rejection 507
redemptive Zionist orthodoxy, Gush Emunim (‘The Bloc of the Faith-
ful’). This group, comprised primarily of young middle-class religious
Zionists who felt that the Zionist project had lost its way after the Yom
Kippur War in 1973, interpreted the messianic significance of the return
of Jews to the land as a prohibition on relinquishing any of the territory
overrun by Israeli troops in the Six Day War of 1967 if it lay within
‘Judaea and Samaria’, the borders of the land which, according to the
Bible, had been settled by the children of Israel under the leadership of
Joshua in fulfilment of God’s promise.^14
The spiritual leader of Gush Emunim, until his death at the age of
ninety- one in 1982, was Zvi Yehudah Kook, the son of Abraham Kook
and his successor as head of the influential yeshivah, Merkaz haRav
Kook, which his father had established in Jerusalem. Zvi Yehudah
regarded himself as custodian of Abraham’s legacy after Abraham’s
death in 1935, and he worked for nearly fifty years on the publication
and dissemination of his father’s writings. But his own interpretation of
these writings was distinctive. His twin beliefs, that Jews have a divinely
ordained duty to settle in all the biblical land of Israel and that every-
thing about the secular State of Israel, including its military arm, is
intrinsically holy because of its role in the messianic process, were fre-
quently in conflict in the mid- 1970s, when members of Gush Emunim
were regularly evicted by the Israeli Defence Forces from illegal settle-
ments in the West Bank. Gush Emunim disbanded in 1980 and no
longer exists as a separate group largely because its advocacy of settle-
ment in the occupied territories has, since the election of Menachem
Begin as prime minister in 1977, in any case been the policy of various
governments in Israel – but for political rather than religious reasons,
since up to now no Israeli government has been led by a politician
openly espousing religious conviction as the basis for policy decisions.
Zvi Yehudah had grown up in Lithuania and remained in contact
throughout his life with the east European haredi world of yeshivah
learning, despite his dramatic forays into the realities of Israel’s political
disputes. His was a very different background to the distinctively Amer-
ican religious Zionism of Meir (originally Martin David) Kahane, a
rabbi from Brooklyn. Kahane had devoted the first part of his public
career to vocal opposition to antisemitism in the diaspora, founding the
Jewish Defense League in New York in 1968 and organizing mass pro-
tests against the persecution of Jews by the Soviet Union when they
expressed a desire to emigrate to Israel, before himself migrating from
the United States to Israel in 1971. In contrast to Kook and his