Yakov M. Rabkin Informed Comment
“Every day I check my mailbox, but I have not found a letter from the Almighty confirming it.” That was Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s reply when I asked whether he considered the Zionist state “the beginning of the flowering of our Redemption.” The phrase ‘reshit tsmiḥat geʼulatenu’ appears in the prayer for the State of Israel, composed in 1948 and recited in many synagogues around the world. Of course, quite a few congregations—mostly Haredi (or ultra-Orthodox)—refuse to recite it, precisely because it imbues the Zionist project with a messianic dimension.
Our conversation took place in the professor’s modest home on Usishkin Street in Jerusalem. His study desk was crowded with piles of scholarly journals. When I spotted the Soviet journal ‘Voprosy filosofii’ (Problems of Philosophy), I realized he knew Russian, and we continued talking in my native language—which he, too, had learned as a child in Riga, then part of the Russian Empire. We shared several interests, including the history of science, which I then taught at the Université de Montréal. Moreover, we had both begun our academic lives as chemistry students. His weekly Torah commentaries on Israeli radio and sharp public critiques of Israeli society made him well known far beyond academic circles.
Professor Leibowitz was raised as an Orthodox Jew and remained one throughout his life. I had become observant barely a decade earlier and was drawn to this brilliant polymath—a deeply committed Judaic scholar and a fearless critic of oppression and injustice. I was eager to understand his views on science, Judaism, and Zionism.
In his youth, Leibowitz identified with religious Zionism in its early form, well before the onset of messianic militancy after the June 1967 war. He became a principled opponent of the occupation and settlement of the Palestinian territories that Israel conquered in that war. Leibowitz viewed social justice as an integral part of Judaism. After his immigration to Palestine in 1934, he became active in Haoved Hadati, which fused Orthodox religious practice with socialist labour values. It turned into a political party (Hapoalim Hadatiim) and even ran in the first Knesset elections of 1949, failing to secure a single seat. This showed that Leibowitz, ever a principled intellectual committed to justice, had no place in organized politics, “the art of the possible.” Fiercely independent, he found himself isolated from the Israeli mainstream.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz Tribute Page
He mocked the institution of the Chief Rabbinate by calling it ‘datikan’—a pun on ‘dati’ (religious) and the Vatican. His sarcasm did not spare even the Western Wall, often revered as Judaism’s holiest site. When the government turned it into a site of political pilgrimage for foreign dignitaries, Leibowitz dubbed it ‘discotel’—a fusion of ‘kotel’ (the Hebrew word for the Wall) and ‘discotheque.’ When he was awarded the Israel Prize in 1993, the then prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, refused to attend the ceremony.
What drew me most to Professor Leibowitz was his strict loyalty to monotheism, intellectual honesty, and courage. He never flinched from calling a spade a spade, even when doing so was deeply unpopular or even blasphemous in many people’s eyes. Leibowitz saw that the sacralisation of the state and the army led to fascism and provoked a firestorm when he coined the term “Judeo-Nazis.”
Beginning with the Qibya massacre in 1953—directed by Ariel Sharon, in which most of the victims were women and children—he fiercely criticized Israel’s repeated military atrocities against Palestinians. As early as 1956, he argued that Israel’s violence exonerated the Nazis, who also claimed they were “just following orders.” It was particularly audacious to insist on comparing the Israeli military, which boasted of being “the most moral army,” with the followers of National Socialism. In a 1991 speech in Haifa, he declared: “A Nazi-like mentality also exists in our country. That is a fact.”
True, Leibowitz was not the first to diagnose fascism in Zionism. In 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and other preeminent Jewish thinkers publicly condemned right-wing Zionism as fascist. The steady drift of Israeli society to the right suggests that all political Zionism contains seeds of fascism, which may take time to sprout. This is how the ideas of Meir Kahane, barred from elections to the Knesset as racist in 1988, have now become mainstream. These ideas are embodied in the ongoing Israeli operations in Gaza, determined to be genocide by Amnesty International, a UN commission, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and the majority of international genocide scholars. They are also embodied in the settlers’ relentless attacks on the West Bank—a violent campaign of pogroms to drive out the local Palestinian population in order to make Israel—Greater Israel—“purely Jewish.” While the Israeli army has carried out the genocide in Gaza with sophisticated weapons, including AI, the enthusiastic adherents of National Judaism (dati leumi) operate with stones, torches, explosives, and machine guns.
By 2025, one could read in the Israeli daily Haaretz the conclusion of Gideon Levy, a veteran Israeli journalist: “It is no longer possible to be a Zionist and not a fascist.”
In September 2025, Orly Noy, the editor of Siha Mekomit (Local Call), another Israeli news outlet, came to the same conclusion:
Photo by Mohammed Abubakr: https://www.pexels.com/photo/pro-palestinian-demonstration-in-a-city-19490608/
The Gaza holocaust was made possible by the embrace of the ethno-supremacist logic inherent to Zionism. Therefore, it must be said clearly: Zionism, in all its forms, cannot be cleansed of the stain of this crime. It must be brought to an end.
Denazification will be long and all-encompassing, touching every aspect of our collective life. We will likely sacrifice more generations—both victims and perpetrators—before this scourge is fully uprooted. But the process must begin now, with the refusal to commit the horrors taking place daily in Gaza, and the refusal to let them pass as normal. Only two paths remain: either a Jewish, messianic, genocidal state, or a truly democratic state for all its citizens.
Leibowitz expected the Zionist state to abide by the moral principles of Judaism and was bitterly disappointed that it did not. Few people saw the early seeds of fascism at the time, and even fewer dared to expose them publicly.
Leibowitz died forty-two years ago, on August 18 (Ellul 11), 1994. History has proven him right.
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