A French journalist explores how far-right religious factions are challenging the Israeli army from inside
“In the history of Israel, the army has never been factional”: writes French journalist Sylvain Cypel in a disturbing piece for Orient XXI, available in both French and Arabic.
The IDF has long been one of the country’s most respected institutions, considered by many liberal Israelis to embody the principles of secular Zionism, foundational to the state itself (and often at loggerheads with religious Jewish Israelis). But in recent years, Cypel reports, a religiously inspired “messianic colonialist” faction has taken root within its ranks, operating with apparent impunity from the army’s normal chain of command, pursuing its own goals, and making a mockery of IDF claims of ‘ethical’ warfare.
The existence of such a faction, ideologically speaking, pre-dates the war in Gaza, writes Cypel, a former member of the editorial team of Le Monde. But it is in Gaza that its influence has been most powerfully revealed, with horrific, criminal consequences for Palestinian civilians, and worrying ones for the integrity of the command structures of the IDF. Once considered a repository of common values, the article suggests, factionalism risks pushing the army even further into a moral (and potentially operational) crisis.
One name crops up repeatedly in Cypel’s piece, that of Yehuda Vach, a divisional commander within the Israeli army, active in the so-called Netzarim corridor in Gaza, partially responsible for the killing zone it has become. In December last year and in January this year, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published two investigations by Yaniv Kubovich into Vach’s activities and pronouncements, and an op-ed (these are in English, available here, here and here).
“No civilians. Everyone’s a terrorist”, reads one of Vach’s orders, as reported by Kubovich. It’s a licence to commit crimes against humanity, in effect lifting the legal requirement to distinguish between civilians and combatants. The result? Cypel reports Kubovich’s interview with a soldier in another division disgusted by the killing of a father and two children by helicopter-launched rocket, as they crossed a control line of which they could not have been aware. Or another where Israeli soldiers shoot Palestinians waving a white flag.
More than this, Vach is reported by Haaretz to have organised a second “private army” made up of messianically-inspired Israeli civilians – essentially a paramilitary unit answerable only to him – outside the usual command structure, assembled by his brother Golan. When the existence of this group was made public, the army claimed it had been fully informed all along. Cypel takes another view: “The army is lying. Facts that should have been the subject of a serious investigation, have been whitewashed after the fact”. He puts down the army’s approach to a fear of political blowback. It amounts to a “capitulation” to the “messianic tendency in Israel which is not in the majority amongst the [Israeli] Jewish community, but which manages to impose its political agenda a little more every day”.
Cypel takes the mid-1990s as one point of origin for today’s violent messianic movement: the 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians in a mosque in Hebron by a religious extremist, and the murder of Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin the following year by a man “under the influence of messianic rabbis”. (Cypel notes the irony that Rabin rejected advice to remove extremists who had barricaded themselves in Hebron in the wake of the massacre, missing an opportunity to nip the movement in the bud).
But the religious-political origin is older. Cypel credits Grand Rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine Abraham Isaac Kook with the idea that secular Zionist settlement might contribute unwittingly to the second coming. The “miraculous” victory in the 1967 war turbo-charged the fusion of messianism with a territorially expansive notion of Eretz Yisrael. Kook’s “supremacist vision”, as Cypel, describes it, was taken up by his son.
Nonetheless, Cypel suggests, in 1967 the suggestion by a military rabbi that the Al-Aqsa mosque should be pulled down and the ancient Jewish temple rebuilt in its stead would have caused 99% of Israelis to view the rabbi as a “dangerous madman”. Now, he writes, defenders of organisations committed to “rebuilding the temple” are in government.
The influence of these messianic currents on army units today comes in two ways. On the one hand, from politicians who are the ideological inheritors of Kook and son, and whose expressions of the desire to remove rhetorically dehumanised Palestinians from Gaza, gives political cover to enactments of that rhetoric on the ground. On the other, from the growth of combined religious and military academies, the Yechivat Hesder. The first was established in 1953. By 1967 there were three. In 1990 there were thirteen. Today there are ninety. In some, racist hate speech goes entirely unpunished.
Cypel notes that in the most “problematic” battalions of the army – those responsible for regular abuse – many have come through these academies. Their alumni are over-represented amongst infantry officers. Sixty per-cent of soldiers in the Netzah Yehuda (Eternity of Judah) battalion went to academies of this type. Vach himself went to a related school.
As Cypel describes it the problem is serious – and it is structural.
Full original in French by Sylvain Cypel published in Orient XXI on 10 February 2025 under the title ‘L’armée coloniale à l’heure du messianisme’.
Also available in Arabic translation here.
Orient XXI is a multilingual Paris-based publication focussed on the Middle East, mostly in French and Arabic, but with some articles in English, Persian, Italian and Spanish.
