Origins and Consequences of Extremist Religious Zionist Settlements on the West Bank

Abstract

A necessary condition for the success of the 7 October 2023 Hamas deadly incursion into Israel was the absence of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from that region. The IDF was involved in helping the settlers in their conflicts with Palestinians on the West Bank, many miles from the Gaza border. Absent the settlers, it is likely that either the Hamas attack might not have occurred or would have been blunted at the outset, yielding a much more measured Israeli response. Hence it is imperative that we understand the origins of the settler movement. It is to be found in Biblical injunctions that were to be amplified considerably by the outcomes of the extraordinarily successful Six-Day war of 1967 and its sequel the Yom Kippur war of 1973. In the third chapter of the Book of Genesis, that is, of the entire Hebrew Bible, God commands Abraham to leave his current domicile and travel to Canaan where a great nation would be formed. Effectively, this is the religious foundation of the connection between the people of Israel and the land of Israel, then called Canaan. The contrast between the outcomes of 1967 and 1973 was striking. Instead of a lopsided victory in the earlier war, the human losses in 1973 were surprising, even terrifying. This intense ephemeral gain combined with a world view defense engendered by mortality salience established the basis for later religious Zionist extremism. The vastly increased number of casualties in 1973 set the stage for the victory of Likud, much more amenable to West Bank settlements than the ousted Labor government had been. Religious Zionists leaped at this opportunity, justifying this activity by referring to God’s commandment to settle the entire land of Israel in the West Bank territories using their Biblical Hebrew names: Yehuda (Judea) and Shomron (Samaria), whatever the cost in violent Palestinian land dispossession.

1. Introduction

At the outset the specific concerns of this article need to be addressed and distinguished from others. Violent displacement of Palestinians on the West Bank by religious Zionists for purposes of establishing new settlements or expanding existing ones is the major concern. Large settlements on the West Bank established for the more prosaic purposes of affordability or commuting proximity to Jerusalem like Ma’aleh Adumim or Beitar Illit (Handel and Maggor 2016) that did not require violent Palestinian dispossession are outside the purview of this analysis.

Understanding the importance of the immediate consequences of this activity is to be followed by its ancient origins, and the war experience of an ephemeral gain engendered by loss. This is followed by an examination of the statements of religious Zionist leaders and their extremist content. A more detailed examination of the consequences of these settlements then follows.

At the heart of this analysist is the ephemeral gain engendered by the contrast between the stunning victory of the 1967 Six Day War, accomplished with comparably few casualties, and the vastly greater human losses incurred as the result of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Noteworthy is the threat and fear of a subordination to the rapidly advancing Arab armies in both the north and south of Israel immediately after Yom Kippur day. Human losses associated with the ephemeral gain invoked mortality salience yielding an extreme worldview defense, here extremist religious Zionism. Ephemeral gains were found in post-World War I Germany and Italy that were threatened and feared the ascendancy of the principal World War I European Allies—Britain and France—that ultimately yielded political extremism (Midlarsky 2011). Now this explanation can be added to the understanding of contemporary extremist elements of Israeli society.

2. Importance

Israeli Settlements in the West Bank are a contentious issue both in Israel and internationally. Domestically there is the realization that if the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had not been preoccupied with protecting settlers engaged in conflict with Palestinians on the West Bank, they would have been available to repel the Hamas invasion of 7 October 2023 at an earlier stage. Israeli civilian fatalities would have been far fewer likely leading to a more measured Israeli response. Indeed, absence of the IDF from the Gaza vicinity was a necessary condition for the success of the Hamas incursion.

Internationally, the extent of Palestinian deaths incurred by the Israeli response in attempting to destroy Hamas has led to condemnations, made more salient by the variety of countries prepared to recognize a Palestinian state. As late as the 20th century, these countries experienced domination and or settlement by others: Ireland by Britain, Norway by Sweden, and Slovenia by Austria-Hungary (and later within Yugoslavia by Serbia). The South African charge of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice was likely influenced by South Africa’s experience of white settlement and subsequent apartheid. Later, other Western countries followed suit. Thus, Israeli settlement policy requires analysis; it has been carried out principally by religious Zionists.

Since Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent return to power, the extent of violent dispossession of Palestinian land has accelerated. Formerly confined to Area C, with approximately 61% of the West Bank’s territory, it was recently extended to Area B. David Shulman describes the exodus from the Palestinian village Magha’ir a-Dir after attacks by Israeli settlers. “They are motivated by an intense hatred of all Arab people and a depraved messianic ideology—a travesty of the Jewish tradition. As one of them said when the outpost was set up in Magha’ir a-Dir, ‘This is what redemption looks like’” (Shulman 2025, p. 18).

The Biblical religious basis for Jewish settlement will now be identified, followed by the interstate relations that affected religious Zionists. These include the 1967 Six-Day War, the Khartoum pronouncement indicating no Arab negotiations with Israel on the future of the captured West Bank in that war, and the profound impact of the far more deadly 1973 Yom Kippur War. In the wake of that war, pronouncements of religious Zionist leaders are examined. These occur within the context of the rise to power of the settlement friendly Likud Party replacing the Labor Party that had legal restrictions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank. For most of these religious leaders, their focus is on the land of Israel, not the State of Israel.

