For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel

Summary

Ian S. Lustick, For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (Council on Foreign Relations, 1988; with a Preface to the 1994 Edition): a political-science study of Jewish fundamentalism in Israel — defined not as hyper-religiosity but as a style of political action in which uncompromisable, transcendentally ordained imperatives drive attempts at rapid and comprehensive reconstruction of society — and of its principal organized expression, Gush Emunim. Lustick argues that the movement, a zealous spin-off of Zionism catalysed by the 1967 Six Day War, incubated in the national-religious (Mizrahi) camp and its Young Guard, and empowered by its symbiosis with the Likud governments of 1977 and 1981, has entrenched Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, helped destroy the post-1948 national consensus on the meaning of Jewish nationalism and the territorial shape of the state, and emerged as the greatest obstacle to meaningful negotiations toward a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace settlement. Part 1 covers the front matter, the Preface to the 1994 Edition, Chapter 1 (Introduction) in full, and Chapter 2 in its text through the rise of Revisionist Zionism and the first Likud governments, breaking off at the start of Chapter 2’s notes (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, lines 1-2059). Part 2 completes Chapter 2’s notes, gives Chapter 3 (The Evolution of Gush Emunim) in full — the movement’s founding in 1974, the Elon Moreh Supreme Court case and the state-land regime it produced, its social base and organizational elaboration in Yesha, Amana and Tehiya, the Yamit trauma, and the turn to outreach and to violence in Kach, the Temple Mount groups and the Jewish underground — and opens Chapter 4 (The Worldview of Jewish Fundamentalism: The Breadth of Consensus), giving the first five of its seven basic beliefs, through the cardinal importance of the Land of Israel, breaking off mid-quotation in that section (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, lines 2060-4118). Part 3 completes Chapter 4 — beliefs 6 (current history as the unfolding of the redemption process) and 7 (the faith and ideological dedication of the Jews as decisive factors) — with Chapter 4’s notes, and gives most of Chapter 5 (The Range of Disagreement within Jewish Fundamentalism): the post-1982 leadership vacuum and the contest over the Kooks’ authentic teaching, the territorial scope debate from Elitzur’s concentric borders to the dovish fringe, the vanguardist/consensus-builder divide over the pace of redemption, and attitudes toward international and Israeli opposition, breaking off at the opening of the local-Arabs section, in the identification of the Arabs as Amalekites and the transfer passages (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, lines 4119-6177). Part 4 completes Chapter 5 — the local-Arabs debate concluded (transfer not dominant; collective punishment and induced emigration as the mainstream programme; the gar toshav and dhimmi models; the Nekuda “Moment of Coexistence” cover) and the prospects-for-peace section (peace as a messianic phenomenon, Eitan’s Sparta, Shiloach’s two federations, Ben-Nun’s and Ariel’s Torah-based transformations, and the dominant work of preventing or sabotaging negotiations) — with Chapter 5’s notes 1-207, and opens Chapter 6 (Present Trends and Future Implications) with the settlement issues and the subsidized-suburbanite strategy analysed through Benvenisti, the Maale Adumim/Kiryat Arba polling and the 1981/1984 settler vote, and the opening of the political-competition section, breaking off mid-sentence in Hammer’s 1986 return to lead the National Religious Party (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, lines 6178-8236). Part 5 completes Chapter 6 — Hammer’s alliance with Matzad, the 180-vote dead heat of 1984 and the leverage the end of the national unity government will give the movement, the double edge of Palestinian violence after the April 1987 Alfei Menashe attack, the “blackening” recruitment problem and the possible Haredi alliance, and the leadership problem centred on the Temple Mount, closing with the warning that the movement is likelier to imitate the Zealots and Bar Kochba than to build a stable consensus — and gives Chapter 7 (Conclusion) in full: a negotiated solution is impossible unless the movement’s goal of permanent Jewish rule over the whole Land is thwarted, yet its leverage blocks that thwarting by normal parliamentary means; Labor’s demographic argument has backfired into support for getting rid of the Arabs rather than the territories, as the October 1987 Shapira transfer proposal and the West Bank and Gaza rabbis poll (62 percent for forced emigration) show; implementation of territory-for-peace would trigger a Fourth-Republic-style crisis, and a fundamentalist-dependent regime, disposing of a large nuclear arsenal, would end the American special relationship; the book closes with Gershom Scholem’s 1959 warning on pushing for the end (dheikat haketz) and a call to find earthly, imperfect alternatives. The five appendixes follow: a glossary, polling data 1974-1987, biographies of seven Gush activists, and the “Moment of Coexistence” cover and “Rebuilt Temple” photomontage (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, lines 8237-10292).

