It was meant to be a delivery day.

On October 13, 2025, surviving Hamas captives in Israel returned to their families and the Knesset became a scene of triumph.

But as US President Donald Trump proclaimed “eternal peace” and was hailed as a savior, the moment revealed not peace, but prophecy.

Beneath the veneer of self-indulgence and collective amnesiac joy lies a choreography ofAmerican complicity dressed in diplomacy. In that dramatic and fateful act, Israel exposed the latent code destined to order its downfall, unless it dares to rewrite itself from the core out.

He “actual intelligence report”

The key to Israel’s destiny was hidden in some 30,000 words of pyrrhic victory speeches in the Knesset: a truth so deeply buried that almost no one noticed.

When Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid solemnly declared: “The true intelligence report on Israel’s intentions is found in the Book of Genesis: ‘And I will give to you and your descendants after you the land of Canaan, for an eternal possession.’” He was not simply quoting Scripture; he was revealing the moral software that drives the hardware of Israeli politics.

Behind the diplomatic language of security, deterrence and ceasefire lies a much older operating system: the belief that Israel’s identity and legitimacy are based on a divine, territorially grounded covenant rather than a civic contract.

From that point of view, Lapid’s comment seems less rhetoric than revealing political theology: the most revealing “intelligence report” and the most important conclusion, from the contest on October 13, 2025.

The sign is manifest: for Israel, the Scriptures have crossed the border from metaphor to command; faith has hardened until it has become the fortress of ideology; and the poetry of promise has become the prose of power: its beauty has not diminished, its cost continues to accumulate through generations.

The agreed grammar of power

Genesis 17:8, the decisive clue in Lapid’s speech, records God’s promise to Abraham of the land of Canaan as a “eternal possession.” Throughout centuries of exile, that verse functioned as a letter of hope and return, not conquest. In modern Israel, however, it has acquired the weight of a political right.

When even Lapid – a senior Israeli leader who presents himself not as a religious fanatic but as a centrist secularist – rises in parliament during the war to invoke this biblical promise, the message resonates louder than the bombings: Israel’s territorial rights are based on Scripture, not international law or diplomatic agreements.

That idea has resonated throughout history, producing triumph and tragedy, renewal and ruin alike. From Joshua’s conquest of Jericho to the Babylonian exile and the restoration of the Second Temple, biblical history oscillates between divine gift and divine punishment.

By its very nature, the covenant has never been a blank check for expansion, but has always been a conditional trust: the land is granted only to a people faithful and steadfast in justice. The prophets warned that possessing the inheritance without righteousness would cause the earth itself to sink. “vomit” its inhabitants (Leviticus 18:25). Christianity later recast the geographical promise as an allegory of redemption.

The elastic boundaries of promise

No map has ever contained the Promised Land. As a theological ideal, it transcends the historical boundaries of Canaan – the inhabited region central to Israelite memory – and embodies a broader spiritual and moral vision that goes beyond the territory.

Its shifting borders, reconceived several times in the Bible, reveal not a divine cartography, but a moral geography: a map that expands or contracts with Israel’s faith and justice.

Throughout Genesis, Numbers, and Ezekiel, the borders of the Promised Land evolved from a mythical ideal to a legal reality and prophetic hope, reflecting Israel’s changing conscience and moral vision through vocation, law, and redemption.

In Genesis 15:18, the covenant is executed “from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates” – a stretch that encompasses areas that today lie within Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.

Numbers 34:1-12 draws a smaller rectangle around Canaan proper: roughly modern Israel and the West Bank.

Ezekiel 47:13–20 extends the borders again, stretching from the Mediterranean eastward past Damascus and south into the Negev, the desert region beyond the Dead Sea.

After the Second Temple was destroyed in AD 70 and the Jews were scattered into the diaspora, the Promised Land moved from map to memory, from territory to testimony, a potent symbol of moral order more than the perimeter of a kingdom.

Modern political Zionism once again translated that symbol into geography, and geography into sovereignty, transforming scriptural poetry into territorial possession.

The dangers of mythical rights

When myth is inscribed on a map, the act is rarely innocent. Merged with state power, mythical narratives cease to be metaphorical; They harden until they become ideology. What began as sacred cartography ends as political pathology.

The classic Athenian myth of being indigenous—born of their own soil—turned origin into law, transforming a poetic self-image into a unifying political argument for purity and dominion. He justified his supremacy over other Greeks, in the same way that origin stories elsewhere have turned spiritual belonging into territorial claims.

Lapid’s “real intelligence report” It also remembers other historical fusions of national destiny and territorial expansion.

In my fight – that grim catechism of myth and power – proclaimed Adolf Hitler,

“Nature knows no political boundaries. She first places living beings on this globe and observes the free play of forces. He who is stronger in courage and industriousness is granted, like his dearest son, the master’s right to existence.” (Chapter 4)

Unsurprisingly, in the Führer’s mind, the laurels of nature could only belong to the “Aryan race.”

However, what is really significant is this: when the high priest of blood and soil wrote this important passage in his Landsberg prison cell, he was not yet giving orders; he was constructing a myth of racial destiny that would later justify military conquest.

Many will rush to affirm that the moral abyss between the National Socialist myth and the biblical covenant is, literally, of cosmic dimension: one, it will be said, deifies ethnic Darwinism, elevating nature as the arbiter of life; the other demands moral justice based on divine will.

It is true: their kinship lies more in structure than in substance: both narratives, although inert, encode a deterministic and transfigurative logic, which invites myth to harden into necessity and memory into destiny. History, in the end, teaches that once politics is written into the grammar of destiny, realism is eclipsed by extremism and compromise becomes heresy.

Canaan Redux: why peace fails under a co-opted pact

Since Israel’s last coup “intelligence report” presented as a promise of eternal territorial possession, any peace with the Palestinians can only be tactical, never definitive.

The ceasefire in Gaza – part of the twenty-point American peace plan, presented at the White House on September 29, 2025 and later exalted in the Knesset as the supposed supreme triumph of diplomacy – was, therefore, doomed from the beginning: the logic of the pact’s permanence strictly prohibits the permanent division of the entrusted land.

The crux of the matter is what I will call “The Neo-Canaanite Question”: What will become of those who now inhabit the Promised Land in its changing borders?

For Palestinians, Israel’s theology translates into perpetual insecurity: if the land is divinely ceded—destined to be possessed by Israel as a kingdom consecrated to God—its presence remains provisional. Every Israeli attack proclaimed as “retaliation”each raid, each demolished house becomes one more note in an endless “sacred” history. Beyond Palestine, across the imagined expanse of “Great Israel” Other nations also hold their breath, not knowing how far the sacred mandate can still extend.

The lesson is eternal: true peace cannot flourish in a landscape shaped by mythical rights. The treacherous and incendiary search for what could be called “Canaan 2.0” the ancient promise rebooted as modern geopolitics, is destined to revive the perennialspiral of violence throughout the Middle East. That impulse for a pact seals the joy of Israel’s Knesset – a performance of peace that veils the logic of the prophecy – like the pyrrhic victory of a conqueror.

[To be continued]