X Close

The new face of Israeli nationalism The rise of Naftali Bennett suggests religious Zionism is no longer a priority

Will Bennett take over the Temple Mount? (Photo by OREL COHEN/AFP via Getty Images)

Will Bennett take over the Temple Mount? (Photo by OREL COHEN/AFP via Getty Images)


June 7, 2021   7 mins

On the night of 15 April, the first day of the holy month of Ramadan, in events reported by the New York Times correspondent Patrick Kingsley, a squad of Israeli police officers entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem, brushed the attendants aside and proceeded to cut the cables to the loudspeakers that broadcast prayers to the faithful. Israeli president Reuven Rivlin was delivering a speech at the Western Wall, lying just below the mosque, and officials worried that the prayers would drown it out.

The act, shocking and brazen even in this bare description, set in motion the series of events culminating in widespread riots inside Israel and a recurrence of the armed conflict with Hamas in Gaza. Disconnecting the loudspeakers was a way to show who the real rulers are, not only in Jerusalem but in the Temple Mount itself. By making it clear that Jewish voices should take precedence, it was a way to put Muslims and Arabs in their proper place.

For a long time, the leading religious authorities in Israel ruled that Jews should not enter the gates of the Mount. There is no way for Jews to purify themselves to enter the sacred square, no way to rebuild the Temple, which is a task best left to God. He alone can send the Messiah, in a future for which the faithful should wait and pray. Shortly after the passage of the Protection of Holy Places Law in 1967, Israel’s then religious affairs minister Zerach Warhaftig said that the Third Temple has to be built by God. The Temple Mount was the property of Israel by biblical right, but the Muslim sites would be preserved. “This makes me happy,” he added, “because we can avoid a conflict with the Muslim religion.”

Unless, as Gershom Gorenberg once put it, the future is now. Unless the waiting is over; unless history is drawing to its climax. The events of 15 April show that the question can no longer be evaded. Jewish sovereignty is now everywhere visible on the Temple Mount.

The road to the Mount has an iron logic and it remains unclear what force could stop it. Liberalism, perhaps, since its strictures separating politics from religion could preserve the religious realm as a purely spiritual aspiration. But liberalism is something that Israel has defeated. It is hardly a coincidence that illiberal thinkers such as Leo Strauss learned their political philosophy in the school of Zionism, since every line of Theodor Herzl is proof of the fact that liberalism failed to solve the Jewish question in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The liberal state could not promise European Jews anything resembling safety or dignity, it failed at the most basic task of ensuring their physical survival — but Herzl went much farther. Liberalism meant for the Jews the very real danger of spiritual no less than physical death. Only in an independent Jewish state could the Jews fully pursue the paths opened by Judaism; only in Israel could they regain their inner wholeness, their own character, free of the fear of making oneself different. Here we can detect the germ of the idea of Israel as a civilisation state, even if Herzl was on this point a very imperfect guide.

The stopping point on the route to a temple and a monarchical government — the restoration of the House of David — remains elusive. If the tradition of the halakha, the body of religious laws, expressed an attitude of distance and sanctity towards the Temple Mount, ethnic nationalism stands for a markedly different goal: the holy site as a totem expressing the ultimate sovereignty over the Land of Israel.

And, as Tomer Persico wrote, who better than Naftali Bennett to serve as a salient model for the shift of the centre of gravity of the Zionist movement from halakha to sovereignty? This probable new prime minister represents a hardline nationalism that leaves religion a few steps behind. “We will consult with rabbis, but we make the decisions in the political arena,” he declared soon after taking over conservative political party The Jewish Home.

History is the struggle to realise a myth in reality, but we now know that the world remains polytheistic. There are many opposing myths struggling for realisation and therefore many opposing ends to history.For the Jewish people, sovereignty over the Temple Mount, and not liberalism, is the logical conclusion to its collective history. At the same time, that moment is also an end, the end of Jewish history, and it is in this context that the many strictures against bringing it about must be understood. In an essay first published in 1959, “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism”, Gershom Scholem worried whether Jewish history would be able to endure the entry into the concrete realm of power without perishing in the crisis of its Messianic claim.

