For the religious-Zionist movement, grabbing power in Israel is just the beginning
Demonstrators protesting the judicial coup in Tel Aviv in February 2023 with a sign condemning Kohelet Forum for helping to bury Israel’s democracy
Hayim Katsman writes in Haaretz on 8 June 2023:
My doctoral dissertation, which I completed in 2021, deals with the impact of the 2005 “disengagement’ from the Gaza Strip on the religious-Zionist movement in Israel. One aspect I wrote about was the rise of Israeli conservatism as a religious-Zionist phenomenon. I identified the flow of American money into Israel via civil-society organizations that espouse a neoliberal agenda, such as the Kohelet Policy Forum and the Tikvah Fund, and I tried to understand what attracted religious Zionism to that ideology.
At that time the judicial revolution was not yet on the horizon, and the media’s awareness of the Kohelet Forum was also negligible. As a result of my online research, I was targeted on social media as a potential customer for educational programs offered by Kohelet and Tikvah, and I encountered an advertisement for a study program run by the latter. The program, which took place in Israel and was conducted in Hebrew, offered a scholarship of 15,000 shekels (about $4,000), presented itself as being intended for “outstanding research students in the social sciences and the humanities who wish to deepen their acquaintance with the foundations of conservatism.”
I was surprised to find in the syllabus, along with six conservative texts, a work by the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, “On Hegemony.” This was shortly before the advent of scholar of religions and media commentator Avishay Ben Haim, with his theory of “the hegemony that isn’t aware of its hegemony,” so I didn’t understand at first what interest a fund that advocates conservatism and neoliberal economics might have in the thought of the Marxist and the revolutionary Gramsci.
Ultimately, my research led me to a possible insight about the role the conservatives have in mind for Gramsci’s thought. As ardent free marketers, they naturally ignore Gramsci’s critique of capitalism. At the same time, the conservative movement’s method of operation indicates that they are adopting his analysis of how political change can be fomented. Gramsci, like many Marxist thinkers of the early 20th century, was influenced by World War I and its outcome, which led him to conclude that the working class of the countries of Europe prioritized national identity over class interest.
To account for this phenomenon, he drew a parallel between the new form taken by warfare and the character of the political-class struggle. He argued that just as battlefield combat had shifted from rapid, decisive “wars of maneuver” to trench “warfare of position,” as he termed them, so too the process of political change in democracies is not speedy. The struggle against the existing hegemony is long-term and entails the creation of a stratum of intellectuals who will generate a conceptual and cultural alternative to the existing hegemony.
The conservative movement in Israel is the manifestation of a conscious attempt by the religious-Zionist movement to bring about an alternative to the hegemony of secular labor Zionism. Conservative thought arrived in Israel in the 1990s, with the establishment of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, but in the current incarnation of conservatism, Shalem wields less influence. In the past two decades, the two dominant bodies in the conservative movement have been the Tikvah Fund and the Kohelet Policy Forum – two civil society organizations that are trying to import American neoconservative ideology and political methods to Israel.
During the disengagement from Kfar Darom, Gaza, in 2005
These organizations are engaged in promoting conservative ideology by diverse means: through a number of educational programs, publication of books and journals, lobbying, researching and writing position papers, conferences, op-eds in newspapers and in the social media, and even by way of their own media outlets (podcasts, a news website). They have also established and funded smaller spin-off organizations – such as the Shiloh Policy Forum, the Israel Law and Liberty Forum and Tacharut [Competition]: The Movement for Freedom of Employment – thus trying to create the impression that they are an organic grassroots movement, represented by a large number of groups that advocate the same worldview.
When we examine the leaders of these organizations through a sociological prism, it becomes apparent that they identify, overwhelmingly, with the religious-Zionist movement and, moreover, live in settlements on the West Bank. For example, Amiad Cohen, the director general of the Tikvah Fund, lives in the settlement of Eli; and three of the founders of Kohelet – Moshe Koppel, Gideon Sapir and Aviad Bakshi – also live in the West Bank.
The question that needs to be asked, then, is why, during the second decade of the 21st century, a group of religiously observant settlers started to think of and market themselves as exponents of “Israeli conservativism.”
It’s difficult to pinpoint a well-ordered ideology that the local conservative movement seeks to advance. A broad range of opinions on a wide variety of issues exists in these organizations, and it’s not always possible to find agreement on ideological matters among their ranking figures. Nevertheless, it’s possible to discern three central ideological pillars promoted by the movement. Economically, the Israeli conservative movement advocates a neoliberal approach, meaning minimal taxation and governmental regulation, and dismantlement of the welfare state.
