Zionists tried to use God. But God used them.

…or how zionism is at the core of Judaism.

I’ve had my head in Jewish texts for a while now while working on my zionist sci-fi novel and I want to move away from fiction for a minute to write about something that I think isn’t well understood in the debates around zionism and Judaism. And it’s this: Judaism has zionism built into it. There is no escaping it. The two can’t be disentangled.

Zionism is just Jewish nationalism. It's the belief that Jews constitute one people and they are bound to the Holy Land by forces beyond human control. Nationalism might be a relatively new idea and zionism itself dates back to the 19th century. But this basic concept — of a unique Jewish people united by destiny and tied to a land — is much older than that and is based on the core text of Judaism, the Torah. This idea, which I call ancient zionist, is a spiritual one — and it’s central to Judaism. It’s the sun around which everything else revolves. Even the ultra-religious sects known for their anti-zionism — including the Satmar or even Neturei Karta, whose members show up to support Palestine at protests and who burn their Israeli passports — support ancient zionism.

There are some Jews who will argue that zionism isn’t built into Judaism. They believe you can be a religious Jew without being a Jewish nationalist or a Jewish supremacist. I think Jewish Currents, a magazine that’s been appealing to younger left-leaning American Jews, channels this worldview. Organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now have members who feel this way, as well. Evgenia and I talked to Shaul Magid, a rabbi who thinks Judaism can be disentangled from zionism. And I think Corey Robin, who we spoke to a few weeks ago, hopes so, too.

I used to agree with this position. I also thought that you could disentangle Judaism from zionism — that you could be a religious Jew and yet reject Jewish nationalism. But I don’t think so anymore.

The reason is that I’ve been studying the Torah. And it didn't take long for me to realize that Judaism at its core has zionism built into it…not a soft nationalism but a hard nationalism that makes it easy to justify genocide, which is what we’re seeing now.

At the core of the Jewish religion is land.

YHWH is the Jewish god. YHWH’s relationship with the Jewish people isn’t some abstract thing that transcends the physical world, like it is with Christians and their god. According to the Torah — the foundational text on which Judaism rests — the sacred is rooted in territory, a very specific chunk of territory that YHWH promised to Abraham and his children. This god’s deal was this: I chose you as my special people. You are better than everyone else. If you obey me and honor me, I will give you this land forever and ever, let you dominate it, and make you fruitful and multiply. That was “The Covenant.” The land that was given in this pact was more or less the land that the state of Israel controls now. Actually YHWH promised Abraham much land…land that extends all the way to Iraq, and some zionists have wanted to claim the entirety of that territory.

For my purposes here the precise borders that YHWH promised the ancient Jews aren’t important. The point is that in this religion, the Jewish people are tied to a specific territory given to them their god. They are commanded to dwell on this land, to control it. According to the text, it’s their destiny, their holy calling, their duty. This is ancient zionism.¹

“To your seed I have given this land — from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates…” (Read my translation of Genesis 15)

Speaking about academic theories about the origin of the Torah, one of the dominant versions, as I understand it, is this: the Torah was essentially written and edited to be a kind of proto-nationalist text that reaffirmed Jewish/Israelite ownership over the Holy Land. It was probably put together while the priestly class was in forced Babylonian exile in 597 BCE. So even if we forget this YHWH character, the political purpose of this religious text was at its core nationalistic: it tied a people to a land.²

This ancient zionist doctrine was more or less natural because for the most part this Israelite ethno-religious community lived on the land.³ Then something happened that forced a change. Around 70 CE, the Roman Empire put down a revolt in Judea and destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem and banned Jews from praying at their holiest site — the site where all main religious sacrifices were carried out.

Roman siege of Jerusalem

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Jews lost total control of the land that YHWH had promised them and Judaism became a religion in exile. And so the old school Judaism of Torah morphed into the Judaism of the Rabbis. To keep the religion alive and to keep their power over their communities, rabbis adapted the religion so that it could exist without attachment to the land — without the temple and without animal sacrifices that had to be carried with exacting precision. Instead of sacrificing animals, Jews would pray and pray and pray and follow very strict rules and study the Torah and Talmud, a new text that now superseded the Torah. In essence, these new Jews would sacrifice themselves — their time, their effort — instead of sacrificing goats and pigeons and bulls.⁴

The religion morphed but the focus on the land and the pact that YHWH made with the Jewish people remained. But it became more abstract. It was turned into a messianic promise: The Jews would be restored to Israel and Jerusalem when they finally redeemed themselves in the eyes of YHWH. “One day, when we are pious and pure, the Lord will bring us back to the Holy Land.” That kind of thing…

Time passed — centuries. Jewish communities and this new Rabbinical religion had moved on. They spread out far away from Jerusalem and the Holy Land. They had new political realities to deal with, new societies in which to live, new power structures to contend with. Jews strove to fit in wherever they lived, whether in Europe or the Middle East. And the rabbis did their best to suck up to power there — to kings and tsars and pashas. A lot of Jews did well and prospered and many were exploited, frequently by fellow Jews.

In these societies the rabbinical class ran the show. In many places monarchs granted Jews total autonomy to run things inside their societies. Rabbis set up religious courts and ran extremely repressive theocracies — societies within societies. In many cases rabbis were seen as living deities by their followers in a very cult-like matter that is still practiced today. Some have described these older Jewish communities as perhaps the most “totalitarian societies in the whole history of mankind.” But maybe this is hyperbole…⁵

This went on up until the 19th century when liberalization in Europe allowed Jews to more easily leave their repressive communities.

