God's War
How Netanyahu's Amalek Doctrine Captured the American Military Machine
The school was called Shajareh Tayyebeh. The Good Tree. It was painted with pink flowers and green leaves on its exterior walls, a two-storey building in the southern Iranian city of Minab where girls aged seven to twelve arrived on the morning of February 28, 2026, the first day of their school week. The US-Israeli strikes on Iran had begun hours earlier. Parents received panicked calls and text messages. Get here. Come now. There was not enough time. A Tomahawk cruise missile, manufactured by Raytheon and held by no other participant in this conflict, struck the school at 10:45 in the morning. The roof collapsed on the children. According to Iranian authorities, 165 people were killed, most of them schoolgirls. Iranian state media put the figure at 180. Bellingcat and BBC Verify geolocated footage of the missile striking the area. Eight munitions experts confirmed to the Washington Post that it was a Tomahawk. US Central Command, according to CNN’s reporting, used target coordinates derived from intelligence that had not been updated since 2013, a year when the building was still part of an IRGC compound. By 2016, a fence had separated the school from the base. By 2017, a football pitch had been marked out in the school courtyard. The satellite imagery was there. No one looked.
The morning the school burned, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood at the site of an Iranian missile strike in Beit Shemesh and told assembled reporters: “We read in this week’s Torah portion, ‘Remember what Amalek did to you.’ We remember, and we act.”
It was not the first time.
THE DOCTRINE
On October 13, 2023, at the swearing-in of Israel’s emergency unity government, eleven days after the Hamas attacks, Netanyahu invoked the same ancient command. “Today, against the enemy, with the ancient command ‘Remember what Amalek did to you’ ringing in our ears, today we are uniting forces in order to ensure the eternity of Israel.” Two weeks later, as the ground invasion of Gaza began, he told IDF soldiers directly: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.”
The biblical source he was drawing from is not ambiguous. First Samuel 15:3 contains the divine instruction given to Saul: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” The Amalekites, identified in the Hebrew Bible as the persistent archenemy of the Israelites, were not merely to be defeated. They were to be erased without remainder, without mercy for age or sex or civilian status. The commandment is not a battlefield directive. It is an instruction in annihilation.
Netanyahu’s Prime Minister’s Office responded to the international outcry by calling the charges “absurdities” and pointing out that the same phrase appears on a banner at Yad Vashem. The comparison was technically accurate and substantively dishonest. A commemorative inscription at a Holocaust museum operates in the register of grief and historical memory. A head of government quoting the same words to soldiers boarding armoured vehicles for a ground invasion of a civilian population operates in a different register entirely. Genocide Watch was direct: the invocation of the divine mandate of Amalek by Israel’s president constitutes evidence of genocidal intent. Scholars including Raz Segal, Mark Levene, and Luigi Daniele documented the accelerating genocidal rhetoric in Israeli public discourse across the Gaza war. South Africa cited Netanyahu’s Amalek invocations before the International Court of Justice. The ICJ’s January 2024 preliminary ruling found South Africa’s claims “plausible” and ordered Israel to take all measures to prevent acts of genocide. Israel and the United States rejected the ruling.
The language did not stop. Finance Minister Smotrich told supporters: “Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat — total annihilation. ‘Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.’” The Israeli newspaper Haaretz described his comments as a call to genocide. Knesset member Tally Gotliv of Likud called for nuclear weapons against Gaza and posted: “Wipe out the memory of Amalek.” By December 2025, at least 70,117 people had been killed in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, around half of them women and children, according to available documentation. The Gaza war produced more child amputees per capita than any conflict on record.
Then the war moved to Iran.
THE EXPANSION
Operation Epic Fury launched on February 28, 2026, the eve of Purim, the Jewish festival commemorating the survival of Jews in ancient Persia as told in the Book of Esther. Reporting from Drop Site News indicated the start date was decided weeks in advance. Netanyahu’s government seized on the religious significance. Israeli commentators and officials had long referred to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as a modern-day Haman, the scheming Persian vizier in the Book of Esther who sought to exterminate the Jewish people. Khamenei was killed in a US-Israeli strike on March 1, 2026.