Important as the Biblical origins of religious Zionism are to understanding the settler movement, more explanation is needed. Specifically, we need to understand why the settler movement began when it did and not at some other time. To do so, I will turn to the consequences of loss and mortality salience. Prospect theory tells us that losses are more highly valued than gains; experimental evidence supports this claim (Kahneman and Tversky 1979). Put another way, I like to win, but hate losing. Losses are especially salient when they come after a period of exceptional gain—an intense ephemeral gain (Midlarsky 2011).

When they are human losses, mortality salience comes into play in the form of a worldview defense (Rosenblatt et al. 1989; Pyszczynski et al. 2003). If that worldview is religious, then key elements of the religion are emphasized. The contrast between the spectacular outcomes of the 1967 Six Day War and the human costs of the 1973 Yom Kippur War set in motion the religious Zionist settler movement that has increasingly veered toward extremism in relations with the Palestinians (Bergman and Mazzetti 2024).

3. Ancient Origins

In the third chapter of the Book of Genesis, that is, of the entire Hebrew Bible, God commands Abraham to leave his current domicile and travel to Canaan. Thus: “Now, the LORD said unto Abram: ‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto the land that I will show thee. And I will make of thee a great nation’…. And Abram passed through the land unto the place of Shechem, unto Elon Moreh. And the Canaanite was then in the land. And the LORD appeared unto Abram, and said: ‘Unto thy seed I will give this land.’” (Rev. Dr. A. Cohen 1947, pp. 60–61).

Noteworthy here is the statement that within Canaan, the first place that Abraham stopped was Shechem (today’s Nablus on the West Bank), implying that here should be the first settlement of the conquering Hebrews upon their return to Canaan (the obscure place Elon Moreh will have contemporary significance, as we shall see).

Effectively, this is the religious foundation of the connection between the people of Israel and the land of Israel, then called Canaan. This narrative begins immediately after the chapters on the Creation (Genesis) and Noah, a righteous Gentile living prior to the advent of Jewish history. The importance of this third chapter of the Hebrew Bible, therefore, cannot be ignored, for it inextricably links the formation of the Jewish people with a given territory.

Yet, there are two possible reactions to this Biblical injunction. The first, a traditional one prior to the founding of the State of Israel, was essentially quietist. As are all of the remaining chapters of the Torah (the Five Books of Moses), this one is read during one week of every year. Hence, it is a ritual, where the words themselves do not constitute a call to action. They are recited and studied simply as part of observing the laws of Judaism.

The second possible response indeed is an imperative call to action. The land is there to be conquered and settled. There is little choice in the matter. These activities are simply what an observant Jew must do as commanded in the holy Torah. What elicits this second active response?

An initial answer is straightforward, even obvious. For the nearly two millennia that the Jews did not have the political power to reestablish their own state, this latter alternative was simply not available After conquest and dispersion by one empire (the Roman), the succeeding Byzantine and Ottoman Empires governing what had become known in Roman times as Palestine, were too powerful to be challenged in any meaningful way. Only after defeat by the British of the last of these empires was the way open for the establishment of a state that could allow the conquest and settlement commanded in the Bible.

Yet, the settlement alternative was not chosen immediately after the stunning Israeli victory in the 1967 Six-Day War leading to the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza. The West Bank settlement process began escalating only after the 1973 Yom Kippur War with its existential threat and many Israeli casualties, and the subsequent election of the right-wing Menachem Begin and his openness to the settlement program. During the six-year interwar period, for the most part, only settlements deemed to be absolutely necessary for Israeli security were allowed, typically found along the Jordan River bank. Effectively, the remaining territories were being retained as a bargaining chip in any future negotiations, as bargaining theory within the rational choice tradition would predict (e.g., Powell 2002; Fearon 1995; Fearon and Laitin 2003; Walter 2003).

What led Israeli society to veer from this seemingly attractive international political trajectory to one that is now conflict riven and is especially inimical to a bargaining scenario yielding a peaceful settlement? Indeed, the former Prime Minister, Ehud Barack, a largely secular leader, was willing to allow Palestinian control over the vast majority of the occupied territories in the 2000 negotiations. But the settlements before and after have become an increasingly contentious issue for the religious right, which leads to much of the political conflict within Israel, and between Israel and the Palestinians. What accounts for this abandonment of a clearly rational policy to one that centers on retention of the settlements at almost any cost? Clearly the existence of a Jewish state is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the rapid escalation of settlement growth beginning in the 1970s.

We must look elsewhere for a more complete explanation. And that explanation will not only address the non-rational elements of the settlement program, but will also suggest a dynamic for a related problem. Why did the messianic impulse among religious Zionists that took root after the 1967 Six Day War actually burgeon after the far more costly Yom Kippur War of 1973? Surely, given a rational choice scenario, that impulse should have been dampened, but was not.

4. The Wars: An Ephemeral Gain

The following analysis is centered on Israeli society, but international events had impact as well. Among the most important was the statement of the Arab League at its 1967 Khartoum conference almost immediately after the Israeli victory that there would be “‘no’ to peace with Israel, ‘no’ to negotiations with it, and ‘no’ to recognition of it” (Shadid 2010, WK 4). The imbalance of power between Israel and its enemies was so great that such Arab intransigence could be virtually ignored. But the costly military events of 1973 were to shed a very different light on this conflict. The 1973 Yom Kippur War rendered the 1967 Six-Day War an ephemeral victory. No longer could Israel bask in the warm glow of a lopsided military outcome.

