At a special panel at the World Union of Jewish Studies Congress taking place at the Hebrew University, colleagues, mostly Israeli, came to discuss facts, law, and Judaism. At the podium and from the floor, colleagues spoke to testimony, international law, human life, and democratic collapse in the face of the starvation suffered at the hands of Israel by the people of Palestine in Gaza. Participants recognized that the war in Gaza puts into tension the place of Israel in the region and among the community of nations. I am noting here that at least a few colleagues and pundits in the United States aver that Zionism and Israel pose a threat to Judaism. But here, a guiding point made at least twice that the war against Hamas in Gaza is nothing less than a “Jewish war.” The war against Hamas in Gaza is the first one in the history of the country defined by such overtly religious manifestations. My own takeaway was that the critique of religion, integral as it was to the classical Enlightenment and to the origin of the Zionist movement, is by now a moribund thing. Both inside and outside the academy it constitutes a redline in the larger public discourse in contemporary Israel; or perhaps a latent force in society.