This Pathless Hour | 281ings.”^160 Little in Buber’s work on Zionism suggests that one can contribute to a
“messianic process” in spite of oneself, but we do find a commitment to what is
valuable in the thoughts and actions of contending parties.
Buber did not live to see Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) become an
important player in Israeli-Palestinian affairs. It is well known that in the hands
of Zvi Yehuda Kook, the thought of Rav Kook the elder was transformed as it
was translated into political action. Aviezer Ravitzky has described this transfor-
mation as “overcoming tensions and avoiding questions that Kook left open.”^161
We will never know what Rav Kook, the man who said that “it is not for Jacob
to engage in political life as long as statehood requires bloody ruthlessness and
demands a talent for evil,” and who perceived the reemergence of the Jewish pol-
ity as necessarily coextensive with the eschaton itself, would have thought of his
son’s contention that “a land under the dominion and sovereignty of a people—
this is a state. The Torah commands us to have a State, and if there is a need for
conquest and war to fulfill this, then we are compelled to do so. This is one of
the 613 precepts of the Torah.”^162 Had Buber witnessed the growth of militant
religious Zionism, he might have sharpened his theopolitics to combat this new
political theology.
From the theopolitical standpoint, Gush Emunim only seems to oppose sec-
ularization. To be sure, it benefits from the secular state’s indulgence of whatever
claims to support Jewish interests while also furthering its own. Here I would
recall Buber’s claim that one can worship YHVH as an idol, either as Baal or as
Molech. Baalism pays lip service to YHVH but tries to stand simultaneously on
two branches, granting the reign over some realms of life to Baal. Molechism
strives to outdo everyone else in the worship of YHVH, but in the process it
makes YHVH into an idol, along with the land, the people, and the Torah. If Bu-
ber’s religious Zionism seems close at times to that of the right, it is the closeness
of theopolitics and political theology, of melekh and molekh. It is a closeness sep-
arated by an unbridgeable gap, as if an ouroboros could not quite bite its own tail.
This does not bring Buber any closer to the post-Zionist or anti-Zionist en-
emies of religious Zionism, however, as long as they also subscribe to the binary
that pits the religious and particular on one side against the secular and universal
on the other. The liberal refrain that religion is the problem in the Israel-Palestine
conflict, and that religion must be “kept out of it,” stems from the success of re-
ligious Zionism in claiming the territory that secular Zionism abandoned. The
checkered relationship between Judaism and Zionism, which for years was led
by antireligious radicals and opposed by religious Jews, has been covered over by
a new normality in which Judaism and Zionism become virtually identical. In-
terested observers with superficial knowledge of the history of the conflict make
similar claims about the supposedly detrimental role of Islam while ignoring
the relative novelty and innovation embodied in the claims of Hamas that Pal-
estine is an Islamic waq f (endowment) and more holy than other lands.^163 Public