Not only were Israeli casualties in 1973 far more numerous than those incurred in 1967, but the initial Syrian and Egyptian gains were so rapid that it even appeared as if the Galilee (the north of Israel) and the Negev (the south of Israel) would soon by overrun by the Arab invaders. Only the combination of sound, even bold Israeli tactics at the front and a massive arms airlift from the United States (matching that to the Arabs by the Soviet Union) transformed these early defeats into ultimate victory. As Gorenberg (2006, p. 259) commented “of that kind of triumph, Pyrrhus said 2250 years before, ‘One more such victory and we are utterly undone.’” Reliance on an external ally, not present in 1967, became necessary. For the first time since 1948, an existential threat was established in the form of early Arab military victories. Also for the first time, mournful Yiddish melodies redolent of the Holocaust were heard prominently on Israeli radio. (At this time, an Israeli wag was said to declare that when the state was to be shut down, one must remember to turn off the lights).

5. Jewish Historical Subordination

Subordination can take many forms. It can be seen in the Ottoman establishment of dhimmi communities throughout the Empire, including Palestine, as monotheistic (Christians and Jews) “Peoples of the Book” who could govern themselves in the millet system, but could not govern Muslims and were subject to additional taxation. Or in the rule of both Arabs and Jews as subjects of the British Empire in Palestine during the interwar League of Nations Mandate period. But subordination also can be seen as a nihilistic descent into purgatory that was generated in the Holocaust. Here, the subordination is absolute and permanent; the dead simply cannot threaten any longer, if they ever did in the first place. Both of these types of subordination, the colonial (or Ottoman semi-colonial) and the extreme sanguinary, are represented in the immediate prehistory of the State of Israel.

The traditional ultra-Orthodox response to political subordination was passivity in the expectation of messianic redemption. It was not the province of the Jewish people to hasten the “end of days” when messianic redemption would be fulfilled. Instead, ritual observance in the purest sense was required to indicate worthiness of the Jews to receive this enormous gift from above.

At the same time, a dualistic understanding of the world was being emphasized in the ultra-Orthodox community. And that binary view was amplified considerably as the Holocaust and then Israeli independence, both absolutely critical events in Jewish history, loomed on the horizon. As soon as the first visible efforts of the Zionists appeared in East-Central Europe, Rabbi Hayyim Eleazar Shapira, the Munkácser rebbe (Hasidic leader in Hungary), proclaimed a ban on Jewish emigration to Palestine. There should be no Jewish effort to “force the end of days.” According to Shapira, “One may not rely on any natural effort or material salvation by human labor. One should not expect redemption from any source other than God” (quoted in Ravitzky 1996, p. 47).

An early disciple of Shapira was Yo’el Moshe Teitelbaum, later to be the Satmarer rebbe, and like Shapira, a vehement opponent of Zionism and the State of Israel. The community of Satmar Hasidim, both in Brooklyn and in Jerusalem, among other locations, is perhaps the largest group of Jews utterly opposed to the Zionist enterprise and its most successful manifestation, Israel’s continued existence.

During the Holocaust, this eschatological dualism was magnified in the emphasis on the opposition of tumah (impurity) to kedushah (holiness). Hitler, as the modern representation of Amalek, Israel’s traditional Biblical enemy, is the apotheosis of tumah. The Jewish people in their martyrdom are in a state of kedushah (Greenberg 2005, p. 147).

Even Modern Orthodoxy was influenced by this ideation. The acknowledged leader of this Orthodox movement during the Holocaust period and beyond, Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, who valued secular learning along with the sacred declared:

In the midst of a nightmare replete with the atrocities of Majdanek, Treblinka, and Buchenwald, a night of gas chambers and crematoria, a night when God’s visage was utterly absent…a night of endless searching and seeking of the Beloved [God]—on this very night the Beloved came forth. The Deity who conceals Himself in the hidden pavilion suddenly appeared and began to knock at the door of the tent where His oppressed, aggrieved, beloved [the people of Israel] dwelled, lay writhing and convulsing on her bed in hellish agony. Because of this banging at the door of the beloved, shrouded in grief, the State of Israel was born.

(quoted in Ravitzky 1996, p. 47)

Of course, the dualism here is not the same as Shapira’s or Teitelbaum’s. It is far more in keeping with the understanding of Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook, the Chief Rabbi of the Palestinian Jewish community until his death in 1935, who saw Israel, even if governed by secular Jews, as a pathway to ultimate redemption. Yet, this dualism of defilement and salvation expressed by Soloveitchik is so compelling to him that it elides the individual suffering of those who died in anticipation of this near messianic event, and their kin, who had to endure the memory of their horrific deadly experience.

Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, head of the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva and son of Rabbi A.Y. Kook, took matters even further. Because of the defilement inherent in European Jewish efforts to assimilate with its correlative adoption of secularism, this corpus of European Jewry needed to be excised from the whole. A “constructive destruction” was effected. Accordingly,

The Jewish people has been brought here, severed from the depths of exile to come to the State of Israel.… God’s people had clung so determinedly to the impurity of foreign lands that, when the End Time arrived, they had to be cut away, with a great shedding of blood…This cruel excision…reveals our real life, the rebirth of the nation and the land, the rebirth of the Torah and all that is holy.

(quoted in Ravitzky 1996, p. 47)

Whatever the pathways to its formation, the State of Israel was viewed by most Jews in the post-Holocaust era as an enormous gain for the Jewish people. Instead of being the passive objects of history that the Holocaust decisively validated, Jews would now, via the State of Israel, enter the history-making process like all other sovereign entities.

