake the historian Benny Morris lamented when he criticized Ben Gurion for not expelling all the Palestinians in 1948. As Bezalel Smotrich said to Palestinian members of the Knesset in 2021, ‘you are here because Ben Gurion did not finish the job’. In the eyes of the government, and the political elite in general, the moment seems to have arrived to finish the job.
This marks a break from the pre-state Zionist strategy and then Israeli regional policy, which was based on covert operations combined with crypto-diplomacy. I am often asked whether the current war is aimed at implementing what is known as the Yinon Plan. Oded Yinon was an adviser to Sharon, and in 1982 he co-authored an article outlining a strategy of divide and rule of the Arab world. Sectarianism serves Israel well, he argued, and should be promoted. This was at the time when Sharon sought to sow division in the ranks of the Palestinian resistance, including by encouraging Islamist forces in Gaza. When that failed, Sharon launched a direct assault on the PLO in Lebanon, which was widely criticized in Israel as a strategic mistake. The recent news about an attempt to facilitate a Kurdish land invasion from Iraq to complement the aerial bombardment of Iran may seem to confirm that these tactics are still in operation. But this is not the case. The old strategy was far less dramatic: clandestine intervention in the domestic politics of other states is not policy that is boasted about; nor is it based on dragging the region into a war.
Evidently, this is no longer the modus operandi of the state of Israel. Ironically, the best interpretative schema here may be that which orientalists have typically applied—not always very accurately—to the Islamic Republic: that this is a power not acting according to a ‘Western’ rational and humanist approach to politics but a fanatical ideology. Those determining the present Israeli strategy are explicit about its roots in the teaching of messianic Zionism and their vision of the present war as divine fulfilment. Netanyahu may be less ideological than his allies, and more narrowly concerned with his own political survival, but there is little doubt he accepts his glorification as both a strategic genius and messenger of God. For this camp, Israeli society itself needs to become far more theocratic. It is not yet, laments Smotrich, the ‘state of the Cohanim’, but is on its way to being ruled by a harsh biblical version of the Halachic law: ‘The State of Israel, the country of the Jewish people, with God willing, will go back to operating as it did in the days of King David and King Solomon.’ Much of the government’s domestic legislation is devoted to pursuing this end. Second, there is a need to resolve the Palestine question. Gaza is the model. Smotrich again: ‘There are no half-measures. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat—total destruction. “Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. There is no place for them under heaven.”’
Speaking in October 2024, Smotrich declared that ‘once in a generation, there is a rare opportunity to change history, to change the balance of power in the world and reshape the future. Soon we will have to take fateful decisions that will lead to a new and better Middle East.’ For most Western political commentators, messianic proclamations—unless by Islamists—sound irrelevant to politics. But these are not hollow statements. This is a worldview that now dominates both the political and military establishments, which provides the underpinning for much of the present jubilation and unconditional endorsement by the media. The war against Iran is also supported by those with a more secular—and allegedly more rational—approach to politics, in the Mossad and academia, as well as the only politicians who can potentially defeat Netanyahu in October’s elections, Avigdor Liberman and Naftali Bennet. The justification is that Israel had to act because it faced an existential threat—a claim as plausible as Colin Powell’s justifications to the UN of the invasion of Iraq. Even more absurd is the argument that a state which systematically violates the rights of the Palestinians is fighting a war for the sake of human rights.
Judged from an economic perspective, despite the exuberance of the Israeli stock market, the course of the Israeli state is highly questionable. It costs a great deal of money—two billion NIS a day in direct expenditure and five to six billion indirectly—and will require significant continued American financial aid. The government’s logic is that this will be balanced by the economic dividends: sky-rocketing profits from arms sales, now that cutting-edge Israeli weapons are being showcased on the battlefield, not to mention the prospect of Iranian oil reserves and greater access to those of the Gulf states, as they come to realize they need Israel’s protection. Yet there is no certainty this will make up for the financial strain; the same goes for money spent on settlements and the promotion of messianic Judaism in lieu of healthcare and other social priorities.
There are further reasons why Israel will struggle to pursue its strategy over the long term. Campaigns like this in the past were abandoned the moment they faced difficulties. Loss of American life, pressure from other countries in the region, public opinion in the US, the potential resilience of the Iranian regime and continued resistance of the Palestinians may all shift the balance. An invasion of Lebanon, judging by past attempts, will benefit no one. Much depends on the global coalition that fortifies Israel’s wars: the arms industry, multinational corporations, megalomaniac leaders of powerful states, Christian and Jewish Zionist lobbies, the timid governments in the global north as well as corrupt Arab regimes in the Middle East. What is certain is that before this fiasco ends, Israel will inflict a great deal of suffering—on the Iranians, the Lebanese and the Palestinians.
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