It’s not only Iran that draws on religious texts to justify its rule.
It’s worth paying attention to the names Israel gives its military operations. It tells you much about how the Israeli government thinks about them and how they frame them as being part of Jewish tradition. Its October 2024 strikes on Iran were named מִבְצָע עוֹפֶרֶת יְצוּקָה Mivtza Y’mei Teshuva – operation days of repentance, which traditionally refer to the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when Jews repent for sins, the implication being that Iran should be made to repent for its strikes on Israel earlier that month (which in turn came in response to Israel bombing an Iranian consulate in Damascus). The Gaza war which began on October 7 is called Kharbot B’razel – Iron Swords, a seemingly non-Biblical phrase that references the Iron Dome missile defence system, though apparently Netanyahu wanted it renamed after Sefer Bereishit (the Book of Genesis) or Simchat Torah, due to the festival on which Hamas’ attack occurred. The first Gaza war, in 2008 was called מִבְצָע עוֹפֶרֶת יְצוּקָה Mivtza Oferet Y’tzukah – Operation Cast Lead – since it began during Channukah and the names refers to a poem by Chaim Bialik: Mori natan sevivon li / Ben-oferet yetzukah / Yod’im atem lich’vod mi? / Lich’vod haChanukah! Teacher gave me a dreidel/ Made of cast lead / In whose honour, for whose glory? / For the honour of Hanukkah.
The pattern of these names is that they seek to root the military operations in Jewish tradition, to suggest that they flow naturally from it. The current offensive against Iran is titled Rising Lions; in Hebrew it’s עם כלאבי Am K’lavi – a nation like a lion. It may refer to the pre-revolutionary flag of Iran which featured a lion at its centre, suggesting that Israel hopes to restore the rule of the Pahlavis. But more importantly it’s a Biblical reference – Numbers 23:24: הֶן עָם כְּלָבִיא יָקוּם וְכַאֲרִי יִתְנַשָּׂא The people shall rise up like a lion[ess] and rouse itself like a [young] lion. Netanyahu released a picture of himself at the Kotel, clad in a tallit, putting this verse into the stones, the day before the operation. He is secular, famously attending a hotel restaurant and eating treyf on shabbat while visiting London. But on certain occasions it suits him to put on religious garb, both literally and metaphorically.
Religious Lions
Let’s start by looking at Rashi’s commentary on the verse. He says: ‘When they rise from their sleep in the morning they show themselves strong as a lioness and as a lion to “snatch at” the mitzvot (to perform them immediately) — to clothe themselves with the Tallit, to read the Shema and to lay Tefillin.’ For Rashi the Biblical text is not military at all – rather it is concerned with religious commandments. Israel (the people) is fastidious about carrying out the mitzvot associated with the morning as soon as it wakes up, and it is in this sense that the people is compared to a lion. This understanding is similar to the opening of the Shulchan Aruch:
יתגבר כארי לעמוד בבוקר לעבודת בוראו שיהא הוא מעורר השחר
One should strengthen himself like a lion to get up in the morning to serve his creator. He should get up early enough to welcome in the dawn.
This is a very traditional Jewish self-understanding. The task of the Jewish people is to perform mitzvot; prayer three times a day, kashrut, shabbat, Torah learning. The words of the written Torah should be read through this understanding. The attempt to read Torah as a military handbook, speaking of Jewish strength and fearsomeness, is a modern discourse, and one shaped by Zionism.
Zionism’s Bible
Zionism has always been led by ostensibly secular Jews. But the movement nevertheless drew heavily on Biblical texts, seeking to separate them from the Rabbinic corpus and the huge Jewish legal and ethical tradition that was produced under conditions of diaspora and a lack of sovereign power. Zionists sought to write off most of Jewish tradition between the fall of the temple in 70CE and the modern era as Galut (exile), and thus irrelevant to the needs of state building and governance. But the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, was beloved by early Zionists, since much of it (well, at least some of it) took place in the land of Israel, and depicted Israelites as warriors and conquerors of the land, just the kind of image Zionists hoped to reclaim. David Ben Gurion thought nothing of calling a press conference to announce a new interpretation of a Biblical verse and convened a study group on the Book of Joshua (See Rachel Havrelock’s The Joshua Generation). Rabbinic and aggadic commentaries on those texts which interpreted them spiritually, ethically or non-literally were played down. It was all about going back to the land, and back to the bible.