Yet, the fledgling state was far from secure. Despite the victory over invading Arab armies in 1948, there always was the possibility of effective military mobilization by one or more of the Arab states. And this would come to pass with the toppling of King Farouk and the ascendance of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Arab nationalist Egyptian leader who sought to unify Arab states not only under his personal rule but also in a supreme effort to accomplish what had failed in 1948, the destruction of Israel. Massive Soviet shipments of arms began in 1955, and although interrupted by the Suez Crisis of the following year, continued unabated until it enabled the direct military buildup of Egyptian forces in the Sinai Peninsula in 1967, the closing of the Straits of Tiran, and a corresponding military readiness of the Syrian army to the north. Israel was surrounded by superior armed forces, both in quantity and quality of the latest Soviet armor matched only by Israeli remodeled World War II American tanks and some recent British arrivals.

According to Aviezer Ravitzky, “This war, with the suspense that preceded it and the relief that followed, is known to have stirred up associations with the Holocaust—the feeling of ‘a nation that dwells alone,’ the fear of renewed anti-Semitism, and so forth—among the Israeli public. Yet the new messianism had also been a direct if unspoken reaction to the earlier mass murder, with its implicit threat to the principles of traditional religious faith” (Ravitzky 1996, pp. 127–28).

6. Victory and Loss

Ian Lustick (1988, p. 1) quotes a description of Jewish reactions to the 1967 Six Day War victory one year later on Independence Day: “So moving was the scene in Jerusalem on May 2, 1968, that some people in the vast crowd wept. Many more felt their blood quicken in a mood of rare exultation. Israelis were commemorating the twentieth anniversary of their independent state; they were also celebrating their year-old victory in the Six Day War of 1967. There was dancing in the streets and old-timers wandered starry-eyed through the teeming squares. According to newspaper reports the next morning, the remarks most often heard were: ‘It’s wonderful! It’s almost unbelievable!.’” It was a near messianic event that should have fueled a settlement mania, but did not.

If nothing else, the initial trajectory of the 1973 Yom Kippur War was surprising and unexpected. It also was frightening and carried with it the threat and fear of subordination to the invading Arab states. Given the occurrence of the Holocaust in the relatively recent past, with at least half of the Israeli Jewish population having some connection with the Holocaust, if “only” in the form of a survivor grandparent, this threat of subordination had very deep roots.

After the Yom Kippur War the mood was much darker. In an article which received much public exposure, “Invitation to Weep,” written by a veteran of the recent Sinai battles, Arnon Lapid, he asked his readers to join him in weeping for the dead: “The dreams from which we’ve awakened…the gods that failed, the false prophets who rose to greatness…the powerful friendships cut off…the truths that turned out to be lies.… We will pity ourselves, because we deserve to be pitied, a lost generation like us of a tortured nation in a land that devours its inhabitants” (quoted in Gorenberg 2006, p. 266).

At the end of the Yom Kippur War, Israel was not subordinated to its Arab enemies. But the heady gain experienced in 1967, after which it seemed like anything was possible, was severely attenuated. This, of course, is in addition to the recognition that human losses of this magnitude would be extraordinarily difficult to sustain in any such future conflict.

Still, immediately after the end of the Yom Kippur War, a rationalist-realist outlook pervaded the largely secular Labor government. Instead of a hawkish stance toward the surrounding Arab states, the idea of compromise was in the air. The terms “defensible borders” and “territorial compromise” became part of Labor’s platform for the coming Israeli elections. This position, in part, reflected the mood of the country.

7. Extremist Ideation

But in response to elements of the public mood, instead of the realism pervading the Labor Party, a religious messianism spread through the militant wing of the religious Zionists. At an early 1974 meeting in Gush Etzion, a platform was written by Hanan Porat, a wounded veteran of Sinai. Written for a new movement, Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), it argued that “‘fulfillment of the Zionist vision’ is the route to ‘complete redemption of the people of Israel and the entire world.’” Settlement throughout the land” is the principle advocated in this document in pursuit of a “‘a resolute security doctrine, not deterred by moral or political considerations’” (quoted in Gorenberg 2006, p. 267).

Like Sayyid Qutb, the ideological precursor of al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups, the Porat document aims at turning religion into an all-encompassing ideology and is “reminiscent of European reactionary politics fifty years before” (Gorenberg 2006, p. 267). Or as Gadi Taub (2010) averred, redemption via land settlement trumps sovereignty. According to the younger Rabbi Kook, “Our obligation [is] towards the Land of Israel, not the State of Israel” (quoted in Taub 2010, p. 55). Other religious leaders expressed similar views.

Since settlement is a direct commandment of “divine politics” it stands not only above and beyond earthly politics but also “above moral-human considerations,” as Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, head of the religious Zionist Yeshiva Ateret Cohanim, put it. It is also above the rights, even the lives, of individuals. “The commandment to settle the land takes precedence over the value of individual life,” explained another prominent settler and student of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda, Hanan Porat. It takes precedence to such an extent that the extension of Israel’s control over territory in the Land of Israel, as Rabbi Moshe Zvi Neriya put it, “supersedes lives.” The expression “supersedes lives” is weighty in Judaism. According to Jewish tradition there are only three sins that supersede lives, meaning one must die rather than commit them: idol-worship, incest, and murder. Any other mitzvah [religious commandment] can be deferred if lives are at stake (Taub 2010, p. 43). Timothy Snyder (2018) would call this “the politics of eternity”.

