Passover – the meshuggene view
JVL Introduction
Haaretz, Israel’s liberal daily, publishes a wide range of opinion pieces.
This one is from the off-the-wall messianic right – a view you might think so off beam it couldn’t possibly have any purchase in today’s world.
You’d be wrong.
What does it argue? It takes the Haggadah literally: “Passover teaches us that ‘in every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us’.”
We must vanquish them first with God’s help
Thus Israel Harel, founder of the Institute for Religious Zionism at the Shalom Hartman Institute, and of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, which he headed until 1995.
He is no maverick but at the heart of the settler enterprise.
Here is Judaism at its worst, in all its proud, ethnocentric, genocidal arrogance.
RK
This article was originally published by Haaretz on Sun 5 Apr 2026. Read the original here.
The war with Iran must ensure that our enemies will no longer 'rise up to destroy us'
Passover teaches us that ‘in every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us.’ It is our duty to defeat Iran’s nuclear capabilities and to turn those words into history
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“On October 7, 2023, the most terrible calamity in the history of the revived Jewish state took place, but at no point did it threaten Jewish existence in the Land of Israel”.
There it is in black on white from the pen, so to speak, of Israel Harel ‘of the off-the-wall messianic right’ ‘at the heart of the settler enterprise…. [Here is] Judaism at its worst, in all its proud, ethnocentric, genocidal arrogance”. “but at no point did it threaten Jewish existence in the Land of Israel” averring that – in stark contradistinction to the instantaneous unequivocal full-throated cries of ‘genocide’ and ‘existential threat’ that issued forth on 7 October from the lips of the government and the military. What price, then, the ‘messaging’ from the eyeballs-out messianics? ‘Move along, now, nothing to see here, no genocide, no existential threat’?. 7 October was not ‘an invasion’. It was a pogrom… sold to YahYa Sinwar’s footsoldiers, by him, as the uprising which would finally resolve ‘the Jewish question’. Confusion all round. The pogrom was done and dusted by tea-time. Some genocide! Some invasion! Some ‘existential threat! I think the only people who knew what was actually afoot… were Netanyahu and his vanishingly tiny circle of confidants. What has unfolded since, is going according to plan. Their plan
Self-projection is a remarkable thing.
The most shameful element of the Passover myth and the one most often ‘passed over’ in contemporary celebrations , is ‘despoiling the Egyptians’. As my Jewish-born, later pagan theologian friend Asphodel Pauline Long explained to me after I asked about a verse of the ‘Dayeinu’ hymn: the slaves looted the homes of their masters while the Egyptians were mourning the deaths of their children. The pursuit must have been all the fiercer when the slaves were carrying stolen property as well as escaping with their embodied labour. In the current time the power relations are entirely reversed but the justification apparently remains embedded in the mainstream religion. Compare and contrast with Brant Rosen’s reading.