A Hebrew essay revisits the Altalena affair and argues that it remains a key test case for how religious-Zionist thought should respond to national crisis. It opens by noting that, after the ship was shelled on David Ben-Gurion’s orders in June 1948, Israel stood close to civil war, and Menachem Begin insisted that no matter the circumstances, one Jew must not raise a hand against another.
The article cites a memoir about Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, who wrote the essay "Mimma'amakim" about two weeks after the incident, on 2 Tammuz 5708, as published in the newspaper HaTzofe and later in "LeNetivot Yisrael." He prefaced it with verses from Ezekiel and Hosea expressing anguish over bloodshed, and said that the terrible suffering of brother killing brother was likely part of the purification required in the return to the Land of Israel.
It then turns to his famous reading of the Talmudic phrase that Israel's redemption comes "little by little." In the account quoted from "Or LeNetivati," Kook said that this phrase should be understood like a "kamea," a protective amulet made by combining scattered divine names and biblical verses into a hidden, ordered whole. In his view, redemption unfolds through broken, mixed, and apparently disconnected pieces that are gradually joined together into one complete pattern.
The essay concludes that this was Kook’s way of facing a fractured reality, by working to unite what seems divided. It presents that approach as a rebuke to those who accuse religious thinkers of naivete or servility, and says that in moments of frustration and confusion, his message still applies, Israel’s redemption advances "little by little."