Interests of the collectivity, here settlers of the land, trump those of individuals, even their lives. According to Dov Schwartz (2002, p. 71), “Zvi Judah (sic) Kook discusses in several passages the value of the collective as opposed to that of the individual. He ascribes enormous importance to the collective to the point of formulating an approach that is almost organistic.” And Rabbi Jacob Moses Harlap, a leading disciple of the elder Rabbi Kook, averred, “Individual redemption depends upon collective redemption, and individual repentance depends on collective repentance. He who wishes for individual repentance and individual redemption before collective redemption has been completed is as someone wishing to build on air, because the place on which the houses are built is the redemption of the collective, and the houses built on it are the repentance and redemption of the individual” (quoted in Schwartz 2002, p. 209). This emphasis on collective versus individual rights comes very close to a criterion of political extremism formulated elsewhere, in which mass violence can be a consequence of such ideation (Midlarsky 2011).

Nothing less than national salvation through religious Zionism is the goal of this movement. An interesting secular counterpart is the Turkish conception of the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–22 as the “War of National Salvation” as described in the Istanbul War Museum. As in the Yom Kippur War, the invaders, in this case the Greeks, penetrated deeply into enemy territory, here Turkey, but were expelled at high Turkish cost in lives and materiel, and the simultaneous ethnic cleansing of most of the Anatolian Greek population. Thoroughgoing settlement in the Israeli case would be the preferred alternative to deliberate ethnic cleansing, but yielding the same or at least a similar outcome—complete control of the land. According to the younger Rabbi Kook,

The State of Israel is divine…Not only can/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, as much in the spiritual [as in the physical] sense. “The Glory of Israel does not deceive or change His mind” [I Sam, 15:29]. We are stronger than America, stronger than Russia.

(quoted in Ravitzky 1996, p. 132)

Similar sentiments were expressed by Osama bin Laden in his derogation of American power. Thus, “Using very meager resources and military means, the Afghan mujahedeen demolished one of the most important human myths in history and the biggest military apparatus. We no longer fear the so-called Great Powers. We believe that America is much weaker than Russia; and our brothers who fought in Somalia told us that they were astonished to observe how weak, impotent, and cowardly the American soldier is. As soon as eighty American troops were killed, they fled in the dark as fast as they could, after making a great deal of noise about the new international order” (quoted in Gerges 2005, p. 85).

Formerly recognizing the Israeli state as a vehicle for ultimate national messianic redemption after the 1948 War of Independence, and especially after the 1967 Six Day War, the religious Zionist movement gradually began to belittle, even denigrate, the state’s importance. This process was accelerated after 1973 and the subsequent withdrawal from Sinai required by the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty of 1979. The withdrawal was an important fillip to this radicalization leading to the formation of the “Hardal” group within religious Zionism. “Hardal is the acronym of Haredi Leumi, or nationalist ultra-Orthodox. It connotes religious observance in the Haredi style combined with an uncompromising nationalist position as developed by the leaders of Merkaz Harav Yeshiva [the center of Orthodox Zionist religious higher learning, named after the elder Rabbi Kook]. The devaluation of the State of Israel by this segment of religious Zionism lowered the barriers to cooperation with the ultra-Orthodox, who always denied that the state had any theological significance” (Shelef 2010, p. 181).

Merkaz Harav Yeshiva is the one Yeshiva in which Zionism was fused with Orthodoxy as envisioned by the elder Rabbi Kook. In his view, even the thoroughly secular socialist Jewish pioneers were to be valued in their efforts to establish a state and its mission, whether they realized it or not (mostly not), in facilitating ultimate Jewish redemption. But now the haredization of the religious Zionists demanded even that the Orthodox members of the military disobey the commands of their officers if they entail the dispossession of Jewish settlers of their land, as occurred in Gaza just prior to the Israeli withdrawal in 2005. Rabbinic authority was increasingly claimed to be absolute, denying any possibility for the Orthodox Jew to defy it if their rabbis command disobedience. The concept of the “State of Judea,” a “real” Jewish state comprising all Israeli settled lands and beyond, is suggested to replace that of the apostate State of Israel (Shelef 2010, p. 179). “Land” has replaced “State” in the hierarchy of political values. Or as Taub (2010, p. 46) describes it.

The turn was dramatic. Rabbi Kook the father created a possibility of cooperation between religious and secular Zionism, based on the centrality of sovereignty, but his son, by shifting the center of gravity decisively to settlement, created the possibility of collision between the two creeds. Any diversion from “divine politics” would delegitimize the state and potentially release believers from any commitment to it. “We are commanded by the Torah, not the government,” Rabbi Zvi Yehuda said.

Within ultra-Orthodox movements there are extremist tendencies. Chabad (Lubavitcher Hasidim) member Shimon Rosenberg, whose daughter was the Chabad rabbi’s wife killed in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks was invited to light one of the torches at the Mount Herzl military cemetery celebrating Israel Independence Day. However, he was advised not to participate. A public celebration of the State of Israel presumably would undermine the Jewish belief in the coming of the Messiah, after which a state of Israel would be acceptable, even desirable.