This is apparent from the books that appear under the imprint of the Shibolet Library (a joint venture between the Tikvah Fund and the conservative publishing house Sella Meir), as well as the political position papers of the Kohelet Policy Forum and its various study curricula. At the individual level, we find a more heterogeneous range of opinions. For example, some in the movement are extreme libertarians, though others even support a welfare state to a certain degree.
A second conceptual foundation of the movement – the one that is currently subject to maximum public attention – is opposition to judicial activism. The movement has been critical of the judicial system in Israel for more than a decade, arguing that there is an imbalance between the branches of government, in favor of the Supreme Court. In this view, more power needs to be transferred to the authorities elected directly by the public, and the ability of the judicial branch to review the decisions of the elected bodies needs to be curtailed. As recent months have shown, on this subject, too, no consensus exists within the conservative movement; some in the Kohelet Forum have publicly criticized the “reform” that the government is trying to push through.
And finally, as the sociological profile of the movement’s leading figures shows, they are deeply committed to entrenching Jewish settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories.
In contrast to the first ideological pillar, namely a neoliberal economic policy – which is a direct reflection of the ideological and economic influence of the United States – the two other pillars are ideologies that have been promoted by religious Zionism for many decades. An examination of the rhetoric of the rabbis of that movement shows clearly that the religious-Zionist critique of the judicial system predated the Supreme Court’s activist shift by more than a decade.
Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook was known for his criticism of the courts in Israel. In his view, their decisions are invalid because they do not pass judgments according to Jewish law, but, rather, draw on foreign legal systems. In a famous sermon he delivered to his students on Israel’s 19th Independence Day, in 1967, he said, “There are in the State of Israel painful things which are replete with the desecration of God’s name… The judicial system in the state makes use of Roman, Ottoman, British law – even Hottentot, for that matter – whereas [its practitioners] are not ordained in or conversant with the true law of Israel, ‘Hoshen Mishpat’ [“Breastplate of Judgment,” part of the Shulhan Arukh, the Code of Jewish Law].” (Ironically, the expansion of the settlement movement, which Rabbi Kook’s followers pioneered, was made possible only in the wake of the government’s declaration regarding “state lands,” which was based on Ottoman law.)
In 1980, Rabbi Yaakov Ariel, leader of the religious-Zionist hesder yeshiva in Ramat Gan, published an article in which he maintained that halakha – Jewish religious law – forbids Jews from being tried in courts of the State of Israel, and severely condemned anyone who violates this prohibition. “A religious Jew who knows of the existence of the law of the Torah and of the presence of learned people who are familiar with religious law, yet prefers to be tried before these lay persons, who deny the Torah, is considered to be vilifying and maligning and raising a hand against the Torah of Moses, and as transgressing the Torah’s prohibition on desecrating God’s name, and he is considered to be as one has submits to legal proceedings of gentiles.”
Most important, the Israeli judiciary is perceived to have restricted the settlement efforts of the religious-Zionist movement. Even though the Supreme Court for the most part validated the settlement project de facto, the settlers remember mainly the judgments in which the court ruled that illegal settlements, or parts of them, must be evacuated. What’s remembered primarily, besides the rejection by the High Court of Justice of the petition against the 2005 Gaza pullout, are the High Court’s rulings ordering the evacuation of Elon Moreh, Amona and Netiv Ha’avot, as well as the court’s overturning of legislation validating the plundering of private Palestinian land (the “regularization law”).
It’s hard to overstate the impact that the disengagement had on the religious-Zionist movement – but what’s the connection between that and the adoption of “conservative” ideology? The connection that the religious right sees between the judicial revolution and the withdrawal from Gaza was demonstrated by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich in his response to Israeli bank executives who cautioned him about the implications of the regime coup: “Where were you during the disengagement?”
In other words, the opposition of the top people in the Israeli economy to the government’s current undemocratic measures is perceived as hypocritical and as stemming from a political position, and not from genuine concern about democratic values. Yet, as the political scientists Avishai Ben-Sasson Gordis and Shai Agmon have noted elsewhere, the disengagement itself was conceived and implemented by the executive branch.
Placing unlimited power in its hands, as the government’s plan would do, would thus lead to the opposite result of preventing any future withdrawal. At the same time, Gordis and Agmon’s claim that the governmental coup is being driven by the right’s desire to avenge the disengagement by punishing the Israeli left, provides only a partial explanation. I would argue that the pullout from Gaza directly influenced the rise of the conservative movement, and that the judicial revolution is only an offshoot of that event.