As the scholar of religion Karen Armstrong has often pointed out, this process was one that occurred in both Christianity and Islam as well – the return to Biblical texts was core to the Reformation, and Islamic revivalism in the 20th century sought to return to the Quran and the early period of Islam, casting off subsequent developments. Such revivalism, also known as Islamism, inspired the Iranian revolution of 1979 which used the Islamic revival to take control of a state. Zionism also engaged in a process of religious reform that sought to reinterpret classic texts for nationalist, statist and militarist purposes. David Ben Gurion coined the term Mamlakhtiyut, putting the state before everything else. In classic Jewish parlance we might say it involved making the state a golden calf, an idol. Iran and Israel have more in common than either would care to admit.
At least the lion metaphor is honest. It depicts strength, ruthlessness – something to be feared. This is an important part of Israel’s self image – especially in the early years of the state – that it is a strong Hebrew republic, no longer ‘trembling Israel’. And its enemies should fear it. Zionism thought it had overcome antisemitism and could return to being the warrior Israelites depicted the Bible. But in the 1960s and 70s a new approach was added, based on the rise in Holocaust consciousness in the wake of the Eichmann trial and the fears of military defeat in the run-up to 1967 and the surprise attack of 1973. The discourse of antisemitism returned, designed to depict Israel as a victim of hostile Arab powers, constantly having to defend itself. Since then, Israeli leaders have used both discourses simultaneously, claiming that Israel is a regional superpower that can do whatever it wants and that it is also constantly on the verge of being obliterated. The combination is clearly contradictory; states can desire to be feared or they can seek sympathy – they can’t credibly do both at the same time.
We see this incongruity with the Iran attack – it was a daring surprise raid by the Israeli air force, thus the ‘rising lions’ name. But once Iran inevitably counter-attacked, there were demands for sympathy for Israelis, forced to run to air raid shelters in the middle of the night. Israel has the right to defend itself, intoned Keir Starmer solemnly. This gets things the wrong way round. It was Israel who attacked Iran, Israel who was the aggressor, Iran who was defending itself. It wasn’t even a pre-emptive strike since Iran had shown no inclination to attack Israel. To expect Iran to do nothing in the face of such attacks, clearly illegal under international law, is to assert that Iran has no right to defend itself.
Two of a Kind
Everything that has been said about Iran to justify this war can equally or more so be said of Israel. Iran was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons, as Netanyahu has been claiming for over 30 years? Israel has had a large stockpile of nuclear weapons since the late 1960s, the existence of which was confirmed by Mordechai Vanunu’s leak to the Times in 1986. The fact that Israel refuses to admit having nuclear weapons doesn’t mean they don’t have them. At least Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty – Israel isn’t. It’s true that Iran has contributed to instability in the region by funding (though not controlling) groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis and by funding the Assad regime over the last 40 years. But Israel has also been a driver of instability – regularly attacking and occupying territories of its neighbours and funding proxy groups of its own to destabilise its enemies, to say nothing of the Palestinians who Israel has subjected to ethnic cleansing, occupation and apartheid for almost 80 years. At present Israel is occupying territory in Lebanon and Syria whilst committing what most scholars understand to be a genocide in Gaza. Iran is certainly an autocratic, repressive regime, which is primarily a danger to its own people, and I hope it peacefully falls. Not to return to the era of the Shah, which is what many western powers would clearly like to see, but to become a secular socialist republic. But I would also like to see the Israeli regime peacefully fall, not to become an Islamic Arab state but rather a secular, socialist state with equal rights for all between the river and the sea.