According to twelve Jerusalem Chabad rabbis, “Let it be known that the participation of a Chabad Chossid [Hasid] at a ceremony which is foreign to the spirit of traditional Judaism, is at his own initiative, and does not represent the Shluchim or Lubavitch Chassidim. The Chabad Beis Din [local legal religious authority] opposes his actions” (quoted in Fax 2011). The “spirit of traditional Judaism” refers of course to the coming of the Messiah as a central tenet, which can appear to be obviated by “excessive” fealty to the State of Israel. Rosenberg was initially asked to withdraw from the ceremony; a compromise was reached when the words “land of” was inserted into the official ceremonial text, rendering it “For the glory of the State of the Land of Israel” (quoted in Fax 2011).

8. Point of Origin: Gush Etzion

Is there direct evidence of a polarized view in the writings or speeches of the Gush Emunim members or other extreme religious Zionists? A speech by Rabbi Yehuda Amital, a founder of the Har Etzion Yeshiva in Gush Etzion, is instructive. Here the worldview that needed defending is the messianic, deftly expounded much earlier by the elder Rabbi Kook, amplified forcefully by his son and enunciated elsewhere in the religious Zionist movement. Gorenberg (2006, p. 261) described Amital’s speech:

When Gentiles waged war against Jews, they were actually waging war against God. Attacking on Yom Kippur proved this. Their actual target was the “Jews of Yom Kippur,” religious Jews, who represented God. Therefore, “The meaning of Israel’s victory is: the victory of the divine idea.” Amital’s portrayal removed the war from the context of politics and normal history, and put it in the mythological realm of darkness battling light: Gentiles attacked precisely because final redemption was beginning, and it threatened their existence as “Gentiles, as the impure. Evil is fighting for its existence.” Snyder’s Politics of Eternity is once again evident.

The Gush Etzion location of Amital’s speech also is critical, for it illustrates the ephemeral gain, not in a single cycle but in successive ephemera which tend to be reinforcing (Midlarsky 2011). Initially founded as an agricultural community by Orthodox Yemenite Jews in 1927, they and subsequent arrivals were forced to flee because of Arab pogroms in the region in 1929. A neighboring Arab village sheltered the inhabitants, but they could not return to the land. In 1935, Kfar Etzion was established there, but again the inhabitants were forced to flee in 1937 because of the Arab revolt against British rule and Zionist settlement, then rapidly increasing because of the Hitlerite persecutions in Europe. Re-founded in 1943 by religious Zionists and joined by neighboring kibbutzim (agricultural collectives, also religious Zionist), the Etzion bloc of kibbutzim succeeded in establishing itself. But it fell in 1948 to the invading Jordanian Arab Legion. “In the final battle, 155 defenders died, men and women. The bloodshed was worst at Kfar Etzion, where [local Arab] villagers massacred almost all those who surrendered. Seventy-nine members of the kibbutz were killed. Bodies lay in the fields for a year and a half, until Transjordan [Jordan] allowed army Rabbi Shlomo Goren to retrieve the corpses and bury them at Mount Herzl” (Gorenberg 2006, p. 20).

According to then Prime Minister David Ben Gurion in 1948, “I can think of no battle in the annals of Israel Defense Forces which was more magnificent, more tragic or more heroic than the struggle for Gush Etzion…If there exists a Jewish Jerusalem, our foremost thanks go to the defenders of Gush Etzion” (Gush Etzion.org). Although defeated, these fighters managed to divert sufficient hostile attention of the Jordanian Arab Legion from Jewish Jerusalem to Gush Etzion which allowed the much larger unit to survive.

Clearly, this high mortality rate satisfies the mortality salience requirement for the rise of an extremist movement. Here we have an intensified and localized version of the successive ephemera of the Jewish community. These ephemera ultimately generated extremist ideation. Every year, the survivors of this massacre gather on Mount Herzl to memorialize the dead. Even teens are regaled with memories of this loss in the retelling of life in that lost Eden. The memories of these dead were to be later reinforced by the direct losses from the Har Etzion Yeshiva during the Yom Kippur War. Out of fewer than 200 students, 8 were dead. “The Yeshiva’s mourning was a microcosm of the national shock” (Gorenberg 2006, p. 260).

9. Elon Moreh

And so the settler movement spurred by Gush Emunim moved forward. As early as the spring of 1974, within less than a year after the end of the Yom Kippur War, a group of settlers formed to establish a settlement in a heavily Arab populated area of the northern West Bank. It was called Elon Moreh after the Biblical reference to the place where Abraham was called by God to settle the land, as we saw in the section on ancient origins. Eight iterations were required to finally establish the settlement because opposition to settlement in this area by the Labor government (headed by Yitzchak Rabin) required abandonment of all the initial efforts. Rabin knew that settling in this area of Samaria near to its largest city, Nablus, would likely prevent a negotiated settlement either with Jordan or the Palestinians.

But in 1977, with religious Zionist support, the right-wing Menachem Begin was elected. On 19 May 1977, Begin and his bodyguards drove up the northern West Bank to Camp Kaddum where settlement had begun. Standing under a large prayer shawl, Begin intoned “Soon there will be many more Elon Morehs” (quoted in Gorenberg 2006, p. 261).

In 1980, a final location for Elon Moreh was found. It was the first settlement established in the northern West bank after the Six Day War. Its primary school, Nahalat Tzvi, is named after the younger Rabbi Kook, manifesting his heavy posthumous influence on the Gush Emunim settlers. And as Begin prophesied, there would be many more settlements like Elon Moreh.

