A Red Heifer Is the Secret to Understanding the Israel-Hamas War
Art by Tanzanian Wojak
This is a holy war, not a geopolitical conflict.
Editor’s Note: Just like everything else on this site, the purpose of this article is not to convince you of a partisan side, but to provide important and largely unreported information. The sources used in our research range from Al Jazeera to Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper to the websites of ultra-religious Messianic Jewish groups.
On October 7, Hamas militants launched the most brutal attack on Israel in our lifetimes, “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.” We’ve heard and seen the many grisly details: women and children kidnapped, families gunned down and taken hostage, bodies burned and mutilated. What has gone curiously unreported in Western media—what is strangely missing from Wikipedia entries about the conflict—is why the invasion happened when it did. The average observer either views the attacks as unprovoked terror or a justified response to the totality of the Israeli system. The real reason, the hidden war, might just blow your mind.
The first clue is the name of the Hamas invasion, “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.” The Al-Aqsa mosque compound sits on a very famous hill known as the Temple Mount. For Jews, this is the holiest site in the world; it is the location of the First Temple, built by King Solomon some 3,000 years ago, the Second Temple, and what would be the future Third Temple. For Muslims, the Al-Aqsa mosque compound is the third-holiest site in the world, containing the Al-Aqsa Mosque itself and the the oldest-standing Islamic structure in the world, the Dome of the Rock, built from 688-692 AD.
Although Israel has controlled Jerusalem since 1967, the Temple Mount is administered by the Jordanian-appointed Jerusalem Waqf and Al-Aqsa Mosque Affairs Department, with Israel controlling the gates of entry. The Waqf permits Jews to visit the Al-Aqsa mosque compound as tourists, not to worship—an act that would be considered sacrilegious to the Islamic world. Nonetheless, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel forbids all visitation to the Temple Mount due to the “impure” nature of the site, a decision the vast majority of Israelis respect.
In the last few years, this arrangement has disintegrated into a bloody mess. Fringe, ultra-religious Jewish groups have been encouraging their followers to pray openly at the Temple Mount. In 2019, at the end of the month of Ramadan, hundreds of Jewish ultra-nationalists entered the Al-Aqsa mosque compound to celebrate Jerusalem Day—the first time the Israeli authorities had allowed them to do this in 30 years. The mosque’s director bitterly complained that Israeli authorities had broken a promise not to enter during the final days of Ramadan.
In April 2022, six members of a Jewish extremist group were arrested for planning to sacrifice a goat on the Temple Mount during Passover. In April 2023, amid rumors on social media of Jews heading to the Temple Mount to perform an animal sacrifice, Palestinian rioters illegally barricaded themselves inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque. In response, Israeli police entered the compound and raided the mosque, firing rubber bullets and using stun grenades, arresting those inside. These scenes of stone-throwing Palestinians, Jewish zealots, and Israeli police in riot gear are now familiar at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound. Rocket attacks from Hamas have duly followed each incident, along with Palestinian chants in the street: “In spirit and in blood, we will redeem Al-Aqsa.”
Israeli police clashing with Palestinian Muslims in front of the Dome of the Rock in May 2021.
Days before the recent attacks, the situation had escalated to a critical point. On October 1, thousands of ultra-religious Jews began to carry out religious, apparently “provocative” tours of the mosque complex. On October 4, Al Jazeera reported that a group of them forced their way into the compound to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. They were protected by Israeli police, who temporarily barred the holy site to many Muslims and mosque employees. For some Muslims, being denied access to Al-Aqsa was the straw that broke the camel’s back; Egypt claims it warned Israel to expect retaliation. Just three days later, Hamas initiated “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.”
A few questions arise: After decades of permitting Muslim control of the site, why are thousands of ultra-religious Israeli Jews suddenly intent on reclaiming the Temple Mount as a place of worship? And why did Hamas name Al-Aqsa as their cassus belli (“occasion for war”), neglecting the security of their own people and instead provoking an all-out, existential war with Israel?
The reason is both hidden and obvious. It boils down to a red heifer.
The Secret of the Red Heifer
Last month, in September, a shadowy but powerful group known as the Temple Institute announced that the “first red heifer in 2,000 years” had been born in Israel. This wasn’t their first red heifer—in September 2022, The Jerusalem Post reported that the institute paid over $250,000 to fly five perfectly red, unblemished heifers from a Christian rancher in Texas to the land of Israel.
Why the red heifer? The Temple Institute believes that this rare, unassuming creature is no less than the key to the fabled Third Temple. After the Romans obliterated the Second Temple in 70 AD, Jews spread far and wide across the Earth. Yet they never forgot Zion and their sacred temple—three times a day, all observant Jews pray “May the Holy Temple be rebuilt speedily and in our day.” Most Jews do not believe in building the Third Temple themselves; instead, they believe that God or the Messiah will rebuild the Third Temple when the time is right.
However, a group of Israeli hardliners have taken action into their own hands. The Temple Institute and the Temple Mount Faithful are just two of the extremist ultra-Orthodox organizations whose primary mission is to rebuild the Third Temple in Jerusalem. They have built close ties with, and receive financial assistance from, Christian fundamentalist groups in the United States, who believe a Third Jewish Temple will herald the return of Jesus to Earth and the subsequent Rapture. This influential but subterranean belief helps explain, in part, the United States’ warm relationship with Israel.