For the Israeli radical right, the inability or unwillingness to take complete control over the Temple Mount is an obvious symptom of a diminished or mutilated sovereignty. Commentators such as Yair Wallach unwittingly add fuel to the fire when they stress that the Muslim sites and the ongoing Palestinian presence above the Western Wall constitute a challenge far more significant than the secular power of the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. The latter also has a clear understanding of these facts and does not miss any opportunity to associate itself with the defence of the Islamic sites on the Haram, as happened again in the latest Gaza war.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that liberals, both in Israel and outside, prefer to appeal to the Jewish tradition of sanctity and distance as a vaguely Rawlsian argument by which to get Jewish conservatives to agree to a general framework of religious tolerance and coexistence. For Rawls, the political conception of justice was the great overlap between different ways of life, but each group has its own reasons to support that conception. A religious group may support the principles of freedom and equality because they are dictated by religious doctrine, while artists and intellectuals arrive at them from the point of view of the eccentric individual. Similarly, liberal commentators have argued that Israel should stop short of bringing the Jewish state back to life for reasons intrinsic to the Jewish tradition itself.

Whether this strategy can succeed is, to avoid all pieties, rather doubtful. As Jewish religious conservatives will readily point out, there is no reason why the Jewish tradition should be made to fit with liberalism rather than the other way around. After all, Judaism is thousands of years old, while liberalism dates back at most two or three centuries.

The contemporary alternatives to liberalism are quite limited in number. There is the Chinese tradition of imperial power. There is Hinduism, the long adventure of Hindu thought, which no one should take for a strictly religious affair. There is Turkey and the bright lights of Turkic, Ottoman and Islamic history woven together in an impossible whole. And there is, of course, Israel and Judaism. These are the best candidates to be considered civilisation-states in our time.

The concept has little to do with size: Israel is small, but Judaism is old and it has grown both inside and outside liberalism, learning from it while remaining fundamentally unconvinced of its final truth. Nor does the civilisation state have anything to do with race or ethnicity, for civilisation is a concept born of the attempt to rise above these biological realities. The civilisation state is an affair of the mind and the heart, the two together. What distinguishes a civilisation-state is its ability to provide an overarching framework for social and political life and therefore a viable or plausible alternative to liberalism, the general framework we are most familiar with.

Now, when people talk about Israel as a civilisation-state they usually mean that the Israeli state represents a specific people and does not aspire to the kind of universality that is common with Western democracies: Israel is the state of the Jewish people. Yoram Hazony wrote a whole book decrying the attempt to transform Israel into a neutral state representing universal values. What he defended instead was a national state, a state representing the Jewish nation, yet a national state is a close cousin of the liberal state. The freedom and autonomy of the individual needs to be guaranteed not only against internal but also external threats, and in the latter sphere, this relies on organising the powers of the nation against other nations. The liberal and national states exist on the same plane. One is turned inward, the other outward. The civilisation-state is a different creature altogether.

If Israel were to become a civilisation-state, its anchor would be the long and manifold Jewish tradition. It would be the state which today represented that tradition in all its aspects. Such a state might well have a territory and a people, but it would not be defined by them. Its essence or core would be the civilisation or way of life it had been tasked to preserve and develop. And of course, Israel as a civilisation state would in my view be able to free itself from the logic of an existential conflict with its Arab citizens or the Palestinians outside its borders. These groups may appear as a threat to the idea of Israel as a nation. They would not be a threat to the historical project of carrying Jewish civilisation into the future. A civilisation state, as opposed to a national state, should be comfortable with the existence of many different cultures and peoples in its midst. Civilisations can learn even from different and opposing civilisations.

Is it surprising that religious Zionism ended up as a hostage to nationalism? Hazony struggled against the drift towards a liberal state in Israel, and he certainly can rejoice in contributing to the demise of liberal ideas in Israel over the last two decades, but what he replaced them with was the typical European nationalism of the 19th century, to which Herzl had already succumbed. Was anything gained with the exchange? The result is the same subordination to foreign intellectual fashions which so enrages Hazony.

According to Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the Land of Israel is one unity, an organic entity connected with the Jewish people, so that the people and the land are in complete oneness as a sovereign historical actor — concepts proper to European nationalism. Amid the growing crisis before the 1967 war, Kook addressed his students in a famous speech: “Where is each and every clod of earth? Every last bit, every four cubits of the Land of Israel? Can we forgo even one millimeter of them? God forbid!”

Hazony is correct on one point. The state of the Law of Return, whose flag includes representations of the Star of David and the traditional Jewish prayer shawl is not and will never become a liberal state. There will be no addition of a crescent moon to the Israeli flag and Arab citizens will never feel that the state belongs equally to them. There will be no new constitutional doctrine whereby the state gets reinterpreted at the highest level of abstraction so that it becomes identical with universal dictates of freedom and democracy.

