Summary
In Lustick’s usage, a style of political participation — not hyper-religiosity — in which adherents regard their tenets as uncompromisable and direct transcendental imperatives to political action oriented toward the rapid and comprehensive reconstruction of society (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, line 519).
Details
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Lustick measures fundamentalism on three dimensions: activities based on uncompromisable injunctions; behaviour considered guided by direct contact with the source of transcendental authority; and active political engagement to bring about rapid and comprehensive change. The definition excludes pietistic or monastic movements and leaves open the substantive character of the transcendental source (Introduction, lines 500-550).
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Fundamentalism is not the same thing as piety: the overwhelming majority of pious Muslims and Jews do not feel impelled toward ruthless and radical political change. In Israel the movement includes Gush Emunim, the Kach movement and a wide array of subsidiary organizations, and also secular ultra-nationalist Jews from activist Labor Zionism and Revisionist Zionism (Preface to the 1994 Edition, lines 190-215; Introduction, lines 585-620).
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The ultra-Orthodox Haredim are expressly excluded on this definition: their traditionalism aims at isolating their way of life from the State of Israel rather than imposing it through politics, and they have effectively opted out of macropolitical struggles including territorial questions (Introduction, lines 551-585).
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The movement’s objectives as Lustick presents them are Jewish rule over the whole Land of Israel, substitution of its radical and apocalyptic vision of Jewish destiny for the pragmatic Zionism of Israel’s founders, and advancement of the world-historic process of redemption in which the Jewish people and the State of Israel play central roles; its adherents believe contemporary political developments are part of an unfolding cosmic drama whose completion depends on Jews acting decisively (Preface, lines 195-230; Introduction, lines 385-430).
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Historically Lustick presents the movement as a zealous spin-off of Zionism that burst on the Israeli scene after the 1967 war, gathered strength in the 1970s, allied with Likud governments under Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, and helped entrench Israel’s presence in the territories so deeply as to produce threats of civil war should that presence be removed; after more than eighteen centuries of dormancy it revived the blend of messianic expectation, militant action, parochialism, devotion to the Land of Israel and self-sacrifice that characterized the Jewish Zealots of Roman times (Preface, lines 200-215; Introduction, lines 375-400; Chapter 2, lines 1180-1230).
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Lustick’s Chapter 4 presents the movement’s shared worldview as seven basic beliefs, of which the first five are given in part 2: the Jews are an irrevocably abnormal, chosen people (am segula) whose divine commandments transcend human notions of national rights; Arab opposition is a metaphysical battle against evil, and Palestinians have no legitimate claim to nationhood or to any part of the land, though individual Arabs accepting Jewish sovereignty may be accorded individual rights; Israel’s international isolation is proof of chosenness, gentile enmity being instinctual and irrational; a negotiated peace is impossible, only a temporary peace of deterrence or the real peace of completed redemption; and the Land of Israel in its entirety is of cardinal, cosmic importance, its right resting on divine promise alone and never on conditional arguments from security or demography (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 4, lines 3625-4118).
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Lustick’s Chapter 4 completes the worldview with beliefs 6-7: current history as the unfolding of the redemption process, in which the Holocaust, the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War are read as God’s communications, and the faith and ideological dedication of the Jews as decisive factors, fulfilment being talui banu (dependent on us) (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 4, lines 4119-4618).
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Chapter 5 shows the shared worldview sustaining a wide internal range: the same authorities (the Kooks, Maimonides, Nachmanides) are cited for contradictory positions on ceding territory, on the Jewish Underground, and on war, and the movement divides between vanguardists and consensus builders over the pace of redemption (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 5, lines 4119-6177).
Where sources disagree
- Lustick’s Conclusion names the movement’s key goal as establishment of permanent Jewish rule over the whole Land of Israel, and holds that virtually no serious observers believe a negotiated solution is possible unless that goal is thwarted, while the movement’s leverage prevents the Israeli political system from thwarting it by normal peaceful parliamentary means; contemporary fundamentalism is dheikat haketz, pushing for the end, and Lustick closes with Gershom Scholem’s 1959 warning that “the blazing landscape of redemption” is a hazardous field for political ambition (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 7, lines 9129-9400).
- In Chapter 6’s closing assessment, the movement’s structural need to maintain a sense of crisis, combined with the absence of charismatic leadership after Tzvi Yehuda, makes it likelier, in Lustick’s judgment, to imitate the self-destructive extremism of the first-century Zealots and the followers of Bar Kochba than to build a new and stable consensus (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 6, lines 8737-8758).
- Lustick frames Jewish fundamentalism as a natural, if unintended, consequence of political Zionism’s success; he notes that many liberal and Labor Zionists instead argue it is a freak and tragic consequence of the 1967 and 1973 wars, an unnatural distortion of what Zionism was meant to be (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 2, lines 1540-1560).
Related pages
For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Gush Emunim, Haredim, Abraham Isaac Kook, Tzvi Yehuda Kook, Zionism, Eretz Israel