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Yehuda Elitzur

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Summary

Yehuda Elitzur, one of the most respected scholars in Gush Emunim, who in Lustick’s Chapter 5 outlines the movement’s concentric biblical geographies of the whole Land of Israel, from the “ideal” patriarchal borders to Ezekiel’s borders as the shape of the “dawn of redemption” (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 5, lines 5119-5400).

Details

  • Elitzur considers the “promised”, or “patriarchal”, boundaries — extending to the Euphrates River, southern Turkey, Transjordan and the Nile Delta — “the ideal borders” of the Jewish state (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 5, lines 5119-5400).
  • The lands conquered by the “generation that left Egypt” — including northeastern Sinai, Lebanon and western Syria, the Golan Heights and much of Transjordan — are, for Elitzur, lands Israel is required eventually to conquer and settle (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 5, lines 5119-5400).
  • Neither the boundaries of the returning exiles from Babylonia nor the smaller borders described in Ezekiel, which roughly correspond to the territory Israel presently rules, are candidates for permanent boundaries: Ezekiel’s borders describe the shape Israel would take during the “dawn of redemption”, to be expanded as the redemption process advanced (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 5, lines 5119-5400).
  • Elitzur concludes that public settlement of Jews devoted to inheriting the land, in any part of the territory ever conquered by or promised to the ancient Israelites, is sufficient to transform that territory into a part of the “holy Land of Israel” (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 5, lines 5119-5400).
  • A study session Elitzur led in Ofra, published in Nekuda in September 1982 at the climax of the Lebanon War, identified the most serious distortion of Israel’s true borders to be in the north, in Lebanon (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 5, lines 5119-5400).

For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Gush Emunim, Eretz Israel

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