When Netanyahu stood in Beit Shemesh on March 2 and again invoked Amalek in direct reference to Iran, the interpretive question that might have applied in October 2023 — was this rhetorical flourish or operational instruction — had been answered by two and a half years of documented conduct. The Nation noted that Netanyahu’s defense minister, Israel Katz, had declared in 2025 that the “residents of Tehran will pay the price, and soon.” As the Iran campaign opened, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right minister with direct roots in the Kahane movement and its history of invoking Amalek to justify killing Palestinians, posted on X: “Blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven; you shall not forget!” Ben-Gvir made no distinction between the Iranian government and Iranian civilians. The doctrine of collective punishment, which produced the Gaza siege and the starvation of two million people, had found its new theatre of application.
By the time Al Jazeera’s 12-day war assessment was published, at least 1,255 people had been killed in Iran, including 200 children and 11 healthcare workers. Multiple hospitals, cultural heritage sites, and civilian infrastructure had been struck. The first 100 hours of Operation Epic Fury cost the United States approximately $3.7 billion, mostly unbudgeted, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Hegseth told the press on March 3 that the operation would have “no stupid rules of engagement.” The following day he described US operations in Iran as producing “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” Senator Elizabeth Warren subsequently wrote to Hegseth demanding to know at what command level authorization for the Minab school strike had been granted, and whether artificial intelligence tools had been used in target selection.
THE MERGER
What Netanyahu provides is the theological frame. What the United States provides is the machinery.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation began receiving complaints from US service members on the morning of February 28, the same morning the strikes began. By the evening of March 2, the Foundation had logged more than 110 complaints from members across every branch of the military. The number exceeded 200 within days, drawn from more than 50 installations. A non-commissioned officer filed a complaint on behalf of 15 troops, including 11 Christians, one Muslim, and one Jewish service member. According to the complaint, their commander opened a combat readiness briefing by invoking the Book of Revelation and informing the unit that President Donald Trump “has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” Other complaints described commanders speaking of a “biblically sanctioned” war tied to the Christian end times. One commander, according to a complaint reviewed by The Guardian, told officers the war was “all part of God’s divine plan.”
These complaints did not emerge from a vacuum. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth introduced monthly Christian prayer services at the Pentagon in May 2025. His featured guest in February 2026 was Doug Wilson, a far-right evangelical pastor who has defended slavery, opposed women’s suffrage, and proposed the United States become a theocracy. Hegseth told the National Prayer Breakfast: “America was founded as a Christian nation. It remains a Christian nation in our DNA if we can keep it.” Tattooed across his chest is the Jerusalem Cross, the emblem of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem after 1099. At the Pentagon press conference on March 2, 2026, Hegseth declared “May Almighty God watch over you and his providential arms of protection extend over you.” He described Iran’s government as operating under “prophetic Islamic delusions.” CAIR noted that this formulation was an apparent reference to Shia eschatological belief and condemned it alongside Netanyahu’s Amalek invocations as holy war rhetoric deployed to justify mass civilian death.
Al Jazeera quoted Jolyon Mitchell, a professor at Durham University, on the function this language serves: theological framing is used to “justify action, mobilise political opinion, and leverage support.” It transforms a complicated regional confrontation, rooted in decades of Western policy, Israeli settlement expansion, and US-backed Gulf state consolidation, into a moral drama with a cosmological outcome. When war is framed as divine mandate, restraint becomes apostasy. Civilian death tolls become the cost of prophecy fulfillment. The laws of war are not violated; they are simply irrelevant to a mission that operates above law, inside scripture.
More than two dozen Democratic members of Congress, led by Representatives Jared Huffman, Jamie Raskin, and Chrissy Houlahan, wrote to the Department of Defense Inspector General demanding an investigation into whether Hegseth’s “extreme religious rhetoric has metastasized into segments of the military chain of command in ways that contravene constitutional protections.” The Pentagon did not directly respond to questions from Military.com about the complaints.
THE STRUCTURE
What is being described is not an aberration. It is the operational consequence of a political alignment that has been decades in construction and has now reached its logical terminus.
