by Alastair Crooke,Strategic Culture:

Some fifteen years ago Iwrotethat western reliance on its lens of secular rationality was no longer adequate as a means to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was becoming obvious — even then — that the future of the region would be one of wars increasingly defined by religious symbols: i.e. Al-Aqsaversusthe Third Temple.

Since then, things have moved on: In Israel, national elections in November 2022 brought a new leadership committed to founding Israel on the ‘Land of (Greater) Israel’; displacing the non-Jewish population and implementing Halachic law.

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The new government’s platform was an expression ofan eschatological and messianic purposewith a teleology of pursuing a path toward messianic Redemption. It was not secular, nor couched in Enlightenment tones.

My point then — and still is — that Western secular mechanistic ways of thinking will misunderstand these fundamental shifts. The West insists to apply its westernised conceptual precepts to something — Messianism and the pursuit of Redemption — that lies outside the frame of today’s post-modern western consciousness. We understand well enough power politics, but eschatology largely is a closed-book to most western seculars.

The bottom line is that no purpose is served in trying to convince those absorbed by a messianic vision that their solution consists of a two-state political structure in historic Palestine. The former actually welcome Armageddon and the defeat it would portend for non-Jews.

Nor can this be viewed as a passing phase, or a whim. Messianism has been a prominent, yet fluctuating, impulse in Judaism since Sabbatai Zevi (1660s) and Jacob Franks (18th century). (Some of its thinking filtered into European notions too, during the later Enlightenment period).

Jewish historian and scholar, Gershom Scholem, correctlypredictedthat religious Zionism — which in recent decades has aligned with Likud and the settler movement — operates as a “militant,” “apocalyptic,” and “radical” messianic movement that tries to “force the end” by demanding that the state engage in, for example, massive territorial control — i.e. they demand territorial conquest for end-of-times reasons.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, western mechanistic rationality however, has proved to be as much at a loss in its grasp of what motivates Iran as it is in understanding today’s Israel. The literal approach simply amputates any awareness of Iran’s deeper resistance and revolutionary anima.

Source: SGT Report