"The end of days."

Wars of Gog and Magog.

But where is the Messiah? The Vision of Ezekiel. Francisco Collantes, 1630. (Wikimedia Commons.)

24 AUGUST—Orit Malka Strook serves in the Netanyahu government as minister of settlements and national missions. She has a seat in the Knesset representing the National Religious Party–Religious Zionism, a political amalgam formed last year when the Religious Zionism party merged with the Jewish Home party, which was itself a merger of three Zionist-extremist parties. Orit Malka Strook’s political journey, this is to say, began on the far right and has proceeded to the far, far, far right of the Israeli constellation.

Orit Malka Strook was born in 1960 and is the product of a rigorous education in Israel’s most rigorously Zionist yeshivas. After she married in her late teens or very early twenties—the date is not clear in her publicly available biographies—Orit Malka Strook and her husband, a rabbinical student, moved to a Jewish settlement on the Sinai Peninsula. When Israel handed the Sinai back to Egypt in 1982, the outcome of the Camp David Accords President Carter negotiated four years earlier, Strook and her spouse moved to a Jewish settlement in Hebron.

To give an idea of Orit Malka Strook’s politics in practice, one of her sons was convicted 17 years ago of violently attacking a young Palestinian in Hebron and spent two and a half years in prison for his offense. We can infer with some confidence this must have been an especially vicious incident, as settlers’ attacks on Palestinians have been absolutely routine in the West Bank for many years. Orit Malka Strook was horrified at her son’s criminal conviction, because the court accepted the word of Palestinians over the word of a Jew—so furthering the Palestinian cause, as she saw it, over the cause of the settlers, the Zionist cause.

Let us set aside the thought that Israel should have no such thing as a minister of settlements given they are all illegal, as the International Court of Justice has at last ruled. Straight to my point, Orit Malka Strook, who still resides in Hebron, has lately taken to asserting that Israel is now “living through a miraculous time,” as Amit Varshizky put it in a very important piece in Haaretz earlier this month. Orit Malka Strook sees the Israeli assault on the Palestinian of Gaza as—from the Haaretz piece—“the birth pangs of the Messiah and the advent of redemption.”

The war in Gaza is not a war, of course, but to Orit Malka Strook it is the apocalyptic war God’s chosen wage against Gog and Magog, the evil forces described in Ezekiel and then Revelations. These are the end-days, in Orit Malka Strook’s cosmology.

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