Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, could not have been clearer in stating his goal: “A total suspension of humanitarian aid.” He justified his words as follows: “Stopping the aid will quickly bring us to victory.”
The victory he envisions is expressed by this Hebrew word: herem, “total extermination,” in German Endlösung, “final solution,” the term that inaugurated the Shoah.
Other ministers in Netanyahu’s government — including the Prime Minister himself — are aligned with this view.
Yet some insist that we cannot and must not speak of “genocide.” What, then, should we call this deliberate intent to starve an entire people? How should we name this systematic annihilation? Is there any other word than “genocide” for this coldly pursued cruelty by these Nazi-Zionists wearing kippahs, intent on wiping out the entire population of Gaza — and succeeding?

They call themselves religious, and one should not think they are pretending: they truly are. Just as the Nazi-Islamists of Hamas are. All of them, deeply religious. But here, it is not Islam that is at stake, but Judaism: what kind of religion is it, if it produces people like Ben Gvir and many others like him, all represented by the religious parties that are the soul and foundation of Netanyahu’s government?

The Jewish religion has a dual essence: spiritual and political. The first is properly Judaism; the second is what I call Israelism.
To describe the spiritual dimension of Judaism, I refer to an ancient text found on a potsherd dating back to the origins of the Jewish people, quoted by Amos Oz: “Do not act in this way, but serve your Lord. Judge the slave and the widow. Judge the orphan and the stranger. Plead for the child, plead for the poor and the widow. Vengeance is in the hands of the king; protect the humble and the servant. Support the stranger.”

Amos Oz’s masterful comment reads: “This message, written in unmistakable Hebrew three thousand years ago, contains moral imperatives and a sense of justice born within a culture that demands fairness for the weak and the losers […] The core of the matter lies precisely with the servant, the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor, the unfortunate, those in need.”

This standing on the side of the weak in the name of ethics is what Oz calls “the inner flame of Judaism.” It is the same message carried by the Jewish Jesus, who intrinsically linked love of God with love of one’s neighbour.

However, in the Hebrew Bible there is, from the very beginning and just as decisively, a political essence which I define as Israelism.
Joseph Klausner, a refined intellectual and Amos Oz’s great-uncle, wrote on this matter: “A simple fact must not be forgotten, even though many Jewish scholars with a sense of ‘mission’ and almost all Christian theologians overlook it; this fact is that Judaism is not only a religion but also a nation — a nation and a religion at the same and unique time.”

Here, what prevails is not moral conscience but political reasoning; not communion with foreigners, but supremacy; not solidarity with the weak, but strength and power.

It is precisely for this reason that in the Hebrew Bible, alongside the spirituality of solidarity, there also exists an ideology of power and of nationalist and racist oppression against other peoples — an ideology that gives birth to many Ben Gvirs.
This Israelism is widely attested in the Bible. Take the Book of Deuteronomy, whose ideology is among the most sectarian and violent in biblical and ancient literature.

At the beginning of the seventh chapter, Moses addresses the people who are about to enter the Promised Land — then called Canaan, later named Palestine by the Romans — already inhabited by other peoples, and commands the following behaviour towards them: “You must destroy them completely; you shall not make a covenant with them nor show mercy to them” (Deuteronomy 7:2).

Why? “For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be his treasured possession out of all the peoples on the face of the earth” (Deuteronomy 7:6).

According to the Deuteronomistic ideology, divine election entails love for Israel and, simultaneously, hatred for other peoples: “You shall consume all the peoples the Lord your God will deliver to you; your eye shall not pity them” (Deuteronomy 7:16).

Israelism represents the dark side of Judaism (every religion, indeed every reality, has its own). This voracious ideology, generating injustice and violence, forms the foundation of the political action that today in Israel drives the current government in its war of extermination against the population of Gaza, and in the systematic theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank by the so-called “settlers.”
Government and settlers alike feel authorized to commit this massacre and these acts of dispossession on the basis of biblical passages that promote Israelism.

But one thing must be clear: just as there are fake news, so there are fake scriptures. Those violent, hate-filled passages of the Hebrew Scriptures have nothing to do with the true essence of Judaism, expressed in that three-thousand-year-old shard and in many other biblical texts.
The moral conscience of believers who regard the Bible as their sacred book must completely restructure their exegesis and hermeneutics of the texts, so that people like Ben Gvir can no longer emerge — people who think they are genuinely religious because they block humanitarian aid and starve an entire people.

This, in my view, is the duty that moral conscience assigns to the churches and Jewish communities that truly wish to be faithful to the inner flame of Judaism. And it is above all the responsibility of those politicians who publicly declare their faith in the God who revealed Himself to Abraham, telling him that “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3).

See, Vito Mancuso: I due volti del fanatismo religioso