10. Why Not Mass Murder?

Given (1) an emphasis on the collectivity to the detriment of individual rights, and (2) the similarity of some religious Zionist views to post-WWI European extremism and contemporary radical Islamism, then why has not mass violence erupted as it did in twentieth century Europe and elsewhere? But in contrast to other, more violent cases, there exist constraints on the possibility of religious Zionist-inspired mass violence.

There are at least three reasons for this outcome. The first already has been mentioned: the attenuated ephemeral gain that did not yield subordination to the surrounding Arab states. Militarily the Yom Kippur War was a victory, although as Churchill once said of the Battle of Britain in 1940, it was “a close-run thing.” Territory in the form of the Sinai ultimately was lost later in negotiation not as a consequence of an imposed treaty as at Versailles that so inflamed German opinion, but as a quid pro quo yielding a cold but thus far stable peace with Egypt.

Second, despite the religious Zionist tendencies toward extremism, there have been countervailing tendencies. Rabbi Yoel Bin-nun, at times a strong supporter of settler rights, nevertheless in 1992, prior to the election of Yitzchak Rabin, averred, “the entire enterprise of settlements is turning into a material success, which would undermine itself in its unbalanced, violent, belligerent, materialistic tendency. The rift within us [Israeli Jews], and the brutal hostility to the ‘leftist’ half of the nation, have turned into the main spiritual content of the settlers’ political worldview” (quoted in Taub 2010, p. 91). Indeed, Bin-nun’s view is similar to that of Maulana Wahiduddin Khan in India, who sought to prevent the politicization of Islam that he saw was inspired by Western intrusion into the Islamic world, instead of an inherent emphasis on individual Muslim piety (Midlarsky 2011, pp. 191–92).

Others, such as Rabbis Aharon Liechtenstein, head of the Har Etzion Yeshiva, and Yehuda Amital also expressed reservations along similar lines. And Rabbi Avi Giesser, Rabbi of Ofrah, “separated the ‘religious ideal conception’ of the Land of Israel as holy, which means that ‘we have no right to give…any part of it,’ from ‘the decision of the national religious to tie their fate to secular Zionism, based on the understanding that Zionism is the only vehicle which assures the existence of the people of Israel’”(quoted in Taub 2010, p. 145).

Until the 1980s, the State of Israel has proved to be resilient in the face of religious extremism. Despite the emphasis on the land of Israel in contrast to the juridical State of Israel, the sovereignty of the state has not been successfully challenged. The Israeli Supreme Court’s order to dismantle the illegal settlement of Elon Moreh was a major buttress to the authority of the state. According to Taub (2007, p. 298),” When all was said and done, the translation of the messianic message into the language of sovereignty did not mark the state’s first step on the road to redemption. It marked something quite other: the first important acknowledgement on the part of the settler leadership that earthly sovereignty, not theology, sets the moral limits of legitimacy for political action”.

Unfortunately, a gradual erosion of this acknowledgment would begin after three processes took place. First, religious Zionists became aware of their increasing electoral advantage as the result of their increased birthrate relative to secular Israelis. Second, the Hardal movement electorally united the religious Zionists with the even more fertile ultra-Orthodox Haredim. (Currently it is the only group in the U.S. that is increasing in number solely as the result of its birthrate,) Third, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, historically never averse to Zionist settlement wherever that might be in the Biblical lands of Israel and Judah including the West Bank, saw these demographic shifts as an opportunity for his continued governance via an extraordinarily settlement friendly extremist coalition. The recent judgement of many Palestinians that the deadly Hamas incursion of 7 October 2023 was “correct” further inflamed the attitudes of Israelis, especially those on the right.

11. Consequences

Much of the following analysis is informed by information provided by the Pulitzer Prize winning team of journalists Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti (Bergman and Mazzetti 2024). In addition to the IDF’s delayed response to the 10/7 Hamas attack mentioned above, the recent lawlessness of the settler movement was presaged by the limpid quality of the governmental response to Jewish terrorism. Jewish underground plotters planning the bombing of West Bank mayors and carrying out attacks on Arab communities were brought to trial in 1984.

Convicted of these crimes, their sentences ranged from several months to life in prison. There was public pressure to pardon them against the recommendations of Shin Bet (internal security agency) and the Justice Ministry, President Chaim Herzog pardoned many and commuted the sentences of the remainder. They returned to the acclaim of the settler community. Carmi Gillon, head of the Jewish Department of Shin Bet bridled at the injustice of it all and warned that “the question of what message the pardons convey to the public and to anyone who ever thinks about carrying out acts of terror against Arabs” (quoted in Bergman and Mazzetti 2024, p. 26; here and elsewhere in this section page numbers are found in the official reading of the text by Jonathan Davis).

Beginning in 1987, conflicts between settlers and Palestinians in Gaza gave rise to the first Intifada, an uprising against the Israeli occupation. Stones and Molotov cocktails were thrown at Israelis. In the occupied territories, conflict between settlers and Palestinians escalated. Central to the conflict was Rabbi Moshe Levinger, a leader of Gush Emunim and founder of a settlement in Hebron. Levinger was responsible for initiating numerous attacks against Arab villages entailing vandalized homes and the burning of vehicles. Driving through Hebron, Palestinians threw stones at his car. In response, he fired his pistol wildly, killing a forty-two-year-old shopkeeper. Levinger was sentenced to five months imprisonment, for which he served only three months.

