Religious Zionism: A Growing Impediment To Middle East Peace

By Allan C. Brownfeld

When reasons are given for the failure to achieve a genuine peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, the major culprits most often are said to be Palestinian terrorism and Yasser Arafat’s failure to respond affirmatively to Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s “generous offer.”

It is indeed true that suicide bombings make it increasingly difficult to bring the two sides together. Some Palestinians reject the idea of peace entirely. It is also true that Yasser Arafat could have responded to the Barak offer, not by accepting it, since it was in many ways flawed, but with a counter-offer which might have set the stage for further compromise.

Still, even if suicide bombings were to cease and the Palestinians were to make their own proposal for a final settlement, there remains a serious impediment to peace. And that impediment is the dramatic growth of what has come to be called Religious Zionism in Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War.

This philosophy holds that God gave all of the historic “Land of Israel” to the Jewish people, that victory in 1967 was a “miracle” which would usher in the messianic era, and that it would be sinful to return “a single inch” to the Palestinians. Christian fundamentalists share this view, for they believe that the return of the Jews to the Holy Land is a prelude to the second coming of Christ, the Battle of Armageddon, and the end of the world.

Traditional Orthodox Beliefs

The growth of religious Zionism is, in reality, a new phenomenon. Traditionally, Orthodox Judaism held that only the Messiah could bestow Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. Religious Jews firmly opposed the Zionist movement based on what they argued were legitimate religious reasons.

The conventional rabbinic doctrine maintained that Jews had a duty to wait patiently until the Messiah led them back to Palestine. The return, they said, would be at the end of days. According to this view, since God sent the Jews into exile to punish them for their sins, only God had the power to lead them back.

Rabbi Hayyim Eleazor Shapira, a Hungarian Hasidic leader, argued that migration to the Holy Land, in abandoning “faith in miraculous redemption from heaven,” preempted the Messiah. Zionism, he declared, violated Halacha, or Orthodox Jewish law. Rabbi Shapira called the Zionists “evil forces [who] have become stronger in our Holy Land and they undermine its very foundation through their ploughshares and agricultural colonies.” Efforts at “forcing the End,” he maintained, were a “sacrilege.”

Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, a celebrated leader of the Satmar sect, called the founding of the Jewish state a terrible crime. It was the Jews’ untimely return to the Holy Land, he wrote, that was to blame for the deaths in Hitler’s crematoria.

“Religious Zionism after 1967 sparked the Jewish settlement movement.”

Theodor Herzl convened his first Zionist Congress in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland—the German Rabbinical Association having successfully opposed Herzl’s original plan to hold it in Munich. Both the Association’s Orthodox and Reform wings had their own reason for opposition. The Orthodox said: “The aspirations of the so-called Zionists…contradict the messianic promises of Judaism as enunciated in the holy scriptures and later religious canons.” According to the Reform group, “Judaism obliges its adherents to serve the fatherland to which they belong with utmost devotion and to further its national interest with all their heart and strength.” Indeed, the two factions’ only area of agreement seemed to be their opposition to Zionism.

The Zionist leaders, on the other hand, were largely secular, and sought to create for Jews what they hoped would be a “normal nation.” Among the Zionist slogans was, “Israel has no messiah, get to work.”

At the Basel meeting’s closing session, the chief rabbi of that city tested Herzl’s intentions by offering to abandon his opposition to Zionism in exchange for an assurance that any future state would keep Judaism’s tenets, starting with the Sabbath. Herzl answered that, though the rabbis had nothing to fear, Orthodoxy was only one of Judaism’s schools of thought. His words indicated his backing for religious tolerance, and the audience applauded. Orthodox Judaism, however, withheld any support.

Originally, those religious Jews who embraced Zionism did not share the Orthodox disdain for the secular state, but rather esteemed it as an agent of Jewish power. While they sought to make the state as hospitable as possible to Orthodox practice, there was little messianic fervor about their efforts or their worldview.

The 1967 war, however, changed all of this. In a thoughtful new book, What Shall I Do With This People? Jews and the Fractious Politics of Judaism (The Free Press), author Milton Viorst, who has worked for three decades as a journalist covering the Middle East, notes that, “Religious Zionism…saw the victory as an opportunity. Religious Zionism’s position, long at the margins of Jewish mysticism, held that Zionism, however secular, was God’s way of preparing the land for the Messiah’s arrival. To the rabbis, the victory was a message from God to seize the land for all time.”