What the file is

The author-copy HTML edition hosted at the University of Pennsylvania site given in the frontmatter, transcribed, proofread and marked up in HTML by Columbia International Affairs Online in May 1998, of the book first published in New York by the Council on Foreign Relations in 1988 (ISBN 0-231-10608-4, as printed in the bibliographical data block). The original as saved is the HTML file; the paired text copy supplied with it is a plain-text rendering of the same edition, with no page markers, so locators are line numbers in the text copy (10,292 lines by newline count; about 87,373 words in total, of which lines 1-2059 are about 18,339 words). The text copy includes the Preface to the 1994 Edition, which postdates the original book and discusses events of 1990-1994, and an About the Author block listing books to 1994. The text copy carries frequent OCR/transcription slips — garbled words, a stray control character, broken hyphenation — which are recorded in the reading notes and under Open questions and kept as printed in quotations; the argument is readable throughout. The contents list gives seven chapters and five appendixes (Glossary; Polling Data; Biographies of Selected Gush Emunim Activists; “Moment of Coexistence”; The “Rebuilt” Temple) plus an Index.

Section by section

Front matter and Preface to the 1994 Edition (lines 1-~330)

Title, dedication (To Terri and Hilary), contents and bibliographical data as above. The Preface defines the subject — fundamentalism as political action to radically transform society according to cosmically ordained imperatives — through two killings it treats as political, not deranged: Ami Popper, who in May 1990 in army uniform lined up Arab men at a bus stop in a southern Israeli town after checking their identity cards and killed seven, was declared by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir the act of a “deranged individual” but was found sane, and settlers and Jewish fundamentalists campaign for his release as a political prisoner; and Dr. Baruch Goldstein of Kiryat Arba, affiliated to Meir Kahane’s organization, who on February 28, 1994, as the preface dates it, entered the mosque at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron during Ramadan prayers and shot twenty-nine people to death before being beaten to death, having left a farewell note about working toward the “complete redemption” (lines 110-169). Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin likewise called Goldstein a “deranged person”; Lustick argues both men were psychologically normal actors within a fundamentalist belief system that can transform slaughter into a virtuous act, quoting Goldstein’s widow — “He planned to do this in order to stop the peace talks. He did this for the sake of the people of Israel.” — and a rabbi at the funeral applauded for declaring that one million Arabs are not worth one Jewish fingernail. The preface reads the Hebron massacre through Purim and the Book of Esther (Esther 8:11; 9:5-16): Goldstein, it argues, almost certainly identified Yasir Arafat with Haman and was reenacting the Jews’ divinely sanctioned slaughter of their enemies, acting to save the redemption process from a “false peace” based on less than total Jewish rule over the completed Land of Israel. It restates the book’s most controversial assertion, that the fundamentalist movement and its settler spearhead have emerged as the greatest obstacle to a comprehensive peace settlement, credits President George Bush and Secretary of State James Baker with withholding ten billion dollars in loan guarantees from the Shamir government — the policy the book’s conclusion recommended — and warns that the settlements now force Israeli governments toward a showdown risking civil rebellion and intra-Jewish bloodshed. The book originated in a research paper under contract for the Defense Academic Research Support Program of the US Department of Defense, with no constraints imposed, as the preface stresses.

Chapter 1: Introduction (lines ~330-1090)

The chapter opens with Amos Elon’s Independence Day portraits of 1968 (exultant unity a year after the Six Day War) and 1987 (subdued, divided, doves and hawks and secular and religious at each other’s throats), and traces the transformation to the consequences of the 1967 triumph, especially the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip: renewed contact with the historic heartland of ancient Judea, real opportunities for territorial compromise, and the challenge of Palestinian nationalism reopened fundamental questions for which no common answers, and for many Israelis no common language, exist. Jewish fundamentalism is the movement claiming unequivocal, unappealable answers. Its reemergence in the mid-1970s revived, after more than eighteen centuries of dormancy, the blend of messianic expectation, militant political action, intense parochialism, devotion to the Land of Israel and self-sacrifice that characterized the Jewish Zealots of Roman times, catching tens of thousands of young religious Israelis and disillusioned secular Zionists. Its objectives are Jewish rule over the whole Land of Israel, substitution of its radical apocalyptic vision for the pragmatic Zionism of the founders, and advancement of the world-historic redemption process; it has helped plunge the state into a Kulturkampf, against a backdrop of a growing Palestinian population and Jewish fear that within fifteen years Arabs within Israeli jurisdiction are likely to outnumber Jews, which makes fundamentalist appeals to Joshua’s destruction of the Canaanites as a model for the contemporary “Arab problem” more attractive.

Definitions and Terminology: Fundamentalist vs. Ultra-Orthodox. Fundamentalism is defined for political analysis, following a comparative study of fundamentalist movements, as a style of political participation with unusually close and direct links between fundamental beliefs and political behaviour designed to effect radical change: a belief system is fundamentalist insofar as its adherents regard its tenets as uncompromisable transcendental imperatives to political action for rapid, comprehensive reconstruction of society, measured on three dimensions — uncompromisable injunctions, guidance by direct contact with the source of transcendental authority, and active political engagement for rapid comprehensive change. On this definition the ultra-Orthodox Haredim are not fundamentalist: their halacha-centred lives aim at isolating their way of life from the state, not imposing it through politics, and as non-Zionist or anti-Zionist they have opted out of the macropolitical struggle, including territorial questions, despite recent militant protests on religious-status issues. The movement instead grew from the neo-Orthodox national-religious (Mizrahi) wing: its state school system educates 25-30 percent of Israeli Jewish children, its political arm the National Religious Party long controlled the Ministries of Interior and Religious Affairs, and within it the Young Guard (the tzeirim) rejected the older generation’s status-quo machine politics for a programme of Jewish sovereignty over the whole Land of Israel as a decisive step toward a redemption process already begun. Secular ultra-nationalists from activist Labor Zionism and Revisionist Zionism are also included in the movement, on the same criteria.