The new coalition government — implausibly spanning the secular far left, a religious Muslim party and religious Jewish parties — cannot change these realities. But the national state is not the only alternative to liberalism. Ben-Gurion once asked: “Can we become a chosen people? Can we become a light unto nations? Is the redemption possible?” Those would seem to be the commandments of a civilisation-state, a state both sustained by and committed to the flowering of a civilisation.


Bruno Maçães is a Portuguese political scientist, politician, business strategist, author and is currently a non-resident Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute in Washington. He was the Portuguese Europe Minister from 2013-2015

MacaesBruno

Join the discussion


Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber


To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.

Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.

Subscribe
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

31 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Esther W
Esther W
3 years ago

Indeed a “bare description”- bare and partial. It was not “the Israeli president delivering a speech at the Western Wall” but rather the opening ceremony for Memorial Day when Israel remembers the soldiers killed in its wars. And unfortunately the Mosque has a “tradition” of broadcasting the call to prayer at full volume at times like this. Just saying.

Last edited 3 years ago by Esther W
Joe Wein
Joe Wein
3 years ago
Reply to  Esther W

Esther – I was going to point out the same thing. Thank you for making the case so eloquently.

Simon Webster
Simon Webster
3 years ago

When it comes to peddling pseudo-intellectual garbage Maçaes has form. But it’s in his writings on Israel that his bias really shines through.
To Maçaes, the sign that Israel is an ethno-nationalist state is that its flag is emblazoned with a Star of David and that its Law of Return favours Jewish applicants for citizenship. Of course, as a good European he’s fully aware that Denmark and Finland have similar laws and that their flags – like every flag in Scandinavia – are emblazoned with a Christian cross. But you won’t find a similar (fatuous) argument about Denmark or Finland … because Jews are that uniquely bigoted, ethnocentric people.

JP Martin
JP Martin
3 years ago
Reply to  Simon Webster

A blind spot and an obsession that is far too common. It has warped his brain.

William MacDougall
William MacDougall
3 years ago
Reply to  Simon Webster

You’re mistaken re Finland and Denmark. Their immigration laws do not say that only people whose ancestors were ethnic Finns or Danes or are Christians have the right to immigrate; ethnic Swedes who were citizens of those two countries qualify, as do Jews whose ancestors where citizens. They do not say that if you had ancestors there two thousand years ago you have any rights now. They say that if you have relatively recent ancestors who were born there that you have the right to immigrate. The equivalent for Israel would be a law which said that anyone who has ancestors born in the British Mandate of Palestine would have the right to immigrate, which they most certainly do not have at present. And people whose ancestors never lived in Palestine or did not do so for centuries would have no special rights.
Re the flag, roughly half the population ruled by the Israeli government is not Jewish. Either have a fair coherent two state solution, or the flag is simply wrong.

Last edited 3 years ago by William MacDougall
JP Martin
JP Martin
3 years ago

Because not allowing religious zealots to shout into electric amplifiers at the top of their lungs while the president addresses a crowd on a national holiday is unreasonable. Genius take. This is the sort of conclusion that an otherwise intelligent person can only reach when their brain is under the influence of a deep prejudice.

Last edited 3 years ago by JP Martin
Peter LR
Peter LR
3 years ago

“ Only in an independent Jewish state could the Jews fully pursue the paths opened by Judaism”
Theodor Herzl who conceived the Jewish homeland idea was no believer. His motivation was the avoidance of European persecution. His vision was of a homeland which would provide safety for Jews. He even considered offers of land in Cyprus and Uganda. He was responding to Russian pogroms and the notorious Dreyfus affair which had the supposedly liberal French crying “Death to the Jews” in the streets.
Sadly, although the conflict in Israel has religious roots it is still a matter of Jewish survival rather than religious hegemony.

Addie Schogger
Addie Schogger
3 years ago

The speech by President Rivlin was not the cause of the Israeli action in al Aqsa. The immediate cause was the hurling of boulders, stored in the mosque, from the Temple Mount onto Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall below.
I am surprised that a political commentator buys the line that this caused the Hamas attacks on Israel. I suppose he believes that assassination of Archduke Ferdinand caused the first world war.

Last edited 3 years ago by Addie Schogger
Jonathan Weil
Jonathan Weil
3 years ago
Reply to  Addie Schogger

“I suppose he believes that assassination of Archduke Ferdinand caused the first world war.”

