HAARETZ Haaretz
Yes to
Transfer: 82% of Jewish Israelis Back Expelling
Gazans
Twenty
years ago, Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, the
spiritual father of the 'hilltop youth,' sketched out his vision for destroying Israel's democratic institutions and establishing
Jewish supremacy. After October 7, it seems that his
vision is coming to fruition
 |
� Shay Hazkani
and Tamir Sorek
� May 28, 2025
 |
A recent survey of Israeli Jews reveals a growing comfort with the idea of forcibly expelling Palestinians
- both from Gaza and from within Israel's borders. The poll also found that a significant minority supports the mass killing of civilians
in enemy cities captured by the
Israeli army. These disturbing trends reflect the radicalization of religious Zionism since Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, and the failure
of secular Israeli Jews to articulate a vision that challenges Jewish supremacy.
Commissioned in March by Pennsylvania State
University and conducted by Tamir Sorek for the Israeli
polling firm Geocartography Knowledge Group, the survey
polled a representative sample of 1,005 Jewish Israelis. It
posed a series of
"impolite" questions - topics typically avoided in
mainstream Israeli polling - about the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict.
According to the results, 82 percent of respondents supported the expulsion of Gaza's residents, while 56 percent
favored expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel. These figures mark a sharp
rise from a 2003 survey, in
which support for such expulsions stood at 45
percent and 31 percent, respectively.
Religious interpretations play a key role in shaping
these views. Nearly half (47
percent) of respondents agreed that "when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho
under Joshua's command -
killing all its
inhabitants." Sixty-five percent said they believed in the existence of a
modern-day incarnation of Amalek, the Israelite biblical enemy
whom God commanded
to wipe out in
Deuteronomy 25:19. Among those believers, 93 percent said the commandment to erase Amalek'
s memory remains relevant today.
This apocalyptic rhetoric has found
fertile ground in religious
Zionist circles, where leaders
have long advocated for such extreme policies.
One of the most
influential figures to call for such policies
is Rabbi
Yitzchak Ginsburgh, head
of the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in the West Bank
settlement of Yitzhar. In January 2005, just
before Israel's dismantling of its
Gaza settlements, Ginsburgh
delivered a sermon near the Knesset
that laid out a vision fundamentally
at odds with the secular Zionist
ideal of a "Jewish and democratic state.11
Ginsburgh gained notoriety
for his pamphlet "Baruch
Hagever"
("Baruch the Man"), which praised Baruch Goldstein, the settler
who massacred 29
Muslim worshippers in Hebron' s
Cave of the Patriarchs
in 1994-.
Following the
assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin in
1995, Ginsburgh was placed under administrative
detention. He later endorsed a book
that sanctioned the killing of non- Jewish women and children.
His 2005 sermon, now known
as "Time to Crack the Nut," was a call to embrace Jewish supremacy in the Land of Israel. It prepared his followers for mass violence and ethnic
cleansing - policies that, two
decades later, appear to be unfolding in Gaza. With Ginsburgh' s vision seemingly
coming to fruition, it is
worth revisiting the ideological framework he proposed.
***
Born in the United States in 1944, Ginsburgh began his rabbinic career
in the Chabad movement. Though he still resides in Kfar Chabad, his greatest
influence is among nationalist Haredi
Jews within the religious Zionist movement. His teachings blend Hasidic mysticism with messianic
nationalism, drawing inspiration from
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and the Revisionist Zionist movement. His appeal even
extends to some secular Israelis, drawn to his New Age-inflected ideas
and his concept of "Jewish
psychology."
The most radical followers of
Ginsburgh's ideology are the so
called "hilltop youth" - violent,
young settlers from illegal outposts
- who now form an armed militia responsible for frequent attacks
and occasional killings
in West Bank villages. Unlike the early leaders of the
Gush Emunim settler movement, who at
least nominally accepted the idea
that Palestinians could remain in the land as a ger toshav (a halakhic
term for a non- Jew living in the Land of Israel) without political rights, Ginsburgh
views any Palestinian presence in the
Land of Israel
as a desecration of God Is
name.
In
his "nut cracking"
sermon, Ginsburgh likened the State of Israel to a nut with four
shells encasing the fruit - the
Jewish people. Drawing on Kabbalistic concepts, he described these
shells (kelipot) as spiritual impurities, remnants of
creation that must be shattered to release
divine sparks. While some shells
may contain traces of holiness,
most are aligned with evil -
the sitra achra, Aramaic for II other
side."
