For over two and a half years, Israel has been fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously — Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran itself. The Islamic Republic has fired hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israeli cities. Hezbollah rained rockets on the North. Hamas murdered over twelve hundred people on a single Shabbat morning. The stated goal of all these forces is not complicated: they want Israel gone. Not modified, not pressured — eliminated.
This is not a territorial dispute. It never was.
The Torah portion of Acharei Mot, read this week, makes an argument that cuts to the heart of what this war is really about. In chapter 18, after enumerating a series of moral prohibitions, the Torah offers an explanation for why the Canaanites were expelled from the Land of Israel. God did not drive out the Canaanites because they were the wrong nationality or because the Jewish people needed their real estate. He drove them out because they defiled the Land itself.
The Torah’s choice of metaphor is deliberately visceral. The Land doesn’t simply change ownership — it vomits. It rejects. It expels. And the Torah immediately warns the Jewish people: you are not immune. Exile is always possible — but unlike the Canaanites, Israel’s bond with the Land can never be permanently broken. The covenant endures.
Why does the Land respond this way? What makes it different from every other piece of real estate on earth?
The Land of Israel is not simply the Jewish homeland in the way that France is the French homeland or Japan is the Japanese homeland. It is the platform from which God’s moral vision was meant to radiate to the entire world. God chose a specific people, gave them a specific Land, and commanded them to build there a civilization that would serve as a light unto the nations — demonstrating what human society looks like when ordered around divine truth rather than raw power.
This is why Israel’s enemies are not simply attacking a nation. They are attacking a mission.
Over the past century, as millions of Jews returned to their ancient homeland, something remarkable happened among the nations of the world. Christians who had never set foot in Israel began standing with the Jewish people with a passion that baffled most Israeli Jews. They gave money, lobbied governments, and prayed for Israel’s security with a fervor that sometimes exceeded that of diaspora Jews themselves. The United States went to war alongside Israel against Iran.
None of this happened by accident.
Whether they could articulate it or not, they grasped something that the Torah makes explicit: what happens in the Land of Israel is not Israel’s private affair. The moral clarity that the Land was designed to produce — the knowledge of God, the demonstration that justice and truth can govern a nation — belongs to the whole world. When forces of barbarism, terror, and nihilism attempt to overrun that Land, they are not only threatening Jews. They are threatening the world’s access to its own moral compass.
This is the vision that Rabbi Tuly Weisz calls Universal Zionism. The Jewish people were given the Land of Israel not to keep its blessings to themselves, but to share them. Nations that align themselves with that mission become partners in it. As God promised Abraham at the very beginning of the Jewish story, “I will bless those who bless you” (Genesis 12:3). The nations standing with Israel today are claiming that blessing.
The forces that seek to destroy Israel are not just on the wrong side of a political conflict. They are trying to prevent Israel from fulfilling the very mission the Torah describes — to be a light unto the nations from this specific Land. That has never ended well for anyone.
The Land of Israel has been outlasting its enemies since the days of the Canaanites. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Ottomans — each in their time believed they had put an end to the Jewish story. Each was wrong.
Hamas will be no different. Neither will Hezbollah. Neither will Iran.
The Land has its own answer for those who oppose it. The Torah told us so three thousand years ago.