The religious-Zionist movement experienced the disengagement as a collective trauma on three levels: personal, religious and political. At the personal level, the overwhelming majority of the evacuees in the disengagement belonged to that movement. Many other religious Jews had relatives and friends who lived in the settlements that were evacuated. Large numbers came to Gush Katif (the settlement bloc in the Gaza Strip) in order to resist the evacuation, and experienced first-hand the trauma of the event and the confrontation with the security forces. The experience exercised a profound effect on the young generation of religious Zionists, some of whom reached the conclusion that they needed to become more active politically. The conservative movement provided them with an infrastructure by which they could put this need into practice.
At the religious level, many believers experienced a crisis of faith in the wake of the disengagement. Some lost faith in the rabbinical leadership, who had promised that the expulsion would not be implemented (most notably the comment by Rabbi Mordechai Eliahu that, “It shall not come to pass”).
In addition, the vast majority of the adherents of religious Zionism were raised according to the mamlakhti (statesman-like) approach holding that the state is “the beginning of the flowering of our redemption” and as such possesses a sacred status. Accordingly, obeying the state’s laws and serving in the army were perceived as a religious obligation.
Nevertheless, the fact that the State of Israel was setting back the redemption of the Jewish people by removing Jewish settlements in the Land of Israel, led many religiously observant Jews to reconsider their commitment to “mamlakhti’ut.” Therefore, for many religious-Zionists, the hyphen connecting religion and Zionism could no longer hold. Some turned away from religion, and others revised their attitude toward Zionism.
For some in the religious-Zionist movement, such as Rabbi Shmuel Tal (whose yeshiva MK Simcha Rothman, one of the architects of the judicial upheaval, attended), the disengagement was a wake-up call emanating from the mystical-messianic theology of Rabbi Kook and his successors. The departure from Gaza led Rabbi Tal to conclude that the idea of the Israeli state’s sanctity could no longer be reconciled with reality. Ideologically, this notion encourages an instrumental approach calling for a “small state,” morally neutral, which is consistent with ideas of a neoliberal or even libertarian political economy.
But the most important conclusions that were drawn by members of the religious-Zionist population regarded the character of the political struggle. Primarily, they came to the understanding that merely taking control of elected political positions was not sufficient. After all, the disengagement could be implemented by a right-wing government, because that government had the backing of the entire Israeli establishment – the courts, the law enforcement agencies and the media.
The leaders of the religious settlement movement realized that it would not be possible to prevent future evacuations if they did not obtain a foothold in those institutions. In addition, the protest against the disengagement was perceived by the broad Israeli public as the battle of religious Zionists. The secular Jews and the ultra-Orthodox who opposed the evacuation did not take an active part in the struggles against it, because the resistance was led by the settlement leadership and bore a strong messianic tone.
To prevent future evacuations, the religious Zionists realized, they needed to forge an alternative hegemony based on alliances with the other segments of Jewish-Israeli society: the Haredim and the secular population. To that end, a new – secularized – language had to be created, so as to render the religious-Zionist ideology accessible to the rest of society. Instead of evoking the holiness of the land and divine promises, the conservative movement talks about interpretations of international law, conceptions strategic security, and realpolitik. Instead of talking about the halakha and “Hebrew jurisprudence,” the conservatives refer to theories of national sovereignty as balancing the branches of government and comparative law.
These two processes – entrenchment in the power centers and forging political alliances between social groups – are critical elements in a hegemonic struggle. As Gramsci showed, the hegemonic struggle is inherently a long-term one, and through the conservative movement, religious Zionism is preparing itself for protracted trench warfare. Some of the movement’s leaders with whom I spoke referred to a readiness to acquire influence across a span of decades.
To a certain degree, it can be said that the judicial revolution arrived prematurely. It’s possible that those in the conservative movement would have preferred to let the changes happen more slowly and more gradually. But things went topsy-turvy: The conservatives had planned to use the politicians to further their agenda, whereas now the politicians are selectively invoking conservative ideology to justify the revolution they seek to lead.
Thus, the right-wing camp was dragged into a battle that would allow it to reap the fruits here and now, and thereby generated a counter-response at a level of intensity they apparently had not foreseen. That strategic error may be the last hope of the secular-liberal public in Israel. Identifying correctly the subterranean processes taking place within the right will also be able to help that public to protect itself against them.
Hayim Katsman is a researcher of religion and politics. He holds a Ph.D. from the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.
This article is reproduced in its entirety