Netanyahu has spent the years since October 7 building an interpretive architecture in which every adversary, from Hamas to Hezbollah to Iran, is cast as Amalek, the enemy that God commanded be wiped from the earth without mercy for age, sex, or civilian status. The doctrine of collective punishment, which the international community formally prohibited and which Israeli officials have repeatedly applied, finds its theological justification in this framing. Every child who dies becomes a casualty of divine necessity. Every school that burns was adjacent to an enemy installation. Every blocked aid convoy was a security measure.
The United States has not resisted this framework. It has adopted it, decorated it with its own eschatology, and placed the most powerful military in human history in its service. Tariq Ali’s long-running argument about the US-Israel relationship bears repeating here: Washington does not function as a check on Israeli conduct; it functions as its guarantor, its arms supplier, its diplomatic shield at the Security Council, and now, apparently, its theological co-belligerent. The relationship is not one of ally and ally. It is one of strategic dependency in which the United States has progressively outsourced its Middle East policy calculus to the preferences of an Israeli government whose far-right components openly advocate ethnic cleansing and invoke a Bronze Age extermination mandate to justify it.
The Amalek doctrine has a documented use history outside Jewish tradition. Europeans quoted it against Native Americans. Hutus quoted it before the Rwandan genocide. Afrikaners and German colonial powers cited it against those who resisted occupation. The text was available for each of these uses because it contains what it contains: an unambiguous divine instruction to destroy a people in total, sparing nothing. Netanyahu’s office argued the reference was misunderstood. But Netanyahu has now applied the label of Amalek to Hamas, to Gazans, and to Iranians, in each case in the context of active military campaigns producing mass civilian casualties. The pattern is the argument.
On March 2, 2026, the same day Netanyahu stood in Beit Shemesh invoking Amalek and declared the US and Israel were acting “for the sake of all humanity,” US-supplied Tomahawk missiles were destroying a girls’ elementary school in Minab. The school had been separated from the adjacent military compound for a decade. The children inside were between seven and twelve years old. The United States had the satellite imagery to know it was a school. No one updated the target list.
According to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the Tomahawk missile that struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh school “conclusively” matched known imagery of US-manufactured munitions. Trump told reporters Iran also had Tomahawk missiles. Iran does not have Tomahawk missiles. The US is the only participant in this conflict that possesses them.
The invocation of Amalek does not explain the Minab strike. The targeting failure that produced it requires a separate investigation and a separate accountability. But Amalek explains the climate in which no one finds it necessary to answer for it. When your commander has told you this war is God’s plan, when the Secretary of Defense has told the troops that prayer has informed every decision in this campaign, when the Prime Minister of the country whose intelligence you share quoted a biblical commandment to annihilate an ancient enemy on the opening day of the campaign, the question of whether the children in that school were acceptable collateral damage answers itself differently than it should.
THE BLOODLINE DOCTRINE
There is a concept the international community spent the twentieth century trying to name, define, and prohibit. It emerged from the ruins of the Armenian massacres, the Holocaust, the Rwandan killing fields, and the Srebrenica execution pits. The Genocide Convention of 1948 defined it with clinical precision: acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. The drafters of that convention understood something essential. Genocide is not simply mass killing. It is killing directed at the continuation of a people. It targets not just the living but the unborn. It does not punish individuals. It terminates lineages.
The commandment Netanyahu has invoked, in three separate speeches, across three separate military campaigns, is not ambiguous on this point. First Samuel 15:3 does not instruct Saul to defeat Amalek militarily. It does not instruct him to disarm Amalek or displace Amalek’s leadership. It instructs him to kill men, women, infants, and sucklings. The suckling is the text’s own word. The infant at the breast. The future that has not yet developed the capacity to be guilty of anything. The command’s theological function is precisely to eliminate the argument of innocence. There are no innocents among Amalek. The category of innocent does not apply. The bloodline itself is the crime.
This is the doctrine that Netanyahu’s government has translated into operational practice across two and a half years of warfare, and what the record shows is not rhetorical excess. It is institutional application.