Gush Emunim: The Organized Focus of Jewish Fundamentalism. Gush Emunim, an umbrella organization of 10,000-20,000 activists with the slogan “The Land of Israel, for the People of Israel, According to the Torah [Bible] of Israel”, is presented as the most successful extraparliamentary movement in Israel since 1948. Its success rests on symbiosis with Likud: Likud lacked a systematic doctrine for its annexationist objectives and a settlement movement of its own, and Gush supplied ideology, a symbol system used by rising politicians such as Ariel Sharon, and pioneering settlers for the Likud governments of 1977 and 1981; in return Likud ties, official sympathy and enormous financial resources legitimized and sustained the movement. Its operational objective is to accelerate the Jewish people’s destiny — for most activists, sovereignty over the entire biblically described Land of Israel, substitution of authentically Jewish governance for Western-style liberal democracy, and rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem. Its core is the more than 130 settlements in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights since 1967; its recruitment pools include Bnei Akiva, the Yeshivot Hesder, the religious school system and expansive Labor and Revisionist Zionists; a parliamentary Lobby formed in spring 1985 grew from 23 to 38 Knesset members within four months. It has no formal membership list or elected leadership; its settlement organization is Amana, its settlements are organized in Yesha, and the Yesha Council gives it a semiofficial governing body in the territories. In 1984 parties on explicitly fundamentalist platforms (Tehiya, the National Circle, Kach, Morasha) won 150,000 votes and eight Knesset seats, while Likud and the National Religious Party together took 37 percent. The fall 1986 campaign for amnesty for the Jewish underground prisoners convicted in 1984 gathered about 300,000 signatures by spring 1987; of the twenty-seven men convicted, twenty were free by September 1986, and President Chaim Herzog reduced the three life sentences in April 1987.

Assessing the Influence of Jewish Fundamentalism. Gush ideologues cast the movement, like early Zionism and the prestate kibbutz movement (no more than 7 percent of the population in 1947), as the energized minority making Jewish history; a spring 1987 Hadashot panel of twenty-two leading Israelis named Menachem Begin and Rabbi Moshe Levinger jointly as the person of the generation with the greatest effect on Israeli society in twenty years, Levinger having established the first settlement in Hebron in 1968 and been identified by Gush in May 1987 as its overall ideological guide. The scholarly literature surveyed (Sprinzak, Schnall, Aran, Aronoff, Seliktar, Don-Yehiya and others) is presented as supporting a profound political and cultural impact, most concretely settlements in heavily populated West Bank areas and the nearly 70,000 Jews in the West Bank, which writers expect would make any territorial compromise precipitate serious political violence. Polling as presented: radical fundamentalist beliefs once regarded as crackpot are embraced by approximately 20 percent of Israeli Jews; 30-35 percent associate with closely related policies including subjugation and expulsion for Arabs; 62 percent in April 1987 were against evacuating settlements in Judea and Samaria even for a peace agreement; and 45-50 percent support permanent unconditional Israeli rule over the West Bank and Gaza, up 30-50 percent over mid-1970s levels. The chapter closes with a roadmap of Chapters 2-7. Chapter 1’s notes 1-25 follow (lines ~1000-1090).

Chapter 2: The Emergence of Jewish Fundamentalism in Historical Perspective — opening and theory (lines ~1100-1180)

The chapter opens with a general theory of fundamentalist success: legitimacy is a regime’s most important resource; fundamentalist movements succeed when regime behaviour can be portrayed as contradicting its own legitimizing myths, when the discrepancy with the fundamentalists’ preserved myths is dramatized, and when mobilizable sectors interpret events as existential threats — conditions under which a religious elite’s authoritative access to transcendental symbols becomes a comparative political advantage, provided its leaders act as political entrepreneurs designing dramatic militant actions cast in consensually sacred values. Chapters 2-3 will show how previously obscure elites used Zionism’s historic success and the consequences of the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War to revitalize ancient Jewish myths and shift Israeli politics from pragmatism toward redemption.

Chapter 2: Jewish Fundamentalism and Zionism: A Historical Perspective (lines ~1180-1600)

The reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty is a revolution whose unintended consequences include an effective Jewish fundamentalist movement; the immediate catalyst was the Six Day War, and the initial stage ended after the Yom Kippur War with the establishment of Gush Emunim. In ancient Jewish political mythology, the Jews as God’s chosen people, Temple worship and rule over the promised land were bound together, so political mythology systematically advantaged aspirants who could evoke imminent redemption and divine imperatives for exclusive Jewish rule according to Jewish law over the whole land — exemplified by the Maccabee (Hasmonean) victory over the hellenized aristocracy and the Seleucid Empire in 166-165 B.C.E., which inaugurated 200 years of sovereignty. In Roman Judea the Zealots’ fundamentalist appeals produced the Great Revolt (66-73 C.E.), which destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple and reduced Judea’s Jewish population by an estimated 25 percent, and the Bar Kochba Rebellion (132-135 C.E.), endorsed by Rabbi Akiva as messianic, which ended with more than a half-million Jews dead and the elimination of a Jewish majority in the Land. The rabbinic reaction — Rabbi Yohanan Ben-Zakkai’s academy at Yavneh, substitution of prayer and study for sacrifice, formal oaths against calculating the end, advancing it, or organizing a mass forcible return, and the recasting of Bar Kochba as a false Messiah — transformed Jewish messianism, in Nahum Glatzer’s words as quoted, from activist and militant to passivist and peaceful. Yet redemptionist expectation was never purged: mysticism, liturgy and the return to Zion as the cornerstone of the Messianic ideal persisted, and in persecution false Messiahs arose, against which Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) set testable, mundane criteria for the true Messiah and forbade calculating the end. His worst fears were realized with Shabbatai Zevi (1665-1667), whose messianic wave swept majorities in centres from Poland to Amsterdam, Italy, Turkey, Yemen and Persia and ended in his apostasy, Sabbatian antinomianism (“Redemption through sin”) and the Frankists. Against this background, Orthodox Judaism’s furious resistance to political Zionism — David Vital’s account is quoted: the Orthodox objection was theological, against redeeming the Jews through mere human agency — is explained: Rabbi Haim Soloveichik, writing in 1899, and a formal rabbinical proclamation at the time, Samson Raphael Hirsch, and Agudat Yisrael (founded 1912) condemned Zionism as pushing the end; even religious Zionism presented itself as a mundane rescue effort, Mizrahi supporting Herzl’s 1903 Uganda proposal. In 1948 Agudat Yisrael and Mizrahi struck the religious status-quo bargain with Mapai (no written constitution; Orthodox control of marriage, divorce and adoption; Sabbath and kosher state institutions) and joined governing coalitions, and religious Zionism remained pragmatic until 1967 — the 1949 declaration by more than 200 rabbis calling the state atchalta degeula (the beginning of the redemption) notwithstanding.

Chapter 2: Contemporary Origins — the Young Guard and Rav Abraham Isaac Kook (lines ~1600-1800)

The Six Day War was a watershed: the juxtaposition of the May 1967 siege and the lightning victory and reunion with the Old City of Jerusalem, Hebron, Beit-El and other biblical places triggered romantic Zionist and religious sentiment and empowered the National Religious Party’s Young Guard — Hanan Porat, Zevulon Hammer, Yehuda Ben-Meir and Rabbi Haim Druckman — which became the dominant faction in religious Zionism; politically this was the beginning of Gush Emunim. Its cooperation of religious and nonreligious activists is explained by three factors: the ideas of Abraham Isaac Kook, their elaboration by his son Tzvi Yehuda Kook, and the ascendance of Revisionist Zionism under Menachem Begin. Rav Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), appointed by the British in 1921 as Palestine’s Ashkenazic chief rabbi, taught in the vocabulary of Jewish mysticism that the mundane world is a vehicle toward a spiritual reality pervaded by the Divine psyche, that the Jewish people’s distinctive excellence is its Divine sensitivity, and that Zionism was Jews returning from a purgative exile to reassume their Divine vocation — welcoming secular Zionists’ manual labour, physical culture and military valour, and their desecration of the hallowed, as phenomena needed for the perfection of the world, since by settling and working the Land they carried out the divine plan whether or not they believed it. For him Eretz Yisrael is part of the very essence of Jewish nationhood, and living and working in the Holy Land a mitzvah equal to all the other commandments combined — the basis on which Gush Emunim can justify de facto annexation to force a permanent relationship with the entire Land. He also validated charismatic personalities, the zaddikim, as conduits of redemptive guidance.

Chapter 2: Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook and the Rise of Revisionist Zionism (lines ~1800-2059)

Tzvi Yehuda Kook (1891-1982) was present at his father’s yeshiva, Merkaz HaRav — which had slipped in stature after the elder Kook’s death and barely managed to survive into the 1960s as an ordinary seminary with no more than twenty students — and became, in the mid-1960s, the teacher of the Gahelet fraternity of Bnei Akiva graduates — including future Gush leaders Haim Druckman, Moshe Levinger and Eleazar Waldman — after their 1964 rebuff within the National Religious Party. He specified the redemption as three stages of repentance: a return from fear of danger in the Diaspora; a second stage made possible by reunion with Judea and Samaria, entailing complete resettlement and the actual fulfillment of inheriting the Land in Jewish possession and not that of any other nation; and a final repentance of love, in which observance brings the Messiah at a pace proportionate to religious observance. He sacralized the State of Israel itself as God’s appointed instrument, created by the council of nations by order of the Sovereign Lord of the Universe to fulfill the Torah commandment to inherit and settle the Land. His Independence Day sermon some three weeks before the Six Day War, bewailing the partition — Hebron, Schechem, Jericho and all of Transjordan as ours, not one millimetre surrenderable — and his reported answer that the scheduled parade was the army of Israel that will liberate the Land of Israel, were taken by disciples as prophetic; a student account of Begin kneeling and bowing before Tzvi Yehuda after the 1977 election is given as the scene’s effect on the yeshiva. Tzvi Yehuda died in 1982.