Another settler in Hebron, Brooklyn born Dr. Baruch Goldstein, entered the Cave of the Patriarchs, holy to both Jews and Muslims. It was crowded with Arabs worshiping during Ramadan. It also was the Purim Festival when Jews celebrate the saving of the Persian Jewish community from the murderous plans of Haman, a court official. Religious Zionists have conflated Palestinian Arabs with Haman. Goldstein was armed and firing his weapon at the Muslim worshipers killed 28 and injured over 100, before he was beaten to death.

An admirer of Goldstein, Itamar Ben-Gvir has made many visits to Goldstein’s grave. He is now the Minister of National Security in Netanyahu’s cabinet. In 1995, Ben-Gvir boasted that he had broken off the hood ornament from Prime Miniter Yitzchak Rabin’s car and remarked that “we got to his car, and we’ll get to him too” (quoted in Bergman and Mazzetti 2024, p. 35). Within a month Rabin was dead. The settlers were furious that Rabin had signed the Oslo Peace Accords allowing the formation of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza, thereby disallowing future settlements in these areas. Rabbis in the West Bank settlements had pronounced a death sentence against Rabin, justifying it by saying that this was a din rodef (law of the pursuer), one if the few instances in Jewish law where extrajudicial killings are permitted. An Orthodox student at Tel-Aviv’s Bar-Ilan University was the actual assassin.

After his arrest, he made reference to these rabbis’ decision as an exculpating factor, Finance Minister in that cabinet is Bezalel Smotrich, who also has responsibility for the West Bank. He studied at the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem, the major center for religious Zionist learning in Israel. He also studied at Yeshivat Kdumim in the settlement of that name, one of the first settlements located in the northern portion of the West Bank. In violation of international law, Smotrich recently announced the formation of 22 new settlements and the possible annexation of a large portion (Area C, 61%) of the West Bank. What had once been a marginal segment of Israeli politics, has moved into its mainstream (Bergman and Mazzetti 2024).

The fundamental disregard for Israeli law, even the State of Israel itself, is embodied in Meir Ettinger, named for his grandfather Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the violent Jewish Defense League in America and the virulent anti-Arab Kach party in Israel. Ettinger was responsible for attacks on Arabs in the West Bank in the service of ultimately declaring a Jewish king, building a temple on the ruins of destroyed mosques in Jerusalem and imposing Jewish law on all Israelis. In this fashion, the arrival of the long-awaited Messiah will be hastened. A founding document of Ettinger’s revolutionary group declared that in the contemporary pre- messianic era, “the State of Israel has no right to exist, and therefore we are not bound by the rules of the game” (quoted in Bergman and Mazzetti 2024, p. 46).

12. Conclusions

The origins and evolution of the current extremist settlement program can now be pinpointed. Theologically, the initial source is Biblical. Historically, it began in 1927 with the unusually long series of ephemeral gains for Gush Etzion, the heart of the initial religious Zionist imperative to settle the Biblical land, wherever that might be. These ephemera reflected the threat and fear of reversion to a subordinate condition as in the successive Arab attempts to conquer Israel, the earlier foreign domination of the Ottoman and British mandate periods, and the Holocaust as the ultimate subordination. Current extremist religious Zionism begins in 1974 almost immediately after the Yom Kippur War when a platform is written for the newly formed Gush Emunim that advocated for complete settlement throughout the land, not to be deterred by any moral or political considerations.

Ephemeral gains consisting of dramatic human losses following a lopsided victory combined with the intensification of a world view defense engendered by mortality salience help us understand why the violent settler movement has evolved as it did, especially its timing. Despite strong international and domestic imperatives to limit, even eliminate settlement activity, it continues. If there is a single barrier to peace between Israel and the Palestinians that is susceptible to modification without attacking the foundations of Israeli society, it is the settlements issue. The Labor government understood this, limiting settlements only to areas of insecurity on the borders. Other issues like the right of return of Palestinian refugees and their descendants or Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem are far more difficult to resolve because virtually all Jewish Israelis are united on these issues. With the rise of the Orthodox right, even the settlements issue became much more difficult to resolve.

With the rise of Hamas and militant religious Zionism, confessional differences have actually increased over time. Political ideations differ in the Israeli commitment to a modified secular democracy, while Hamas essentially governs using theocratic Islamism. Regionally, interstate issues are extremely important, with the legacy of the Arab-Israeli wars still strongly influencing the region. Finally, the religious Zionist claim to Israel and the occupied territories not only stems from the much earlier settlement of Palestine by the Hebrews (God’s promise of the land to Abraham), but also from the colonial British Balfour Declaration declaring Palestine a homeland for the Jews. A colonial dimension is manifested. Thus, along with increased conflict on the confessional dimension stemming from this Biblical territorial commitment to the Jews, there still exists a colonial residue, along with the ever-present regional disputes.

Finally, international conditions have not been propitious for the settler enterprise. In addition to former President Obama’s strenuous efforts to limit Israeli settlement activity, the international community generally has not been receptive to Israeli expansionism. Efforts to delegitimize the State of Israel have more or less centered on the settlements as evidence of Zionism’s colonialist essence. Absent the settlements issue, at least this charge would lose much of its weight. Given Israeli dependence on U.S. diplomatic and military support, made abundantly evident in the midst of the Yom Kippur War and the more recent war against Hamas thus far, aside from the war in Gaza that has its own bloody dynamic complicated by Hamas hiding among the civilian population, there have been limits to Israeli political programs that might be construed as overtly sanguinary in their extremism. Few if any such constraints existed in the far more violent instances of political extremism that with impunity veered towards the wanton mass murder of innocents as in WWII.