The equation of the two countries will be anathema to many. But I invite those who feel this way to consider if their attitude is not based on a dogma – a presupposition that Iran is evil and Israel is good. With this presupposition everything becomes clear – Iran is the aggressor because it is guilty and Israel is acting in self-defence because it is innocent. It is acceptable for Israel to hold nuclear bombs because it is good and will only use them wisely and in self-defence; it is wrong for Iran to have them because it is a Nazi-like state that would use them to conquer the world. Iran deliberately attacks civilians while Israel only kills them by accident when bombing military targets. Israel has a right to exist and any attempt to transform it into a state of all its citizens would constitute antisemitism; the Islamic republic is an illegitimate state that needs to be defeated and rebuilt from the ground up. If you already hold these non-rational beliefs; either because of Jewish identity, philosemitism or imperial ideology then you may believe all this. But if you don’t, if you are a broadly neutral observer, you will likely see Israel as the aggressor and Iran a state that has been desperately trying to do deals with the West over its nuclear programme and avoid a war with the Jewish state. At the very least you will see two states which are both dangerous and oppressive regimes.
This is the war that Netanyahu has sought for his entire political career. He has always been obsessed with Iran, presenting it as the overarching enemy, the invisible hand behind all the militias that Israel has fought on its (undefined) borders. This is, of course, a conspiracy theory. It seeks to replace a messy and diffuse reality with a single bad guy who is pulling all the strings. We have become used in recent years to the idea that conspiracy theories are essentially antisemitic, that it is always Jews who are presented as being at the head of the conspiracy. But anti-antisemitism has conspiracy theories of its own, usually involving Islamists. Iran, or Islamism in general plays the role for Netanyahu that ‘global Jewry’ played in Nazi ideology. The efficacy of this conspiracy theory for Netanyahu and his allies is that it entirely shifts the focus. The rest of the world sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the core issue, specifically Israel’s ongoing attempt to destroy Palestinian life, geography, history and culture. Netanyahu’s theory replaces it with a narrative of Islamic extremism, of Islamists engaged in a war of annihilation against Jews, seeking primarily to destroy the world’s only Jewish state. The rest of the world sees a secular national conflict that can be resolved through a political solution, this theory presents a religious conflict that can only be resolved by the total military defeat of one side. The only lions it has room for are military ones.
Shelley’s Lions
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy, written in response to the Peterloo massacre where Chartists marching for democracy were massacred by the British state in Manchester, was frequently quoted by Jeremy Corbyn while leader of the Labour party. Its final lines declare:
‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.’
I don’t know if Shelley was referencing the same Biblical verse as ours – but given the strong grounding British poets had in the Bible and the tendency for nineteenth century Britons to connect themselves with the ancient Israelites it seems quite probable. Here the lions are the protestors, ‘after slumber’ a suggestion that the oppressed have hitherto been sleeping and not yet used their full power. The chains that have bound them can be, the poet suggests, easily shaken off, and they can by force of numbers prevail against the British army and police. Here the lion represents the underdog, those who have not yet been enfranchised. Everybody sees themselves as the underdog, the lions that need to rise up against their oppressors, Israel is not unique in this self-understanding. But in truth, the state of Israel is extremely strong. Its leaders draw upon the repository of stories of how the Israelites overcame Pharaoh, Amalek, Belshazzar and Darius, but it has become like those Biblical oppressors and those it oppresses have become the lions who may rise against them. Daniel survived the lion’s den due to the protection of YHVH – today Israel has turned Gaza in a den of lions in which its inhabitants are regularly shot in the process of seeking food. Drawing on ancient texts of powerlessness to justify modern power and force is a dangerous cocktail. One response to this danger would be to give up on those texts altogether. But wholly secular nationalism doesn’t have a great record either. It would be much better to return to reading those texts diasporically, ethically, humanistically. Better to return to being lions that rise for prayer, mitzvot and the study of Torah. Better to return to valorising texts over land, humility over strength. Better to return to Judaism.