To Karpin and Friedman’s inventory of dark corners, I would add the concept of Zionism itself. Because Zionism is a commitment common to both religious and secular Jews, it is not something any politician tampers with easily. Both groups subscribe to the notion of Zionism as grounded in the right-of-return for all Jews. Secular Jews cleave to historical rights, religious Jews to entitlements derived from biblical scripture. As a result, there is a wholly fluid movement between religious and secular Zionism, so much so that it is impossible to change one without seriously altering the other.
Theoretically, it might be argued that Zionism achieved its principal goal with the founding of Israel in 1948 and that by now it has overstayed its welcome. Israelis could jettison the “rights “argument and replace it with a watered-down version of Zionism akin to the patriotism to which most nations subscribe. But a majority of Israelis hang on to a far more aggressive version of Zionism as one would hang on to a life raft and believe that to whittle off a plank, even one that is clearly rotten, is to put Israel itself at risk.
While a generous and a tolerant leader, Kook had a rather patronizing attitude toward secular Zionists. “They may think they do it for political, national, secular reasons,” he wrote, “[but] the actual reason for them coming to resettle in Israel is a religious Jewish spark [nitzotz] in their soul, planted by God.” But Kook did not overplay this hand. For the most part he respected the positions of secular Zionists and was a good friend of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Kook established the largest yeshiva in the country and became the nascent state’s first chief rabbi. From Merkaz Harav, his seminary in Jerusalem, the venerable rabbi preached moderation, personal integrity, and individual choice. The single most important feature of Kook’s teaching may have been his notion that redemption’s foremost agent was the individual, not the state. This view allowed early graduates of Kook’s yeshiva to remain behind the scenes, to accept that God expresses his will through the individual, and that there was therefore no reason to seek power. In 1956, religious Zionists formed Mafdal, which grew to become the nrp, but they did not append to it a competitive national agenda. Rather, the nrp concerned itself with religious issues and defending the rights of religious Jews.
All this changed in 1967, when the agent of redemption suddenly became the state of Israel itself. “To us [religious Zionists] the Six Day War seemed like a miracle,” Yigal Amir’s mentor, Rabbi Raziel, told the media at the time. “The Egyptian air force destroyed in a few hours; the whole land of Israel ours in a few days. It was beyond anything natural, the hand of God in the process of redemption.” Within months of the war, religious Zionism, once a largely apolitical force, consolidated on the right and became more directly involved in matters of state.
Seven years later, in 1974, this same community formed Gush Emunim, the settlement movement from whose ranks arose men like Yonah Abrushmi, who threw a grenade into a crowd of Peace Now activists, and Yehudah Etzion, whose plan to blow up the Al-Aqsa mosque was foiled in 1984. Dr. Moshe Hellinger, a political science professor at Bar Ilan University who spoke at the conference I attended, argued that today being part of the right-wing coalition has become the sine qua non of the movement and that “there is [now] no dialogue between the huge majority of right-wingers and the tiny minority of left-wingers.” Insisting that “many religious Zionists know next to nothing about their history or ideology, or anything else but that they are committed right wingers,” the young professor was almost booed off the stage.
While striking, many attributed Israel’s victory in the Six Day War to something other than divine intervention. “We were all swept up into a major euphoria, “General Shlomo Gazit, who later led Israel’s military intelligence, told me when I visited him in his office at the University of Tel Aviv. “But over time most of us got over it. We realized that in large part our exhilaration could not really be explained by the fact that we were now in possession of those Jewish sites which our ancestors had always dreamed of. In fact, many of us were so secular that we didn’t give much of a damn about such things. What caused us to feel so intoxicated was that our military had done so much better than anyone had dared expect.”
Such confidence was almost shattered in the 1973 war with Egypt and Syria, a devastating conflict in which Israel had to rely heavily on American arms shipments. That war speaks volumes about the paranoia Israelis feel about security and the need to create buffer zones between themselves and their Arab neighbours. The assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat after he signed a peace treaty with Israel made the point that moderates would not survive. And so an emboldened Sharon, then Israel’s defence minister, led the incursion into Lebanon. Two intifadas erupted, violence cycled upon violence, and, over time, most Israelis came to accept that the military’s top brass and Israeli politicians must work hand in glove to protect the state.
Today, no sober politician believes that the Israeli army is anything less than a well-oiled machine, fully capable of exploiting the weakness of Arab states and of the Palestinians. But few Israeli politicians or military strategists think in terms of an ultimate victory. Everyone prefers to talk about managing the conflict for decades to come, and few mainstream politicians or military officers consider the Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Al-Aqsa Brigades, or Hamas as anything more than a serious pain. As idf Chief of Staff Dan Halutz recently put it, the terrorism of these groups is simply a “nuisance.”
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