Didn’t it? Sure, there were many, many other factors at work. So many that it becomes impossible to single out just one. In which case, the most directly proximate cause is as good a candidate as any, especially considering the shady context behind the assassination itself — the presence of a rogue state (Serbia) on the borders of “the lynchpin of European security”, the salience within that state of an aggressive, semi-official terrorist organisation (think Hamas/Palestine, almost), and the way Russia was providing resources, diplomatic support and encouragement to said terrorist organisation. It turns out that a lot of the Great Power dynamics usually cited as the “real” causes of the war, to which the assassination was supposedly incidental, are actually embodied in the assassination itself.

Last edited 3 years ago by Jonathan Weil
Addie Schogger
Addie Schogger
3 years ago
Reply to  Jonathan Weil

“Didn’t it?”
No. Nothing more than a pretext

Jonathan Weil
Jonathan Weil
3 years ago
Reply to  Addie Schogger

A pretext for whom? And what, then, was the real cause?

Addie Schogger
Addie Schogger
3 years ago
Reply to  Jonathan Weil

Imperialism, nationalism and economics. The system of alliances didn’t exactly help. Europe was a tinderbox just waiting for a spark.

Last edited 3 years ago by Addie Schogger
kathleen carr
kathleen carr
3 years ago
Reply to  Addie Schogger

Might I make the suggestion that Jerusalem be turned into an independent city where all religions can go? The visiters, guides etc would have to be checked first ( incase of weapons or explosives etc)and stay on the outskirts in hotels. The city could be guarded by UN troops ( who don’t belong to any three main religions involved ) because at the moment noone is happy with the situation.

Addie Schogger
Addie Schogger
3 years ago
Reply to  kathleen carr

People of all religions CAN go! This was not the case before 1967 when Jews were forbidden to enter the old city. Thousands of Muslims regularly enter the temple mount complex with restrictions only in periods of tension. The Palestinian ‘president’ has already said that he doesn’t want ‘filthy Jewish feet’ on the temple mount. this does not augur well for the future if this ‘moderate’ Palestinian were to gain control of the eastern half of the city.

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
3 years ago
Reply to  Addie Schogger

But if I drop a lighted match into the tinderbox – especially if deliberately – then that is the cause of the explosion. If FF had not been shot that day, then things might have turned out differently. If only.

Addie Schogger
Addie Schogger
3 years ago
Reply to  JR Stoker

with respect, I don’t think so. Something else would have happened real or iagined.

Gandydancer x
Gandydancer x
3 years ago

“The act, shocking and brazen even in this bare description…”
Um, no it’s not. Your right to swing your fist ends short of when it hits my nose, and your right to pour noise into the commons is similarly limited. I don’t know anything about this incident, but if you want to convince me that it was shocking or brazen a “bare description” will not suffice.

Penelope Lane
Penelope Lane
3 years ago
Reply to  Gandydancer x

Your right to swing your fist ends short of when it hits my nose, and your right to pour noise into the commons is similarly limited.
Glad you made that point.
People seem to have no trouble understanding why physical violence is unacceptable, yet appear incapable of grasping the fact that noise can be an even more violent aggression against one’s neighbour.
ForcIng one’s noise into the public arena is a form of mind control, affecting the soul at deep levels. This applies equally to invasive calls to prayer as to playing loud rock music through your open window into your neighbour’s home.

JP Martin
JP Martin
3 years ago
Reply to  Penelope Lane

It’s a common form of torture, actually

Fred Dibnah
Fred Dibnah
3 years ago

And of course, Israel as a civilisation state would in my view be able to free itself from the logic of an existential conflict with its Arab citizens or the Palestinians outside its borders. These groups may appear as a threat to the idea of Israel as a nation. They would not be a threat to the historical project of carrying Jewish civilisation into the future.

The man is delusional. Without stating it, he is proposing all jews leave what is the state of Israel and the West Bank.

Abe Stamm
Abe Stamm
3 years ago

I’m unfamiliar with Bruno Maçães, but to say that “the rise of Naftali Bennett suggests religious Zionism is no longer a priority” is idiotic and exposes the fact that the author has no real understanding of the Jewish Homeland, Zionism, and modern day Israel.
Whether politically left, middle or right-wing leaning, the average Jewish-Israeli citizen, from the secular to the religious ultra-orthodox, will always vote for national security as a their primary ballot box concern. Bennett is a Zionist, a nationalist, and a militarist… he is little concerned with a resolution of the Palestinian “problem”, the majority of whom live in 3rd and 4th generation refugee camps in Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria. When’s the last time the major media outlets covered the squalid lives of the 2.5 million ethnic Palestinians residing in Jordan, peoples who have no rights of citizenship? The 20% of the Israeli citizenry who are not Jewish have ALL rights of citizenship, and are represented in all aspects of Israeli culture and business, including the upper echelons of the military and as members of the Knesset, being Israeli’s version of Congress.