Initially, Ginsburgh
argued, these shells were necessary for the Jewish people's development. But now, he claimed, they have become obstacles. To bring about
redemption, the shells
must be broken. The first
three - the media, the judiciary, and
government institutions - are irredeemably impure and must be destroyed. The fourth, the military, can be salvaged, but only if
its moral foundations are purged.
The secular
media, Ginsburgh stated, "creates an
atmosphere in which speaking
in the name of Torah is seen as anachronistic, primitive and irrelevant
to all conversations essential to our
lives.11 The
legal and justice system encourages II assimilation and blurring the differences between Israel and the nations." It receives
frequent assistance from the educational
system, "which also strives ... to
impose those foreign and
confusing values on the youth.11 The Knesset and
government advance interests alien to the Jewish
people.
The cracking of these three shells is nearing completion,
with the rapid pace
of regime change
stemming from Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's judicial
overhaul, the crushing of the education system and the widespread abandonment of the professional
ethos within the Israeli media.
The army is the most
important and useful of these shells, Ginzburg argues.-It
is ''soft
and easy to digest.''
Its cracking will release the divine substance inherent in it in an apocalyptic
process. Ginsburgh asserts a simple Jew who will rely on a primal desire for
revenge - whom he calls "the nutcracker" - will instigate this process.
That person shall not be bound by the military's emasculating
rules, those Gentile values
associated with the so-called
"purity of arms" that prevent soldiers from fulfilling the Talmudic commandment, "if someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first." That same nutcracker will take revenge against the Gentiles, the Arabs of
the Land of Israel, without
moral constraints. He will emulate Baruch Goldstein, or the biblical Shimon and Levi, who killed all of the residents
of Shechem after the
rape of their sister Dina.
This was not an end-of-time prophecy.
As early as 2005, Ginsburgh
articulated a clear vision upon which his followers should act. But
the plan required a window of opportunity to crack
open the nut, a time when vengeance could be
spontaneously and organically applied
to the Gentiles so that the divine substance would be released from the
shell. At that point, all that would then remain
would be the fruit, the people of Israel, ready to take on the time of salvation. At the moment of vengeance,
Ginsburgh believes, the avengers can also free themselves from the
shackles of halakha, or Jewish religious law, which restricts bloodshed.
The opportunity presented itself on October 7, 2023, following
the Hamas massacre of civilians in Israel. "The
wicked acts of the people
of Gaza underscores their Amalek-like features," he wrote in his "Niflaot" pamphlet on the weekly Torah portion a
few weeks
after the massacre. These features,
he added, ''demands that we observe the command 'Blot out the
memory of Amalek from under heaven, you shall not forget
it' - total annihilation, not sifting, 11 meaning not checking who is innocent and who is guilty. Sacrificing the hostages by refusing
any deal to secure their release is a reasonable price to pay for what the
rabbi, like Netanyahu, calls "total victory."
The secular
public's widespread adoption of positions in support of ethnic cleansing
and genocide is more evidence
of the realization of Ginsburgh's vision. That public has failed to
articulate an alternative vision to messianic Zionism in the form
of human rights for all. Thus, 69 percent of secular Israelis
in the Penn State survey supported the expulsion of Gazans, while
31 percent of them considered Joshua's extermination of Jericho's residents as a precedent that the IDF should adopt.
***
Ginsburgh's achievement is indeed a result of cracking the shells, even if the ones doing the cracking were mostly not his actual supporters. The Hebrew media,
the first shell,
was always mobilized in support of the state, but it carefully
maintained an aura of
professionalism. Since October 7, it has pretty
much abandoned this posture.
Now, many journalists have foregone
critical coverage. Some
have even joined the calls for revenge,
expulsion and extermination.
The judiciary
once refused to openly declare
Jewish supremacy in the Land of Israel
and the right to expel,
exterminate or starve the Jews' enemies, even as it supported the occupation.
Ginsburgh likened the judiciary to a stumbling block that "we must break ... with derision and 'contempt of court.'" It seems that the second shell has also splintered, if it hasn't already been �7,z, completely removed.
Two months
ago, Supreme Court
Justice David Mintz rejected a petition by the human rights
group Gisha to order Israel to supply humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. Mintz,
a resident of the West Bank
settlement of Dolev, asserted
that this was
a "war of
commandment" just like in the Torah. He effectively
authorized the denial of food, water and
medicine to 2 million Gazans. The ruling,
joined by Supreme Court President Isaac Amit and Justice
Noam Sahlberg, a resident of the
Alon Shvut settlement, is
already taking its toll.
