Jewish fundamentalism and the Israeli State
A tiny minority of orthodox Jews in the 1920s began to see in Zionism – a belief
that Israel represents a natural homeland for the Jews – a more holistic vision after
the trauma and constrictions of exile, as Armstrong (2001) notes, and they were
strongly opposed to secular Zionists. In the 1940s, they established their own
schools (2001: 259). Rabbi Yehuda who led the Gahlet, an elite group within
religious Zionist circles, declared that every Jew ‘who comes to Eretz Israel [biblical
Israel] constitutes... another stage in the process of redemption’. The war of 1967
in which Israel conquered the Golan Heights, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,
was deemed proof that redemption was under way (Armstrong, 2001: 261, 263).
Kepel sees 1977 as a signpost year in which the dominant Zionist tradition was
critically re-examined as Labour lost its first election in the history of Israel. Judaism
was redefined in terms of observance and ritual (Kepel, 1994: 6). The war of 1973
ended in ‘a psychological defeat for the Jewish state’, and in the confusion and
questioning of certainties there emerged the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful)
that became the self-proclaimed herald for the re-Judaisation of Israel. Gush Emunim
was formed by a bloc of hawkish secularists and religious Zionists. It replaced the
legal concept of the state of Israel with the biblical concept of the Land of Israel,
and sought to plant more and more settlements in the occupied territories (Kepel,
1994: 140–1). The Zionist ideal needed to be renewed and fully realised. Israel was
seen as a unique state that was not bound by international law (Armstrong, 2001:
280, 282).
After the death in 1935 of Rabbi Abraham Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi
of the Mandate of Palestine and a powerful influence on Gush Emunim, the
movement split: a few identified the Palestinians as Amalekites, a people so cruel
that God had commanded the ancient Israelites to slay them without mercy
(Armstrong, 2001: 346). Terrorism was resorted to: Gush Emunin extremists were
suspected of murdering students at the Islamic University of Hebron and making
attempts on the lives of Palestinian mayors, and the organisation encouraged other
groups to embrace the cause of re-Judaisation as well. Ultra-orthodox groups began
to recruit among university students and among Sephardic Jews who were often
immigrants from the Arab countries in which groups like Gush Emunin had been
quite unknown.
Religious parties represent such groups in parliament and they exercise real
leverage on coalition governments. These groups argue for a sharp break between
Jews and gentiles, with a demand for the strict observance of prohibitions and
obligations. As with Protestant fundamentalists, devout Islamists or Catholic
organisations like Communion and Liberation, secularism is seen as suffocating by
‘reborn’ Jews, with the Enlightenment blamed for plunging humanity into ‘a hostile
sea of doubt’ and cutting it adrift from ‘firm moorings in a theocentric universe’
(Kepel, 1994: 140–3). Some, like the Russian émigré Herman Branover who went
to Israel in 1972, found Zionism and Israeli society intolerably secular. Nevertheless,
even secular Zionists were held to be the unwitting bearers of a messianic redemption
(Kepel, 1994: 147, 155).
Stern religious observance is regarded by fundamentalists here, as elsewhere, as
compatible with making use of the technology and apparel of the modern world.392 Part 3 Contemporary ideologies