Stani Huepfl
Stani Huepfl
3 years ago

“But liberalism is something that Israel has defeated. It is hardly a coincidence that illiberal thinkers such as Leo Strauss learned their political philosophy in the school of Zionism, since every line of Theodor Herzl is proof of the fact that liberalism failed to solve the Jewish question in the 19th and 20th centuries… Herzl went much farther. Liberalism meant for the Jews the very real danger of spiritual and physical death.”
Interesting article. However I am very confused by this claim. Herzl indeed criticised the European states of his time for failing to protect their Jewish minority, but he was a liberal thinker through-and-through. Any good faith reading of his works confirms this. So to present Herzl and by extension Israel as uniquely illiberal seems misleading.

Last edited 3 years ago by Stani Huepfl
JP Martin
JP Martin
3 years ago
Reply to  Stani Huepfl

You clearly know more about Herzl than I do but, as I had understood, wasn’t his criticism directed at European nationalism rather than European states qua states? Certainly that would have been a typical experience for minorities living through the dissolution of Austria-Hungary as its constituents embraced forms of nationalism that would be in tension with the identities of their minority residents.

Stani Huepfl
Stani Huepfl
3 years ago
Reply to  JP Martin

Yes – sorry my comment was poorly worded. Similarly I’m no expert on Herzl. However I get the impression that his criticism had many parts – on one hand, populist politicians’ tendency to stir anti-semitism among the masses, and on the other, social Darwinists and their (widespread) claim that the Jewish race was inferior. In many ways I think it was not a criticism so much as a realisation that the Jewish people couldn’t live in safety due to the omnipresence of anti-semitic attitudes in Europe. So yes it was not directed at ‘states’ to the best of my understanding but rather the growth of anti-semitism among their people. Thank you for pointing this out.

JP Martin
JP Martin
3 years ago
Reply to  Stani Huepfl

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

Simon Newman
Simon Newman
3 years ago

If Israel were to become a civilisation-state, its anchor would be the long and manifold Jewish tradition. It would be the state which today represented that tradition in all its aspects. Such a state might well have a territory and a people, but it would not be defined by them.”
So it might NOT have a territory and a people? How is this a State?

Penelope Lane
Penelope Lane
3 years ago

I found this article difficult to understand. It seemed to me to be confused and confusing.
Is the term “civilisational state” an accepted term in political science? If so, what does it actually mean? What is its relationship to physical occupation of territory?
I’m not a political scientist, so could someone help me out here please?

Matthew Freedman
Matthew Freedman
3 years ago

By the way universalism doesn’t exist in the Western Democracies or anywhere. To get anywhere minorities have to integrate. The traditional collective history of most Western Democracies is the one that is taken as the history of the country, not other more recent residents.
A lot European countries have crosses on the flag, have bank holidays on christian days and the majority cultural language is christian. None of this makes this British Jew not feel at home here. It is home.
Many Muslim countries have crescents on the flag, in their constitutions have statements about sharia being a guide to the national law and also statements about Islam being that the state religion and people belonging to the Arab people, in the Arab homeland. A country like Turkey doesn’t even recognise the culture of the Kurdish minority who has no other cultural representation.
Why talk about the star of david and the blue strips excluding Muslim, when crescents on flags appear everywhere road the region. Israel is the most liberal country in the region, that’s why you get pride there. The new religious muslim coalition partner in government has said it will block pro-LGBT legislation suggested by the ultra-liberal party Meretz. It makes mockery of self described LGBT supporters, who mock Israeli pride events. Intersectionality puts LGBT rights very low in the hierarchy.

Last edited 3 years ago by Matthew Freedman
rj5555366
rj5555366
3 years ago

…Just become another multiple
Cultures sham of a nation like those in Western Europe, with their ever deepening divisions and libtard self hatred… seems to be the sum of this

Harry Potter
Harry Potter
3 years ago

Every country considers nationalism a good idea to promote and instill into their children’s heads, except those one in the West. Yet it seems no justice fighters in the West is willing to pay attention to (let alone critique) this common sense prevailing outside their echo chamber.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
3 years ago

Israel is the new Sparta, tough, laconic, organised.

The Palestinians on the other hand are the new Helots.
Someone has to be, it was, and always will be thus.