The late Israeli commentator, Uri Avnery, wrote, “I am increasingly worried that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle … is assuming a more and more religious character.”
At first glance, the statement may seem baffling. If Israel is a ‘Jewish State’ that serves as a ‘homeland’ for all Jewish people, everywhere, does it not follow that the ‘struggle’, at least from an Israeli viewpoint, is essentially a religious one?
If only it was that simple.
Israel’s dichotomy is that it was founded by an ideology, Zionism, which purposely conflated between religion and nationality.
“The Zionist movement was non-religious from the start,” Avnery wrote, “if not anti-religious.” He went on to cite a famous quote by the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, that “we shall know how to keep (our clergymen) in their temples.”
Clearly, Herzl’s descendants could not keep the “clergymen in their temples”. The once marginal impact of Israel’s religious Zionists has long exceeded the margins allocated to them by their liberal brethren.
It is the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right ministers of national security and finance, respectively, who are the new kings of the hill.
The days of Chaim Weismann, David Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol and even Shimon Perez are long gone, and most likely irreversibly so.
The irony and the source of confusion is that all past and current leadership of Israel – liberal, conservative or religious – are proud Zionists who saw Judaism as a centerpiece in the Israeli identity.
But how can one then understand the current layers of religious, class, ethnic and, ultimately, ideological conflicts at work in Israel?
The simple explanation of Israel’s ongoing protests is that nearly half of the Israeli population objects to judicial reforms championed by an extremist right-wing government under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Protesters say that the mass mobilization aims at saving Israeli democracy from the likes of Ben-Gvir and others.
Yet, there was no such mobilization when Israel passed its Nation-State Law in 2018, defining Israel as the “national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.”
The truth is that most Israeli Jews have no qualms with a law that exists to discriminate against the Palestinian Arab citizens of the country. This should hardly be a surprise as Israel is a settler-colonial state whose very existence was made possible by the expulsion of most of the native Palestinian population.
The phrasing of the Nation-State Law, however, did not only exist to cancel the rights of the Palestinians, but to ensure some kind of balance between the competing Israeli-Jewish groups.
Writing in Haaretz in June 2017, Shlomo Sand asserted that Zionism was a national movement that “rebelled against historical Judaism” and that it “was mainly atheistic”.
In this context, atheism did not simply translate to the denial of God’s existence, but also to the rejection of all religious myths, notions and beliefs affiliated with traditional Judaism.
It was no wonder that religious Jewish organizations and communities in Europe had initially rejected Zionism and perceived early Zionist leaders as heretics.