The Rise of Revisionist Zionism: Labor Zionism accepted the 1921 separation of Transjordan and, pragmatically, the 1947 offer of a state in part of western Palestine, over the objections of activist Labor Zionists (Yitzhak Tabenkin, Achdut Haavodah, Hakibbutz Hameuchad) and of the Revisionists, whose party under Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky left the World Zionist Organization in 1935 devoted to Jewish sovereignty on both banks of the Jordan, whose military arm was the Irgun under Menachem Begin. Ostracized by Ben-Gurion (“except the Communists and Herut”), Herut won no more than 14 percent in the elections of 1949-1961, and the territorial issue seemed dead after 1956; but Herut’s 1965 Gahal alliance with the Liberals won 21 percent, Begin’s co-option into the 1967 emergency government legitimized him, and in 1977 the scandal- and war-shaken Labor Party was voted out. Begin, as prime minister, went at once to the Gush settlement of Elon Moreh with a Torah scroll calling for many more Elon Morehs, placed settlement and land-acquisition bodies under Gush sympathizers, targeted the densely populated Arab areas previous governments had kept largely clear of settlers, and in the 1981 campaign swore there would be no withdrawal from Judea and Samaria, the Gaza District or the Golan Heights while he served. From 1977 to the end of 1984 two Likud governments poured more than $1 billion into West Bank and Gaza settlement; nearly sixty new West Bank settlements were added and the settler population in predominantly Arab areas rose from a few thousand to over 38,000, with sweeping land requisitions, open access to ministers and generous settlement employment for Gush activists. The part ends with the chapter’s summary of the three factors — the elder Kook’s doctrine, Tzvi Yehuda’s charismatic imperatives linking the wars and settlement to the divine plan, and the Zionist right’s ascendancy supplying status and resources — and the opening of Chapter 2’s notes (notes 1-3 begun, continuing in part 2).

Chapter 2: Notes (lines 2060-2277)

Chapter 2’s notes 4-51 complete the chapter begun in part 1 (notes 1-3 were begun there). They document the ancient and medieval history (Kedar and Harkabi on Masada and Bar Kochba; Josephus; Neusner on Yohanan ben Zakkai; Scholem’s messianic-idea essays and Sabbatai Sevi; Maimonides’ “Kings and Wars” in Twersky’s A Maimonides Reader), the Orthodox opposition to Zionism (Vital’s Zionism: The Formative Years), the 1949 rabbis’ declaration (Kasher’s The Great Era), Abraham Isaac Kook’s writings (“The Road to Renewal”, “Souls of Chaos”, Orot, the 1908 Milstein letter), Gideon Aran’s ground-breaking study of Gahelet, Tzvi Yehuda Kook’s anthology pieces and 1978 homily, Sprinzak’s iceberg model, and the activist Labor Zionist Tabenkin. Note 24 glosses kupat holim (sick fund) Zionism as the fundamentalists’ derogatory term for Reines’s refugee-aid Zionism. The text copy’s slips in the notes are recorded in the reading notes.

Chapter 3: The Evolution of Gush Emunim — founding and early activities (lines 2278-2560)

The Six Day War reopened the borders question and was the catalyst for the movement. Levinger’s illegal Passover 1968 presence in a Hebron hotel, confined by the Labor government to a military compound and after more than eighteen months allowed to become the town of Kiryat Arba, is the model for the “creation of facts in the field”. The only other significant incorporationist effort, the secular elite Movement for the Whole Land of Israel (founded two months after the war; manifesto quoted), was eclipsed after 1973 by Gush Emunim, which absorbed many of its participants on Kookist injunctions. Gush Emunim’s actual founding was in 1974, as the religious expression of the post-Yom Kippur War “earthquake”: the first war in which substantial numbers of Orthodox soldiers from the Yeshivot Hesder served in regular combat units, giving religious Jews self-confidence and legitimacy. The Elon Moreh garin (1973) joined in 1974; a secretariat and statement of principles followed in August 1974 under Hanan Porat’s “Zionism of Redemption”. Against Labor’s policy of keeping the densely populated West Bank highlands free of settlement for eventual return to Arab rule, Gush made eight attempts in 1974-1975 to settle near Nablus, succeeding at Sebastia on Hanukkah in December 1975 with 2,000 supporters and winning permission to remain at the Kadum army camp; 20,000 joined its first Independence Day March in May 1976. Under Likud from 1977, Sharon announced a plan to settle more than one million Jews in the West Bank within twenty years and Drobles issued the “Master Plan for Judea and Samaria”; $400 million was spent in the West Bank and Gaza by mid-1981, settlers rose from about 3,500 to 18,500, and by August 1984 there were 113 settlements and some 46,000 settlers in the West Bank, with capacity being built for 15,000 more a year. Lustick stresses that beyond the territories the symbiosis concealed a difference of kind: Gush is fundamentalist and seeks redemption; Likud is a coalition of practical parties that primarily wants to win elections. After Sadat’s visit, Camp David and the Egypt treaty shattered Gush expectations, and at that low ebb its pressure-group effectiveness became most apparent.