Declared Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, who spearheaded the religious Zionist movement: “Under heavenly command, we have just returned home in the elevations of holiness and our holy city. We shall never move out of here. We are living in the middle of redemption. The entire Israeli army is holy. The Kingdom of Israel is being rebuilt. It symbolizes the rule of the [Jewish] people on its land.”

Serving Political Ideology

“Kook and his followers reshaped Halacha, religious law, to serve their political ideology,” Viorst writes. “Not only did they insist that the law required permanent Jewish rule in the territories but they proclaimed its supremacy over secular law…Religious Zionism was not alone…in urging Jewish hegemony over all Palestine. Since the 1920s, Zionism had contained a minority wing known as Revisionism, progenitor of the present-day Likud Party, which promoted the kind of territorial nationalism that pervaded Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Religious Zionism’s role was to sanctify this nationalism, imparting new energy to it by characterizing it as God’s command. Religious Zionism after 1967 sparked the Jewish settlement movement in the occupied territories…Every stake driven into the soil, it maintained, served God’s will.”

When Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo accords with Yasser Arafat in 1993, the settlers’ wrath shifted from the Arabs to the “traitors” they perceived in their own society. “Rabin’s proposal to evacuate a small settler enclave in Hebron, considered especially vulnerable to Arab attack, provoked a defining crisis,” reports Viorst. “Hebron, where Abraham is said to be buried and David made his first capital, is sacred to Judaism…Rabin’s plan to remove the settlers signaled to religious Zionism the defeat of its holy mission, and its forces mobilized to fight. Led by a former chief rabbi of Israel, religious Zionists issued a Halachic ruling. Not only did God command the settlers to resist evacuation, it said, but He instructed Israeli soldiers to disobey any orders to withdraw. The ruling pitted Halachic judgments against democratic legitimacy. Rabin, facing civil war, backed off, and the Hebron settlements remain to this day.”

After Oslo, some rabbis circulated charges through their network of religious schools that Rabin, in surrendering Jewish territory, was a religious outlaw. Orthodox circles debated whether, under religious law, he was guilty of capital crimes. In New York, hundreds of Orthodox rabbis signed a statement declaring that Rabin deserved to die. On Nov. 4, 1995, Yigal Amir, an Orthodox student, killed Rabin with two pistol shots in the back. Competent rabbis, he said, had convinced him of his Halachic duty to commit the murder. In killing Rabin, Amir was convinced that he was doing God’s work.

In Viorst’s view, such religious extremism has been an element in Judaism from the beginning, and has frequently led to disaster: “Jewish history shows that when a stiff-necked nature manifests itself in persistent defiance of reality, its consequences can be catastrophic,” he notes, citing “defeat in two wars against Rome, the superpower of the age, which the Jews, being a tiny nation, should never have waged. These wars resulted in the annihilation of the state, the destruction of the holy Temple and the scattering of the people to the ends of the earth…The Jews lost their homeland and spent two thousand years in exile, dreaming of a way back. In our own era, they have regained their state, but it is still tiny and with limited resources and its inherent fragility raises the question whether their stiff-necked nature does not again place their national life in peril.”

The “Bar Kokhba Syndrome”

Israeli historian Yehoshafat Harkabi, a retired general, points out that historians regard Hadrian as Rome’s wisest emperor and that Jews alone of his subjects made trouble for him. Harkabi calculates the Jewish population worldwide on the eve of the Bar Kokhba rebellion at 1.3 million, and estimates that only half that number survived the war. Since, under Roman law, Jews and others were permitted to practice their religion, Harkabi maintains that it was nationalism, not religion, which motivated the war. He now fears that Israelis might one day be imprudent enough to repeat this disaster. Harkabi is particularly alarmed at Israel’s present day habit of resurrecting not just the Bar Kokhba revolt but the mass suicide at Masada, transforming them into a mythology of national glory. He calls this phenomenon the “Bar Kokhba Syndrome,” enticing Jews into foolish, perhaps deadly misadventures.

