Messianic fanatics drive Israel to ‘Armageddon’

As the world holds its breath waiting for Iran and Hezbollah’s response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s blatant attempt to expand the war by assassinating a Hezbollah leader in Beirut and Hamas leader in Iran, top experts including a former Israeli Defence Force (IDF) chief of staff are intensifying their warnings that dangerous religious extremists are controlling Israel. The warnings echo the detailed analysis published by the Australian Citizens Party in the December 2023 dossier titled “Plunging towards World War III: The Made-in-London ‘Temple Mount’ Plot behind the Israel-Hamas War”, which exposed the British imperial sponsorship of Messianic extremists whose movement now dominates Israeli politics, such that they represent the primary threat of a provocation that could trigger a regional religious war which draws in the superpowers and escalates into a thermonuclear showdown, i.e. the Armageddon of Biblical prophecy which is their explicit goal. 

As AAS reported last week, former MI6 officer and leading Arabist Alastair Crooke noted that Netanyahu went to Washington to get the green light to expand his war into a wider regional conflict. This he immediately acted on by bombing Beirut to assassinate Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, falsely accused of responsibility for the attack on a Druze village in the Golan Heights. Netanyahu immediately followed up with the assassination of moderate Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s representative in the hostage negotiations, which Israel calculated for maximum provocation by assassinating him in Tehran instead of Qatar where he is based. Al Jazeera reported 6 August that the assassinations have “all but guaranteed retaliatory attacks that experts worry could set off a full-scale war”, which is exactly what Netanyahu’s government and, presumably, its extremist neoconservative backers in the United States and United Kingdom want. 

As this unfolded, Israel’s internal politics were riven by a stomach-churning dispute over the arrest of nine Israeli soldiers at a prison camp in the Negev desert called Sde Teiman, accused of horrific torture of Palestinian prisoners including anal penetration with iron bars that caused ruptured bowels and multiple deaths. Seemingly to demonstrate the “rule of law” in Israel, Israeli authorities sought to arrest the accused, only to be confronted with a riot of angry extremist settlers who descended on the torture camp to stop the arrests. In the ensuing public debate, extremist Israeli Cabinet Ministers Itamar Ben Gvir (National Security) and Bezalel Smotrich (Finance)—both with backgrounds in terrorism— defended the accused torturers as “heroes” and “heroic warriors”. In a committee exchange in Israel’s Knesset (Parliament), Arab Israeli lawmaker Ahmad Tibi asked Likud Minister Hanoch Milwidsky: “To insert a stick in a person’s rectum, is that legitimate?” To which Milwidsky angrily shouted, “Shut up! Yes, if he is a Nukhba [Hamas commando], everything is legitimate to do.” While Netanyahu condemned the protestors, it was token at best, given the statements of his own Ministers. 

Writing in Strategic Culture on 5 August, under the headline “The 1948 Irgun re-born?”, Alastair Crooke explained: “An eschatological [obsessed with ‘end times’ Biblical prophecy] right-wing cult now holds the majority in cabinet—and wields a vigilante militia ready to attack the military establishment, and the Israeli state. No one was arrested for the attack and take-over of the two bases. They do not dare.”

Crooke quoted Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon, former Chief of Staff of the IDF, who also served as Israel’s Defence Minister, giving this stark warning in a video interview on the forces taking over in Israel:

“When you talk about Smotrich and Ben Gvir: They have a Rabbi. His name is Dov Lior. He is the Rabbi of the Jewish Underground, who intended to blow up the Dome of the Rock [Al Aqsa]—and before that the buses in Jerusalem. Why? In order to hurry up the ‘Last War’. Do you [not] hear them talking in terms of the Last War; or of Smotrich’s concept of ‘subjugation’? Read the article he published in Shiloh in 2017. First of all, this concept rests on Jewish supremacy: Mein Kampf in reverse. … It is anchored in ideology. And then actually what he aspires to—as soon as possible— is to go to a big war. A war of Gog and Magog [Armageddon]. How do you start the flames? A massacre like the [1994] Cave of the Patriarchs? Baruch Goldstein is a student of this Rabbi. Ben Gvir has hung up Goldstein’s picture [in his house].

“This is what goes into the decision-making process in the Israeli government”, Ya’alon declared. 

Crooke followed up in a 5 August interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano on his YouTube program Judging Freedom, saying: “There are Israels [plural] now; two completely distinct Israels. The 800,000 settlers follow Rabbi Dov Lior, whom Netanyahu calls ‘our guide’. There are 105 other rabbis who follow him, and they okay attacks on schools, hospitals. This was the vigilante militia that came down and stormed the two prisons. It is the State of Judea fighting the State of Israel ... They want a big war, to bring on the Messiah.” 

Rabbi Dov Lior was described in the 9 January 2012 Jerusalem Post as “a premier student of Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook”, the son of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook who was sponsored by the British elite in the late 19th century to inject into must return to Israel to rebuild Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem on the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque (the third holiest site in Islam) before the Messiah will return. As the ACP’s “Temple Mount” dossier (available at citizensparty.org.au) documents, the younger Kook continued his father’s work, influencing entire generations of Israeli settlers and leaders, including Benjamin Netanyahu himself, into this eschatological worldview which is a recipe for Armageddon.

By Robert Barwick, Australian Alert Service, 9 August 2024