In Gaza, Israeli President Isaac Herzog asserted that there were no innocent civilians. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described the population as “human animals.” Knesset member Ariel Kallner called for a Nakba that would “overshadow the Nakba of 1948.” Tally Gotliv of Likud called for nuclear weapons against the territory and separately called for Gaza to “be erased and go up in flames.” Knesset member Yitzhak Kroizer stated there was “but one sentence” for the population, “and that is death.” Moshe Saada of Likud approvingly quoted an acquaintance who said everyone in Gaza should be killed. Zvi Sukkot observed in May 2025 that nearly 100 Gazans were killed in a single night and remarked that no one cared because everyone had gotten used to it. These are not fringe figures. These are members of the governing coalition. The statements were made publicly, in the Knesset, on social media, and in press interviews. Israel, as a signatory to the Genocide Convention, is legally obligated to prosecute incitement to genocide. It has prosecuted none of them.
The targeting is not random. It follows the logic of the bloodline doctrine with uncomfortable consistency. By December 2025, the documented death toll in Gaza had exceeded 70,000. Around half were women and children. Gaza produced more child amputees per capita than any conflict on record. Israel’s blockade contributed to confirmed famine, with projections showing 641,000 people facing catastrophic food insecurity by August 2025. The deliberate destruction of essential health services also targeted what the ICJ case described as the conditions necessary for Palestinian births. The suit named the prevention of births itself as a mechanism of genocide, which is precisely what Article II(d) of the Genocide Convention prohibits. South Africa’s lawyers did not need to invent this argument. The convention’s drafters put it there in 1948 because they had watched it happen and understood that destroying a people’s future required destroying its children before and after they were born.
Then the framework moved to Iran.
Israel Katz told residents of Tehran they would pay the price. Ben-Gvir posted the Amalek extermination commandment in reference to Iranians as a collective, with no differentiation between government and population. Netanyahu told reporters he and the United States were acting “for the sake of all humanity,” the oldest formulation of civilisational warfare: the destruction of the enemy is a gift to the world. Every genocide in the modern record has been announced in the language of human improvement. The Nazis described Jewish people as a contamination to be cleansed. The Hutu Power radio broadcasts described Tutsis as cockroaches. The architects of the Armenian massacres described the deportations as a security measure. The language of collective biological threat always precedes the action of collective biological elimination. It functions as both preparation and permission.
What the Amalek doctrine adds to this structure that is new, or rather very old, is the removal of the secular intermediary. Normally the dehumanisation has to construct its case through political or quasi-scientific language, through the architecture of threat and contamination. Amalek requires none of this construction. The case is already made in the text. The enemy is Amalek because they are Amalek, and Amalek must be blotted from the earth because God said so, which means the argument ends before it begins. There is no court, no convention, no international law, no humanitarian framework that can operate above the divine mandate. This is the doctrine’s function. It is not incidental theology added for colour. It is a mechanism for the pre-emptive invalidation of all accountability.
The children buried at Minab were between seven and twelve years old. Their school had been walled off from the adjacent military compound for a decade. The separation was visible from satellite imagery available to any party with a subscription to commercial satellite services, which the United States military certainly holds. None of this produced a change to the target list. If the bloodline doctrine means anything operationally, it means that the distinction between the military compound and the school on the other side of the wall is not a distinction that requires maintenance. Amalek is Amalek. The suckling is in the text.
The Genocide Convention was written in 1948 by people who had just finished counting the dead. They wrote it because they believed that naming the thing precisely enough would make it possible to prevent the next one. They were not naive about power. They were explicit that the convention applied to governments, not just non-state actors, and that the obligation to prevent and punish was universal and unconditional. Netanyahu’s government has now invoked a biblical extermination mandate against three consecutive populations. The United States government has blocked accountability mechanisms at the Security Council across multiple conflicts, rejected the ICJ’s preliminary findings, and is now co-executing a military campaign under the theological direction of a foreign head of government whose closest ministers post calls for the annihilation of entire peoples on social media.
The convention’s drafters gave this a name. The name has not changed.
WHAT AMERICA IS DOING TO ITSELF
Set aside, for a moment, the dead children in Minab. Set aside the 70,000 killed in Gaza. Set aside Iran. Consider only what the United States is.
