The Blogs: Religious Zionism’s dangerous euphoria | Elchanan Poupko

A religious Zionist commentator warns that his own community is dangerously disconnected from reality, living in an engineered euphoria that ignores Israel's severe challenges. He cites specific examples: ignoring mass emigration, dismissing international sanctions, overlooking settler violence, and believing in unrealistic solutions like Palestinian mass migration. The piece argues this disconnect, enabled by closed-community dynamics, has already caused incalculable harm and threatens Israel's future.

In a guest blog post, religious Zionist commentator Elchanan Poupko warns that his own community is living in a dangerously engineered euphoria that disconnects them from reality. He describes meeting an Israeli family on vacation who assured him that media coverage of Israel is misleading, but argues the opposite: the community is blind to severe challenges. Poupko cites specific examples: almost 300,000 Israelis have left in the past four years since the current government was elected; international sanctions are dismissed as meaningless; videos of hilltop youth violence and harassment of Christians in Jerusalem are ignored; and unrealistic beliefs persist that five million Palestinians will voluntarily leave Gaza and the West Bank. He draws a parallel to the pre-Second Temple destruction era, quoting Maimonides on how disconnection from reality led to disaster. The piece criticizes the community's disregard for the US-Israel alliance, Diaspora Jewry, and European opinion, and notes that two religious Zionist parties now run on a platform of Palestinian mass migration. Poupko contrasts this with the community's intellectual heritage from figures like Rabbi Kook and Rabbi Soloveitchik, which he says is being replaced by a "cowboy fantasy" culture.