But as the region becomes engulfed by a conflagration of increasingly apocalyptic proportions—a regional war with Iran was, until recently, considered to be political and strategic suicide—the narrative of ‘Bibi the Pragmatist’ has become an untenable alibi.

Whether Netanyahu personally subscribes to his own millenarian rhetoric is a distinction without a difference. By adopting the discourse and shared goals of the Religious Right, his coalition is guiding the Israeli (and American) state into a logic where catastrophe isn’t a risk to be managed, but a requirement for redemption.

Confused? Of course you are.

However, as Ben Lorber documented a year ago, Messianic Zionism is no longer a fringe movement but a unified eschatological frame where a new generation of Orthodox Jewish and Christian Zionists have found a seamless theological mesh. Within this worldview, the catastrophic spiritual-political trajectory that emanates from the Palestinian Nakba is reframed as the necessary labor of a new Messianic Age,

The hope in Washington and Brussels is that, though his allies on the Religious Right may dream of demolishing the Dome of the Rock in order to erect a Third Temple, Netanyahu understands that at some point he’ll run into the red lines of market stability and international law. This assumption is failing in real time. Almost three years into the genocide of Gaza, Israel continues to expand its territorial claims over the West Bank (what the Jewish Right refers to as “Judea and Samaria”), Gaza, and Southern Lebanon.

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In the worldview of the Religious Right—whether Jewish, Christian, or, increasingly, “Judeo-Christian”—history cannot result in a negotiated peace. Instead, the arc of the moral universe bends towards a final showdown between “Good and Evil.” In practice, this becomes an accelerationist worldview which posits that the End Times must be brought into being through human action.