Gush Emunin received some support from the Israeli party Likud, but subsequently
resorted to a terrorism that was officially denounced (Kepel, 1994: 161, 163). A
plan to dynamite the mosques on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem was foiled by
the Israeli secret service. Kepel finds striking similarities between these Jewish
conspirators and the Islamic fundamentalist group which assassinated Sadat in 1981- a process of re-Judaisation or re-Islamisation taken to extremes. Gush Emunin
has a membership of some 50,000, most of them resident in the occupied territories
(Kepel, 1994: 169–70). From the mid-1980s, the ultra-orthodox Jews (the haredim)
became the most highly visible advocates of re-Judaisation, drawing support
particularly from Sephardic Jews (Kepel, 1994: 178). The orthodox parties are able
to wield substantial power. Although they receive only 15 per cent of the vote, they
control several ministries and obtain large subsidies to strengthen their network of
practising Jewish communities (Kepel, 1994: 180, 190). The Lubavitch believe that
Israel should be cleansed of its Zionist accretions in order to become a ‘Torahcracy’
over the Land of Israel (i.e. Israel as projected in the Bible) (Kepel, 1994: 189).
Hence, they should, in our view, be regarded as extreme Zionists rather than anti-
Zionists.
The assassination of Rabin, like the assassination of Sadat, showed, as Armstrong
points out, that two wars are being fought out in the Middle East. One is the war
against Israel; the other is the war between the secularists and the religious (2001:
353).
Chapter 17 Fundamentalism 393Fundamentalism and the state
Some fundamentalists see the nation-state as an alien Western invention and look towards
some kind of Revolutionary International Movement to cleanse the world of its imperfections.
Yet the emphasis on violence and polarisation shows that whether or not fundamentalists
consciously support the need for a state, their arguments are statist through and through. The
view of opponents as enemies to be crushed by an organisation which monopolises truth and
legitimacy, projects in extreme form attitudes which exist even in the liberal state. Hence the
ease with which the US president after 9/11 began to invert the sentiments of Al-Qaeda,
declaring that ‘those who are not with us, are against us’.
While we are not suggesting that the state per se is a fundamentalist organisation, there is
a continuity between the extolling of violence against enemies by fundamentalists and the use
of force by the state. The same cynical, instrumental and ambiguous attitude towards modernity
is evident in both, so that although they are different, fundamentalism – particularly if it can
be blamed on a rogue state – is grist to the mill of the state’s own contradictory identity.
An institution which links conflict with violence and seeks to justify monopolistic practices
must operate in terms of divisions and dualisms which under pressure can easily become
fundamentalist in character. The state, while not fundamentalist in itself, harbours
fundamentalist leanings in its bureaucratic soul.
Focus