Unshared Values

Recently the American Jewish Committee has launched a series of television advertisements lauding Israel as a free, democratic society which shares America’s values. This formulation, however, is only partially true. When it comes to religious freedom and separation of church and state, Israel’s values are quite different. Viorst describes this difference: “The trend within Western democracies over recent centuries has been to separate church and state. Israel has gone in the opposite direction. Israel accepts Orthodox Judaism as the one official faith. Israel has a chief rabbi, who is an official paid for by the state. In fact, it has two chief rabbis, one Ashkenazi, the other Sephardi, both Orthodox. It maintains at public expense all Orthodox rabbis and their synagogues. It finances religious education at every level, run by Orthodox administrators. It empowers a system of Orthodox courts to preside over the enforcement of Halachic law in personal matters. It also sets Orthodox standards for naturalization and waives military service for students at Orthodox yeshivot.”

Today, religious Zionists have adopted the notion that God demands not so much devotion to the Torah as to the land that Israel’s army has conquered. Their theology comes from Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (father of Zui Yehuda Kook), who taught that by settling the land the Jews would hasten the Messiah’s arrival. This doctrine was largely overlooked until the Six-Day War, when it became religious Zionism’s ideology.

Shortly after the 1967 war, 72 noted intellectuals, many of them mainstream Zionists, founded the Land of Israel movement. In a highly publicized manifesto, they put aside historical differences to proclaim a nationalism based on divine imperative: “The Israeli army’s victory in the Six-Day War located the people and the state within a new and fateful period. The whole of the Land of Israel is now in the hands of the Jewish people. Just as we are not allowed to give up the State of Israel, so we are ordered to keep what we received there from the army’s hands: the Land of Israel.”

Religious Zionism’s rabbis spoke of the victory as a “miracle” and said that it meant the messianic process was reaching fruition, even if the Messiah himself were absent. The 1967 war was called the War of Redemption, and the victory God’s sign that every inch of the land was holy. Mainstream Zionism, while in theory continuing to favor exchanging territory for peace, found it difficult, once the land was in Israel’s hands, to give it up. As time passed and settlements continued to grow, religious Zionism became Israel’s most dynamic political force.

Some observers argue that religious Zionism has produced a fanaticism such as Judaism has not seen since the Second Temple days. Securing territory became a divine commandment equal to traditional piety. On Israel’s 27th anniversary, Rabbi Kook declared: “The principal overall thing is the state. It is inherently holy and without blemish. All the rest is details, trivia, minor problems and complications…Not only must there be no retreat from a single kilometer of the Land of Israel, God forbid, but on the contrary, we shall conquer and liberate more and more…In our divine, world-encompassing undertaking, there is no room for retreat.”

Terrorism Applauded

Kook went so far as to describe the Holocaust as a blessing in disguise. The settler movement, Gush Emunim, became the vanguard of territorialism and held a mystical concept of the Jewish state. It was a resurrection of David’s kingdom, which God entrusted to re-establish Jewish rule over holy soil. To pursue its goals, terrorism was permissible. In 1980, the Jewish Underground, a secret society of Gush Emunim militants, booby-trapped the cars of three mayors of Arab towns, leaving two of them severely maimed. In 1983, gunmen killed three students and wounded 30 at Hebron’s Islamic college. Disciples of Rabbi Kook openly applauded the attacks. In the synagogues of religious Zionism, worshippers debated whether “Thou shalt not kill” applied to Arabs at all. Both Labor and Likud, argues Milton Viorst, “turned an unseeing eye, and the police put little effort into finding the perpetrators.”

The mindset of the religious Zionists may not have been what Theodor Herzl and his supporters had in mind. Israel’s Declaration of Independence vowed “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” Herzl dreamed of a “nation like all nations.” Now, however, religious Zionism seems to be the driving force of Israeli policy. And if God commands that “not one inch” of occupied territory be returned, what Israeli government will proceed to make peace—which, after all, requires sharing of the land?

When we look for reasons why peace has not been achieved, it is an evasion of reality to overlook the importance of religious Zionism. Yitzhak Rabin paid the ultimate price for resisting its demands. Since his death, its numbers and influence have only grown stronger.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.