Chapter 3: The Elon Moreh case and the state-land regime (lines 2560-2800)

Gush attacked the Begin cabinet in fall 1979 for surrendering Sinai and for an autonomy plan it feared would produce a Palestinian state, seeking to sabotage the autonomy negotiations by spreading settlements. The Supreme Court decision of October 22, 1979 — agreeing with Arab petitioners that international law prohibited expropriation of private property for settlement, and ordering Elon Moreh dismantled and its land returned — is the case study. Gush leaders warned of “the collapse of the Jewish hold on Judea and Samaria” and threatened to resist evacuation; Drobles at once sought ways to circumvent the decision, and Levinger led delegations to Hammer, Ben-Meir, Ben-Elissar and Sharon, who offered alternative sites, an enlarged area and protective legislation. The cabinet on November 1 decided to comply but find an alternate site, and on November 11 announced expanded settlement on “state land” throughout the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights without security rationales. Begin promised Druckman to speed the land survey identifying state land, and chaired a new inter-ministerial settlement committee that announced the fleshing out of five settlement blocs, over the objections of ministers Erlich and Tamir that the decision stemmed directly from Gush and National Religious Party pressure. The sixty settlers moved peaceably on January 17, 1980, citing Begin’s undertaking and a commitment by 30 Knesset members to change the legal situation; within six weeks at least five legal-change proposals were under consideration. A hunger strike by six Gush council heads outside the Knesset from March 19, 1980 lasted more than six weeks; Begin tearfully told the strikers they sought nothing contrary to the government’s views. A week after the fast ended on May 2 on Yisrael Harel’s statement of “sufficient and unambiguous commitments”, the cabinet adopted administrative measures to safeguard existing settlements; Sharon, the only dissenter in favour of sweeping legislation, chaired the new committee. A five-year plan for fifty-nine additional West Bank settlements followed on May 15, and Weizman resigned as defense minister ten days later, frustrated in part at the government’s responsiveness to Gush. Sharon’s administrative devices, combined with state-land declarations, ended Arabs’ ability to protect their lands through the Court; within eighteen months the settlers had virtually ceased raising land acquisition. Lustick’s assessment: small numbers of fundamentalists with close ties to powerful Likud and National Religious Party figures changed important policies, hindered international negotiations and substantially quickened de facto annexation, while the movement lacked coherent organization and Tehiya was out of the government. Gush leaders blamed their failure to prevent Camp David and Yamit on that organizational absence.

Chapter 3: Social base and organizational elaboration (lines 2800-3200)

From 1977 to 1984 Gush developed from a loose association into an umbrella movement. Its recruitment pools: the settlers themselves (decisively young, Ashkenazic, well educated, upper middle class; now nearly 70,000 in the West Bank, Gaza and Golan excluding expanded East Jerusalem); the state religious school system (25-30 percent of Israeli Jewish students), which unlike the absorbed secular streams kept replenishing religious ranks; Bnei Akiva (25,000-30,000 members, 150 branches), which after 1967 turned from “Torah and Labor” to the whole Land; the Yeshivot Hesder (fourteen functioning, about 3,500 students a year), whose teachers were overwhelmingly Gush-oriented and whose graduates were expected to remain as settlers; activist Labor Zionists, who supplied experienced settlers and the symbolic link to “watchtower and stockade”; Herut and the Revisionist veterans of Lehi and the Irgun, who supplied publicists (Eldad, Schweid) and patrons (Sharon, Cohen, Shamir, Begin); and, for Likud’s electoral strength, Sephardic Jews whose resentment of the Labor-Ashkenazic establishment found expression in maximalist, anti-Arab positions. Yesha, based at Ofra, is the closest thing to an overall representative body, lobbying for settler interests and designing zoning that expands settler access to land and regulates Arab municipal growth; its monthly Nekuda (December 1979, edited by Yisrael Harel) became the movement’s primary in-house forum. Tehiya, the first party traceable to Gush, originated in a March 1979 meeting at Tzvi Yehuda’s home over Begin’s “betrayal”; Tzvi Yehuda’s endorsement of the secular Yuval Neeman to head it, on his teaching that the Land belongs to the whole Jewish people, overcame the founders’ differences; it won 44,500 votes and three seats in 1981 and 83,000 votes and five seats in 1984. Amana, begun in 1976 as Gush’s settlement organization, announced in spring 1980 that for all intents and purposes it was Gush Emunim; by spring 1983 it had ten full-time staff, representatives in Europe and the United States and a budget approaching $2 million; Amana and Yesha cooperated with Likud before the 1981 elections to settle and seize land against a feared Labor revival of the Allon Plan. The Movement to Halt the Retreat in Sinai, formed in spring 1981 to stop the Yamit evacuation (5,000 settlers, to be completed by April 23, 1982) or else to make the clash traumatic enough to inhibit any future evacuation, obscured its redemptive ideology behind security and pioneering appeals, fell short of its one-million-signature goal, concentrated only several thousand supporters in Yamit, and saw the evacuation completed by unarmed soldiers without serious injury; the Yamit evacuees formed Shvut Sinai and reestablished the Yamit Yeshiva Hesder in the Gaza Strip.

