August, 2025
From Guy G. Stroumsa, FBA, MAE, Member, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Martin Buber Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Professor Emeritus of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions, University of Oxford
gstroumsa@gmail.com
https://huji.academia.edu/guystroumsa
MIDSUMMER’S NIGHTMARE
Political and military actions often have unintended consequences. When Titus destroyed the
Jerusalem Temple, in 70 CE, he intended, through his erasure of the Jewish nation’s symbolic core, to
obliterate their political hopes. Instead of excoriating his memory, the Jews might well be grateful to
him, for having thus weaned Judaism from the blood sacrifices which once stood at the core of the
daily ritual. The Temple’s destruction, moreover, instilled in the Jews’ hearts a powerful yearning for
Zion, which served at different moments in history as a motor of change and revolution.
The Hamas and Netanyahu have long been the oddest of bedfellows. After Rabin’s
assassination, it is thanks to Hamas’s bloody terror attacks on Israeli civilians that Netanyahu came to
power. The horrors of Sinwar’s Simchat Torah mega pogrom, made possible by years of the financial
support of Hamas authorized by Netanyahu, have led Israel, as well as the Palestinians, into a
bottomless trap. I am writing here, as an Israeli Jew, about the Israeli responsibility in digging this
trap, leaving it to the Palestinians to battle the mortiferous ideology of Hamas.
Israel’s war on the Palestinians, in the West Bank as well as in Gaza, aims at nothing less than
erasing any hope of the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state, side by side with Israel.
Netanyahu and his government went so far in laying the Gaza strip to waste, destroying buildings,
including hospitals, schools and universities, in the hope it would become to a great extent
uninhabitable.
In suggesting it could be made into a new riviera, Trump further encouraged Israeli ministers
in seeking to implement their dreams of a Gaza “cleansed” of Palestinians, Palestinenserrein. Jewish
supremacists and theo-fascists are gloating: after too long, the messianic times are at hand. They could
not care less about the fate of the Gazans, who could move “willingly,” to Libya, Indonesia or the
moon. Meantime, they could be herded into a “humanitarian city,” or else seek food in a few
“humanitarian” distribution centers, shot at by soldiers more or less at will. In this scenario,
bloodshed, hunger, and humiliation go hand in hand.
No matter how this messy tragedy evolves, no matter what kind of solution will eventually be
found, it is already clear that the deep shame for what our government has done, and is doing, with the
passive indifference of much of the (Jewish) Israeli population, will remain with us for a very long
time.
Years ago, I knew already, and wrote, that at some point, the Israeli policy to behave as if one
could go on forever with the military occupation of a whole people, would one day cost us dearly.
Even in my worst dreams, however, I could not have imagined we would one day be bombing and
starving an entire population, openly seeking massive ethnic cleansing, and even insanely planning
what must evoke, certainly for Jews, a concentration camp.
In 1966, on my eighteenth birthday, I became an Israeli citizen. My parents survived the Nazi
death camps. To a great extent, Israel was established so that such horrors would never happen again.
What is happening in Gaza, as well as in the West Bank, highlights the colossal failure of generations
of Israeli education and culture. More precisely, it reflects the Israeli interpretation of “the lesson” of
the Shoah: it should not happen to us again. When it happens to others, and even when we do such
terrible things to others, is treated as morally irrelevant.
Unintended consequences in history: is it possible that, through international pressure, and
through heading the urgent call for justice once preached by the prophets of Israel, the present carnage
will eventually lead, at long last, like the Shoah for the establishment of Israel – to the emergence of
Palestine?
Guy G. Stroumsa, FBA, MAE, Member, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Martin Buber Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Professor Emeritus of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions, University of Oxford
gstroumsa@gmail.com
https://huji.academia.edu/guystroumsa