The United States was founded by men who had watched their European antecedents slaughter each other across centuries of religiously justified warfare. The Thirty Years’ War, fought in the name of competing Christian confessions across Central Europe, killed between four and eight million people and depopulated entire regions. The English Civil War invoked scripture. The French Wars of Religion invoked scripture. The founders of the American republic looked at this history and made a deliberate institutional choice: the state would not take sides in theology. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. The principle was not incidental. It was foundational. It was inserted into the First Amendment before freedom of speech and before freedom of the press, because the architects of the republic understood that state-sanctioned theology was the precondition for all other forms of tyranny.
That republic is now waging a war in Iran in which its Secretary of Defense opens Pentagon prayer sessions and sends troops into the field with a theology about Armageddon and the return of Christ. Its military commanders brief combat units using the Book of Revelation as operational context. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which has tracked the creep of religious extremism inside the US armed forces for two decades, received more than 200 complaints in the first four days of this war alone. Twenty years of patient institutional infection, and the results are now visible: an American military that, across every branch, across more than 50 installations, contains a significant number of commanding officers who believe they are fighting a biblical war.
This is not a foreign policy failure. It is a constitutional one.
The founders explicitly prohibited the establishment of religion because they understood what happens when military power and theological conviction are merged: the mechanisms of restraint disappear. The laws of war, the Geneva Conventions, the distinction between combatant and civilian that underpins every framework of international humanitarian law, these are products of Enlightenment reason, of the painful historical lesson that unlimited war produces unlimited destruction. They are precisely the frameworks that dissolve when commanders tell their troops that the mission is divinely ordained, that they are instruments of Christ’s return, that the enemy is Amalek and Amalek must be blotted from the earth. Hegseth told the press on March 3 there would be “no stupid rules of engagement.” He did not need to explain what he meant. His commanders had already explained it to their troops in the language of prophecy.
Now layer on top of this what is genuinely without precedent: the United States military is not operating under its own theology. It is operating under someone else’s. Netanyahu is not an American official. He holds no commission in the US armed forces. He is accountable to no American constitutional principle, to no American voter, to no American court. He is the Prime Minister of Israel, a country with which the United States has no formal mutual defense treaty. And yet on the opening day of a war that American aircraft, American missiles, and American intelligence are prosecuting at a cost of $3.7 billion in the first 100 hours alone, it is Netanyahu who provides the theological framing, quoting a Bronze Age extermination mandate to the international press while American Tomahawks are already in the air.
The question this should produce in any American who still believes the republic means something is not complicated: who is commanding this war? The answer the evidence provides is: a foreign head of government whose cabinet ministers invoke a biblical mandate to destroy entire peoples, whose far-right coalition partners openly post calls for the annihilation of Amalek in reference to civilian populations, whose defense minister told residents of Tehran they would pay the price, and whose interpretation of ancient scripture has now been absorbed, decorated with Christian eschatology, and transmitted down the chain of command of the most powerful military on earth.
The Founders had a word for the subordination of republican government to foreign theological authority. They did not use it lightly. They had lived it under Crown and Church. They built the First Amendment, and Article VI’s prohibition on religious tests for office, and the entire apparatus of secular constitutional governance, to make sure their republic would never be subject to it again. The irony that the country which produced this architecture is now functionally running a war under a foreign government’s Bronze Age extermination theology, with its own Secretary of Defense providing the Christian Zionist overlay, is not lost on the service members who filed those complaints. It should not be lost on anyone else.
There is a line from the founders to this moment, but it does not run forward. It runs in reverse. Every principle the American republic was designed to protect against is now present in the operational logic of Operation Epic Fury: state theology, divinely mandated war, collective punishment of civilian populations, the subordination of constitutional restraint to prophetic necessity. The United States did not import these ideas. It chose them, installed them in the Pentagon, handed them Tomahawk missiles, and sent them to Minab.
What Benjamin Netanyahu has done is remarkable in its audacity: he has taken a doctrine of total annihilation rooted in his own tradition, applied it to three successive populations in three successive years, and persuaded the government of the United States to adopt it as its operational posture. He did not need to convince the US military to believe in Amalek. He only needed them to believe in the mission. American evangelical Christian nationalism provided the rest. Hegseth provided the institutional infrastructure. Trump provided the authorisation. And 165 schoolgirls in Minab provided the proof of concept.
The United States Constitution does not permit this. The laws of war do not permit this. The living memory of why secular republican government was invented does not permit this. None of that has stopped it.