Chapter 3: Aftermath of Yamit and the Lebanon War — outreach, parties and violence (lines 3200-3624, with the chapter’s notes)

Yamit’s failure, six weeks after Tzvi Yehuda’s death and six weeks before the Lebanon War, precipitated a crisis of confidence. Symposia variously blamed leaders’ overconfidence that God would intervene, the Yamit settlers’ spiritual imperfection, or God’s inscrutable will (the word used is hurban, destruction). Two opposing political conclusions followed. Outreach: to prevent a repeat in Judea and Samaria, far larger numbers had to be settled and far more emphasis placed on organization and cultural outreach; Likud from fall 1982 through winter 1984 poured gigantic sums into subsidized garden suburbs to attract non-ideological, upwardly mobile Israelis. Parties proliferated: Druckman (who coined the name Gush Emunim in February 1974) left the National Religious Party in March 1983 to found Matzad, joined in 1984 by Porat (who left Tehiya over its secularism) in the Morasha alliance with Poalei Agudat Yisrael, which won 21 percent of Gush settler votes and two seats before redividing in July 1986; Tehiya’s joint 1984 list with Rafael Eitan’s Tzomet put secular ultranationalists in its first three places, and Tehiya took 23 percent of settler votes against Likud’s 48 percent (note 31). Yesha adopted detailed bylaws in August 1984 as the settlers’ non-partisan representative; in February 1985 Gush announced a fifty-person secretariat, a ten-member action committee and Daniella Weiss as general secretary, Nekuda itself noting that in recent years Gush had carried out no organized activities. The catalyst and the movement’s most divisive issue was illegal violence. Direct action: settlers integrated into reserve patrol units from 1979, with Eitan’s and Sharon’s sympathetic climate, made attacks on Arabs and Arab property commonplace; the June 1980 car bombs injured the mayors of Nablus and Ramallah after six Hebron settlers were killed, and masked gunmen killed three Arabs at the Islamic College in Hebron in July 1983; the Israeli press reported more than 380 attacks on individuals in 1980-1984 (23 killed, 191 injured, 38 abducted), hundreds on property and 41 on religious institutions (note 37, citing the Palestine Human Rights Campaign’s Israeli Settler Violence in the Occupied Territories: 1980-1984). Three interrelated carriers are distinguished: Meir Kahane’s Kach (Kahane, the Jewish Defense League founder who left the United States in 1971, held in administrative detention in 1980, suspected behind TNT, elected in 1984 on 29,907 votes with an overtly racist platform, yet winning only 3-6 percent in Gush settlements); the Temple Mount groups (at least five, about 1,500 members, seeking to change the status quo of Har Habayit / Haram el Sharif, from a synagogue to a rebuilt Temple; the May 1980 el-Aksa bombing plot, the March 1983 digging operation based at Rabbi Yisrael Ariel’s home, and the January 27, 1984 cache of thirty pounds of explosives and twenty-two grenades); and the Gush Emunim underground, whose 1978-1982 plot to destroy the el-Aksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock — IDF munitions stolen, an explosives-expert officer involved — was aborted for want of explicit rabbinic approval, and whose members, arrested on April 27, 1984 over bombs under five Arab buses, were established as responsible for the mayors and Islamic College attacks. The underground’s significance is that virtually all were respected Gush mainstream figures corresponding to the movement’s ideal, led in theory by Yehuda Etzion; after stunned silence, Yesha and Nekuda, attacked for their “hasty” condemnation, backed the defendants, and in July 1985 joined their families demanding a blanket pardon, while Nekuda published Etzion’s five prison articles justifying his actions. The chapter closes by turning to the worldview that gives this fragmented movement its coherence. Chapter 3’s notes 1-43 follow, citing among others Rubinstein, Isaac, Shafir, FBIS translations of the 1979-1980 broadcasts and press, Lustick’s own “Mechanics of De Facto Annexation” (note 20), Aran on the Sinai movement, and Nekuda throughout.

Chapter 4: The Worldview of Jewish Fundamentalism: The Breadth of Consensus — opening and beliefs 1-5 (lines 3625-4118)