Almost two thousand years had passed at this point. And all this time the ancient zionism that was built into Judaism had remained part of the religion but only in a purely spiritual sense. The Holy Land and YHWH’s promise was the focus of daily prayers. But no one even thought that Jews could return and rule the land. What were the Jews gonna do? Storm Jerusalem by force in their fur hats and funny socks? It wasn’t even a possibility. And anyway, why would the rabbis want to move somewhere and risk losing followers and their personal power? “No thank you, we’ll stick to the old ways,” they said. And so they did.

So when zionism started taking off among European Jews in the 19th century, the majority of rabbis were against it. They still preached a doctrine that kept Judaism’s religious zionism confined to the messianic realm. It’ll happen but sometimes in the future when YHWH says so. Return to land will be YHWH’s reward to Jews when they finally became good in YHWH’s eyes. And to be good, Jews had to carefully observe all the laws that the rabbis laid out for them. They had to do what the rabbis told them. It was a good racket — and still is.

While the rabbis were against zionism, the idea of Jewish nationalism was taking off in Europe among newly liberated secular Jews who saw themselves as European now — as peers of other great European nations. These secular zionists were aping nationalist ideas already bouncing around Europe at the time — ideas about there being natural entities that could be called “nations” and that every nation should have its own chunk of land and if they don’t they’ll fall into degeneracy and race mixing and decline. This zionist movement generally had the support of Europeans, who didn’t mind getting the Jews out of Europe.

Obviously Israel — a land tied to the Jewish people not just in Judaism but in Christianity and Islam — became the focus of zionist aspirations.

And then a funny thing happened.

Zionists were secular. But to bolster their zionist claims, they took the Torah — a religious text — and turned into a historical document, a kind of contract that gave them rights to Palestine. But how secular could something be if it was based on a religious text — a text that religious Jews for thousands of years have believed had come straight from the mouth of God? Well, they were about to find out…

Ultimately these early zionist Jews succeeded. They founded a Jewish state and then expanded their control to the entirety of what used to be Palestine — the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem. The vast majority of the original founders of Israel were secular. Most of them saw themselves as socialists, even. They thought they were creating a modern secular state, where progressive secular values would rule. And yet this secular state was founded on a religious text that tells of a story of a god making a pact with a shepherd in the desert, a god who appeared in visions and in burning bushes, a god that sent angels down to earth…

Some will say that secular zionists were cynical, that they were using the Torah to give their movement legitimacy and power. And that is true. That’s how some of them saw it to an extent. Still they made the Torah the foundation of their communal identity — and so it’s not surprising that society would move along a certain track because of it.

For instance, in the 1950s, David Ben-Gurion launched a project that brought together archeologists, writers, historians and politicians — and tasked them with figuring out how to use the Torah to force a sense of unified identity and purpose on what was then a largely confused, immigrant population that spoke different languages and came from different countries. This group settled on the Torah’s Book of Joshua, which recounts the violent and genocidal conquest of the Holy Land by the twelve Israelite tribes.⁶

Ben-Gurion and other secular zionists thought they could harness the power of an ancient religion and use it to forge a national identity. They thought they could bend the words of an ancient god to their will. But no matter much they tried to neuter the sacred, it never went away.

Once a Jewish state was in place and Jews controlled Jerusalem and the holy sites, the direction that Judaism would take seems obvious. Jews controlled the land now. The ancient zionism that had been confined to abstract messianic hopes for two thousand years didn’t have to be ancient or abstract anymore. It could be real now…and it was.

Some rabbis, including people like Abraham Isaac Kook, who spearheaded religious zionism and collaborated with the secular zionist movement, predicted this a century ago. He saw secular zionists as a vessel that could be used to bring Judaism back in line with the old days, to the before the Roman Empire ended Jewish rule in Jerusalem. I’m guessing he saw secular zionists as the biggest suckers around. They would do all the hard work — they’d fight and die conquering the land, they’d do all the massacring and the ethnic cleaning, they’d slave to set up a self-sufficient society… And then the rabbis and the religious freaks and their followers would take over once it was done, heralding in the Messianic Age. That was YHWH’s plan on along, thought Kook. YHWH was working through these godless zionists to bring about god’s return. Kook called them “messiah's donkeys.”⁷

Kook was right in how own way.⁸ Religious zionism is taking over the Israeli state. It was slow at first but it’s moving now at an increasingly rapid pace. If you’ve been following the news out of Israel and Palestine the last year, it’s seems that takeover might be a done deal at this point.

Ben-Gurion and his fellow secular zionists thought they could tap the power of YHWH for their own secular ends. In the end, the 3,000 year old religion proved stronger than their modernizing secular nationalist state. YHWH proved too powerful. He escaped confinement and melted the face off their secular project, turning it into a theocracy.

It was one of those turns that you could see coming a mile away. Kinda reminds me of that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the Nazis try to weaponize the Israelite Ark of the Covenant but get their faces burned off.

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What does this mean for religious Jews generally? My prediction is that this is where the energy of the religion will increasingly move: towards more zionism…more religious violence…more conflict…more genocide…not less. We’re seeing that play out now.

I know there are progressive and left-leaning religious Jews trying to find a path forward for Judaism that isn’t based on nationalism and zionism and who are trying to forge a Judaism that’s humanistic and progressive. But I have to say that this endeavor just feels weak. Sure religious texts are meant to be interpreted and misinterpreted and new sects and strains are constantly spun off. But you really have to do some serious editing to twist Judaism into a tolerant non-supremacist religion that isn’t about territorial domination. The text is clear. It’s all about the land. To pretend it isn’t or to hide it with sophistry is the same as, I don’t know, trying to argue that Jesus was for the rich. You can do it, and good luck to you. But I think going in this direction, especially in the context of the ongoing genocide, feels disingenuous and intellectually weak. It disregards the reality of the religion and the culture that’s built on top of it. The easy slide of Israeli society into supporting and carrying out a genocide isn’t that surprising — or even an aberration — if you study the religious text on which this society is based.

—Yasha

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