Not since the October 7 Hamas attacks has such a festive, ostensibly joyous event taken place in Israel. Large families and students from religious schools and academies preparing for military service crowded into a conference hall in Jerusalem's ministerial district on Sunday, January 28. With messianic fervor, the religious far right gathered several thousand people to call for the recolonization of the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, thanks to a war they see as the fruit of divine will.

Portraits of the secular founders of Israel hung in the hall, intended as a reminder that there was no difference between the socialist kibbutzim of the early days and the settlements that were still being created in the occupied West Bank, discreetly, thanks to the war. Young girls handed out 3-D pictures of potential future settlements in Gaza, beneath a huge map of the enclave. These include the former settlements of Gush Katif, which until their evacuation in 2005 numbered 5,600 inhabitants, and a new one, which the organizers imagine in place of Gaza City, a Palestinian metropolis of 1 million inhabitants, now largely destroyed.

The gathering was the brainchild of Yossi Dagan, head of local authorities in the occupied West Bank, and Daniella Weiss's Nachala organization. Weiss is a settler militant who became a member of Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), which built the first settlements after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Weiss claimed "the Palestinians lost the right to live in Gaza" on October 7 and wants the enclave ethnically cleansed.

Weiss was busy in the hall with a son of Rabbi Levinger, her late teacher. She greeted Avi Farhan, a former Israeli farmer in Gaza with a sunburnt face, who embodied the grief of the evacuated settlers in 2005, on TV sets. Uzi Sharbag, the first speaker on stage, was a member of the Jewish Resistance in the 1980s, which planned the destruction of the Dome of the Rock on the Esplanade of the Mosques in Jerusalem.

Fundamentalist influence

The evening testified to the influence of these fundamentalists within the ruling right. In all, 11 ministers and 15 members of parliament were present, including most of the representatives of the religious far right in government, and seven ministers and elected representatives of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud, a confused party that accepts its openness to supremacist ideology. Several of them asserted the need to "transfer" Palestinians out of Gaza, under duress.

Their war is not the same as that experienced by most Israelis. On stage, there was little place for the fate of the hundred or so hostages still alive (and at least 30 dead) held by Palestinian factions in Gaza, nor any possible agreement with Hamas to free them. No worries of getting the army involved in this. Bezalel Smotrich, minister of finance and defense minister for the West Bank, extolled the memory of the 220 or so soldiers who had died in Gaza, particularly those from religious Zionist backgrounds, who are heavily involved in the combat units and are paying a heavy price.

You have 25% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.