Today, most of the requirements to build the Third Temple are complete. In 1948, the Jewish nation was prophetically reborn, and in 1967, Jerusalem once again became a Jewish city. The Temple Institute has formally trained over 500 young Jewish men, directly descended from the tribe of Levi, as Temple Priests, going so far as to have already sown their priestly garments and selected their sacred vessels. The institute boasts it has created a “Temple-in-waiting,” even preparing operational blueprints that conform with modern architectural standards. However, there is one last ingredient needed: the ashes of a red heifer.
Four Temple Priests practicing their rites in the Temple Institute.
These ashes are essential for the Temple Priests to carry out their work, purifying them after touching corpses. The reason why God commanded the use of “a red heifer without defect or blemish and that has never been under a yoke” (Numbers 19:1—2) is unclear. Some believe it’s connected to the sin of the Golden Calf, others accept it’s a divine mystery behind our comprehension. But the qualifications for the heifer are precise. According to the Jewish Mishnah, the presence of even two black hairs invalidates a red heifer. The heifer must also be 100% free from any internal or external blemish, never worked a day in its life, and be at least three or four years old. Such a perfect creature is so elusive that the Mishnah says its ceremonial burning has only happened nine times in Jewish history. The sage Maimonides believed that the tenth animal would only be found and sacrificed when the Messiah was ready to appear.
So, when it was announced last month that a perfectly unblemished red heifer had been born in Israel, it caused great excitement in ultra-religious circles. Even academics have joined in on the craze—in 2019, Professor Zohar Amar from Bar Ilan University developed computational models that determined how many Jews could be purified from one burnt red heifer, finding the number to be 660 billion.
Next year, the red heifers from Texas will finally be of ripe age to sacrifice. The Biblical nonprofit that helped procure them, Boneh Israel, hopes they will be sacrificed in Passover 2024—thus marking the last element needed for Temple worship.
There’s just one rather obvious problem.
“Al-Aqsa Is In Danger”
Building the Third Temple is impossible without the demolition of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock.
Before you accuse me of superimposing fears onto a populace, keep in mind that the Third Temple looms large in Hamas’ mind. In fact, “Al-Aqsa is in danger” (Arabic: الأقصى في خطر) is a popular political slogan used to oppose efforts by Jewish hardliners to take over the Temple Mount. Between 1996 and 2015, the annual “Al-Aqsa in Danger Festival” was the most-attended Islamic festival in Israel. Hamas itself directly responded to the five red heifers landing in Israel last year, warning their followers that Jewish animal sacrifice on the Temple Mount would soon follow. In August of this year, the Islamic Middle East Monitor stated that “Israel’s red cow will blow up the region”: “Israel will now use this red cow–if one of them is deemed blemish free–to impose new facts on the ground in occupied Jerusalem,” the author said.
A video from the Facebook of ultra-religious group Shalom Jerusalem in May 2022, as they prepared their group to enter the Al-Aqsa mosque compound on Jerusalem Day: “There is nothing that expresses Jewish sovereignty…better than the Temple Mount.”
The humanitarian situations in Gaza and the West Bank no doubt contributed to Hamas’ reason for war. But Hamas, via actions like digging up its own water pipes to build rockets to fire against Israel, proudly demonstrates that it cares less for the safety and governance of its own people and more for the punishment of Israel. To fundamentalists like Hamas, Jews and Zionism represent no less than the Dajjal (comparable to the Antichrist in Christianity).
Is it possible Hamas fighters genuinely believe they are fighting to save the Dome of the Rock from the jaws of their version of the Antichrist? Is it possible that an extremists minority of Israelis are actively working to undermine the third-holiest site in Islam in order to erect the Holy of Holies? There is overwhelming proof for both, beginning with the name of Hamas’ invasion of Israel, “The Flood (or Deluge) of Al-Aqsa.”
The Eschatological Dimension
If the events at the Temple Mount are not the sole motivation for war, they are certainly the spark for the flame. With the increasing escalations on the Temple Mount, and the red heifers having arrived in Israel, religious elements from both sides view this is a now-or-never situation.
This is not a war of geopolitics, like Russia and Ukraine. This is a holy war, fought between the most extreme, militant elements of two ethnoreligious groups, to either cause or prevent the End of the World.
That’s not to say that the majority of Israelis or even Palestinians want to fight this war. 99% of Israelis would consider the Temple Institute to be on the fringes of Orthodox Jewry and do not resonate with its practices. 99% of Israelis also don’t spend their weekends going to the Temple Mount, either religiously vandalizing Al-Aqsa or gloriously reclaiming the site for God, depending on your point of view. But the few that do anger the hardline segments of the Muslim world, especially Palestinian Muslims, who respond with terrorism and rockets. This is a war escalated between the most religious, extremist segments of both societies, while innocent civilians, women, and children are forced to suffer.
That this conflict has the character of a holy war is necessary to understand it. It cannot be solved through military means—piecemeal destruction of Hamas is possible, but will annihilate so many Palestinian civilians that it will drag Israel into the abyss. It cannot be solved through political means—a two-state solution does not work when the charter of Hamas calls for the direct annihilation of Israel. Ultimately, whether now or in the future, it can and will only be solved through religious means, which shape world civilization forever.
Does The Temple Mount, and Israel by extension, belong to the group which owned it first (Jews)? Does The Temple Mount belong to the group which controls it now (Muslims)? Or does it go to which group can take it by force (has been the case historically)? Most importantly, to which group will God give it?
We will find out in the near future.
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