There was a time when religious opposition to modern Zionism was principled, coherent, and came from a place of genuine love for the Jewish people. The great Torah authorities of Eastern Europe, who viewed the movement with suspicion, were not wrong to notice that early Zionism was frequently secular, aggressively modernist, and in many of its currents, openly contemptuous of religious tradition. Some of its most prominent architects were socialists and atheists who saw Judaism as a civilisation to be shed rather than a covenant to be honoured.

The rabbis who opposed them did so from within, through argument, through scholarship, through legitimate theological disagreement. They shared synagogues, cemeteries, and a common fate with the Jews they disputed. When the catastrophe came, they perished together. Their opposition was an internal Jewish conversation, conducted in love, however fierce. It deserves to be remembered with dignity.

What we are witnessing today is something categorically different. It has nothing to do with that tradition and everything to do with its desecration.

Let us be precise about what we are looking at.

Marginal figures in traditional Jewish dress have been plastered across the world’s screens as the authentic voice of Orthodox Judaism on Israel. They did not rise to prominence. They were manufactured into it by hostile governments, well-funded propaganda operations, and organisations with a long and documented record of hatred toward the Jewish state, and only just beneath the surface, the purest old-school antisemitism. The amplification is not organic. It is a production, and it has backers.

And the men used for this charade must be spineless, devoid of soul or conscience.

These are men whose entire religious life, every prayer, every fast, every ritual, is oriented toward a single destination: the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in Greater Israel, the ingathering of the exiles, the rebuilding of the Temple on Mount Moriah, precisely where the Dome of the Rock now stands. Not eventually. Not conceptually. Imminently, urgently, before nightfall if God wills it. That is not an interpretation. That is doctrine. That is what they would be asking for every single day.

Which means one of two things is true.

Either they do not believe what they pray, in which case they are impostors, wearing the garments of a faith they have privately discarded while trading on its aesthetic for money, attention, and the grotesque privilege of being applauded by people who despise them.

Or they do believe it, in which case we are asked to imagine a rather extraordinary conversation.

Scene: somewhere between a Tehran conference room and a London street protest. A........

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