The educational system, part of
the second shell, has become a workplace where Jewish teachers
promoting universal values risk
dismissal (Arab teachers have long been familiar with this danger). Scholars of education point to a sharp shift in the
curriculum's nationalist, ethnocentric direction since the second intifada. It has led to growing
support for expulsion and
extermination, especially among those who completed their education in the past 20 years.
Some 66 percent of those under age 40 support expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel, and 58 percent want to see the army
follow the path laid down by biblical
Joshua in Jericho. A generational gap in political positions is not an unusual phenomenon, but in Israel,
it has widened greatly since 2000.
What has happened in the Knesset and the government also neatly follows the rabbi's prophecy. Ginsburgh himself demanded: "We must eradicate the government - left or right - it must be overthrown. And when a new one is established, it must be overthrown as well, and so on, until a Torah-based government is established in the country." Ginsburgh could boast quite a bit of divine support after five elections in three and a half years. •
With the
fourth shell, the
goal has also
been practically achieved. It's hard to find
any soldier who
would refuse illegal
orders, such as starving hundreds of thousands of people, creating kill zones, or
bombing densely populated residential neighborhoods. Only
9 percent of men under 40, the main demographic
group serving in the IDF in Gaza,
rejected all the ideas of deportation and extermination presented
to them.
Ginsburgh has not missed
the fundamental change in policy taking place in the current war. He was exalted to learn that the IDF no longer
considers the presence of civilians,
"who constitute a shelter for terrorists,"
in his words, as reason not to act.
Last September, he congratulated the heads of state
"on the change for the
better" that has taken place in their position.
***
Some
see the shock and anxiety
that gripped the Israeli
public in the wake of
October 7 as the only explanation for this radicalization. But it seems the
massacre only unleashed
demons that had been nurtured for decades in the media and the legal and educational systems. Zionism,
besides being a national movement, is also a movement of immigrant-settlers, seeking to displace the local population.
Settler-immigrant societies always encounter indiscriminate violent resistance from indigenous
groups. The desire for absolute and permanent security can lead to an
aspiration to eliminate the resisting population. Therefore, virtually every settlement project has the potential for ethnic cleansing and genocide, as indeed happened in North America
in the 17th through 19th centuries or in
Namibia in the early 1900s.
To be sure, Ginzburg is not the cause of Israel's moral collapse. But the nationalist Haredi movement, with Ginsburgh as one of its most prominent leaders, offers Israelis a religious veneer for erasing Palestinian indigeneity. It provides a language and a plan of action for both observant and secular Israeli Jews who seek a solution to the conflict that doesn't force them to cede the privileges granted by a regime of Jewish supremacy.
The use of biblical language to justify war crimes is likewise not a novelty of Zionism. Puritan settlers
in America, Ireland and other
places seized on the Bible and compared
the indigenous populations who opposed
them to Amalekites and Canaanites.
They too resorted
to ethnic cleansing and genocide
against the natives.
Note that this process is
not deterministic. While messianic
Zionism seeks to block decolonization in Israel and Palestine, it doesn't make it impossible. Opponents of
messianism have had several
opportunities where they could have chosen a
different path, but the price was that they would have to reinvent themselves as Israelis, and dismantle the regime of Jewish supremacy. Absent
a willingness to make these changes, the door remains open to the
impetuous spirit of Ginsburgh and his ilk.
If
there is any chance of stopping the march toward
a Spartan, outcast society,
it lies in the rejection
of the idea of Jewish supremacy and Judaization, even in the version currently accepted by secular Zionism. The alternative vision to suicidal
messianism is a true, equal
partnership between the river and the sea.
Shay Hazkani is a professor of history
and Jewish studies at the University of Maryland. He is the author of "Dear Palestine: A
Social History of the 1948 War" (2021).
Tamir Sorek is a professor in the History
Department of The Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of the book "The Optimist: A Social
Biography of Tawfiq
Zayyad" (2020 ).
A serious and factual article forwarded to me from a friend, it was innitially published in the leading English newspaper Haaretz, Penn State university professor collaborated with the data. I thought my readers would learn the truth about the reigning atmosphere and ferocious violence throughout this situation engulfing Israel/Palestinians and all their neighbors in the Middle-East.
As always, my many thanks to all.
