“Most Americans,” observes Joel Kotkin, “see conflict, not harmony, between religion and science (though only a small fraction of believers, some 16 percent, agree).” Similar attitudes are even more prevalent in Europe. But not all scientists feel that way, Kotkin writes:

Whatever their current religious orientation, many spiritually inclined scientists draw inspiration from recent breakthroughs in fields like biology and physics that have seemed to move us away from the mechanistic, predictable outcomes suggested by Enlightenment science and philosophy—and toward a view in which uncertainty and mystery appear to play a fundamental role.

Historically, Kotkin adds, there is a long history of seeing science and religion as “strongly linked” which can be found in many cultures:

Some scientists and historians—most famously the great British writer Edward Gibbon—saw the spread of the Mosaic religions as undermining the rational, scientific legacy handed down by the Greeks and their Roman acolytes. Yet Judaism, the root of both Islam and Christianity, has generally accepted science as simply as another means of revealing God’s work, not a challenge to divine agency.

Edward Reichman, a medical doctor and ethicist at New York’s Montefiore hospital, notes that, though some branches of Orthodox Judaism reject widely embraced scientific ideas like evolution, most Orthodox intellectuals embrace science and discovery. . . . “For most Jews, including the Orthodox,” notes Reichman, “it is impossible to distinguish between religion and science because God created science as well.”

Stephen Daisley writes about the slaying of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim:

Yaron and Sarah were murdered in a climate of lies and vilification and hatred. . . . The more institutions participate in this collective madness, the more madness there will be. The more elected officials and NGOs misrepresent the predictable consequences of asymmetric warfare in densely populated territories, where much of the infrastructure of everyday life has a dual civilian/terrorist purpose, the more the citizenries of North America and Europe will come to regard Israelis and Jews as a people who lust unquenchably after blood.

The most intolerant anti-Zionism is becoming a mainstream view, indulged by liberal societies, more concerned with not conflating irrational hatred of Israel with irrational hatred of Jews—as though the distinction between the two is all that well defined anymore.

For years now, and especially after the October 7 massacre, the call has gone up from the pro-Palestinian movement to put Palestine at the heart of Western politics. To pursue the struggle against Zionism in every country, on every platform, and in every setting. To wage worldwide resistance to Israel, not only in Wadi al-Far’a but in Washington, DC. “Globalize the intifada,” they chanted. This is what it looks like.