The chapter presents the shared worldview, noting that it is only marginally inaccurate to call it “the ideology of Gush Emunim”, that its content discourages explanation to non-Jews, and that Rav Tzvi Yehuda produced no systematic presentation, so disputes among his disciple-core (Porat, Levinger, Waldman, Aviner, Ben-Nun, Yaacov Ariel, Druckman) are framed as disputes over accurate interpretation of his opinions; Aviner’s “Messianic Realism” disclaims originality on exactly that ground. The exposition rests on Tzvi Yehuda, on Rabbi Menachem Kasher — whose post-1967 and post-1973 treatises classed the period as the Great Era, the beginning or even the middle of redemption — and on Harold Fisch, the only core-elite member to publish a systematic presentation (The Zionist Revolution, 1978; Hebrew The Zionism of Zion, 1982). Seven basic beliefs are announced; this part gives five. (1) The abnormality of the Jewish people: against Pinsker’s and Herzl’s classical Zionism, in which Diaspora abnormality caused anti-Semitism and national normalization would end it, Fisch calls the idea that the Jewish nation is a normal nation “the original delusion of secular Zionism”; Jews are irrevocably abnormal, eternally unique by the Sinai covenant (am segula); even a World Zionist Organization Diaspora study workbook now starts from that difference in kind. Chosenness nullifies the moral laws binding normal nations: Aviner’s scale of values is theonomous, and by humanistic morality the taking of the land from the Canaanites was wrong, except that God’s command ordered it. (2) Arab opposition is not a normal, negotiable conflict but the latest episode in Israel’s eternal battle against evil; Waldman reads the Lebanon War’s ferocity as evidence that redemption advances. Palestinians cannot be seen in terms comparable to Jews, nor can any non-Jewish group have a real tie to the land, which would “vomit out” any other people; historically unsupportable claims — that Palestine was productive only under Jewish cultivation and that most Palestinian Arabs arrived within the past century — are treated as incontrovertible. Fisch holds the Palestinians to have no legitimate claim to nationhood or any part of the country, no real suffering, and a collective “deathwish”; Gush rabbis class them as Canaanites (Maimonides’ three choices: flee, accept Jewish rule, or fight) or Ishmaelites (Porat: humane treatment only for Arabs accepting Jewish sovereignty; merciless war on those who reject it, and deportation of stone-throwers’ families). The shared principle of all formulas is that Arabs may hold individual rights but no group, people or nation may be recognized as having any rights over any portion of the land — Tzvi Yehuda’s distinction between an Arab national entity, for which no place exists, and “Mustapha and Ahmad”, created in God’s image. (3) International isolation proves chosenness: Numbers 23:9’s people that dwells alone; the world’s irrational opprobrium is, for Fisch, “a theological sign of election”; the slogan becomes “what counts is not what gentiles do, but what Jews are!”; Aviner teaches an inner instinctual gentile enmity beyond rational explanation, and Kasher can explain United States support in the Yom Kippur War only as “a miracle from heaven”. (4) A negotiated peace is impossible, since the conflict is metaphysical, not about borders or rights; compromises obscure the annihilation threat, abandon imperatives and delay the redemption of the world. Only two peaces exist: a temporary peace of Arab fear (Begin’s predicted “forty years of peace” in the Lebanon War) and the real peace (Shalom-emet) that follows completion of the inheritance and precedes the Messiah; Waldman holds redemption cannot be completed except through war. (5) The cardinal importance of the Land of Israel: the slogan’s first term; Fisch’s covenant is a triad of God, land and people, without whose theological dimension “Zionism itself turns to ashes”; Orthodox critics charge idolatry, and for nonreligious fundamentalists the land with the Bible and Jewish destiny functions as God does for the religious, as the source of transcendental imperatives. Tzvi Yehuda is quoted that the chosen land and chosen people comprise one divine unity from creation. Porat insists the connection is unique among nations — a land of destiny, not an existentially defined homeland — so territorial debates are of cosmic significance, and Jews must never rest their right on conditional considerations such as security, economics or demography, nor distinguish parts of the land as more important: the entire Land is the Promised Land, to be “conquered, possessed, and settled”, and “apologetic arguments” are to be abandoned. The part breaks off mid-quotation in Porat’s statement (“There is no moral blemish in our declaration, once and for”), continuing in part 3.

Chapter 4: Beliefs 6-7 and notes (lines 4119-4618)

The range completes Porat’s statement that the Land is the Jewish people’s by virtue of God’s command engraved in iron and blood, and Druckman’s Yamit speech — the uprooting of settlements as “the severing of a limb from a living body”. Belief 6, current history as the unfolding of the redemption process: history is God’s means of communication, and analysis properly undertaken is interpretation of God’s will (Schweid). The Holocaust is read as God’s discipline, “a commandment written in blood upon the soil of Europe” (Fisch), and as the “birthpangs of the Messianic Age” (Kasher), within Kasher’s scheme of the Messiah Son of Joseph, in whose period the Arab-Israeli wars fall and miracles are shrouded in natural events, and the Messiah Son of David; the Six Day War is a Red Sea moment of miracle and restoration to Jerusalem and the cities of Judah (Fisch); the Yom Kippur War is God’s admonition to accept abnormality and covenant destiny; Tzvi Yehuda is quoted that God, and no other, creates peoples and kingdoms and that “the Temple Mount is in our hands”. Belief 7, the faith and ideological dedication of the Jews as decisive factors: the Jews are God’s chosen assistants in tikkun olam; political contacts are tests of the people’s vision and will; Fisch’s hawk-dove struggle is between authentic covenantal Zionism and a vain search for normalcy; Tzvi Yehuda teaches that no state or council of states has any right to interfere in the state’s internal affairs or its settlement of the land, and that Israel does not depend on aid or intervention by any foreign power; Fisch, writing in 1978, identifies Gush Emunim as the force reformulating Zionism in covenantal terms; fulfilment is talui banu (dependent on us). Chapter 4’s notes 1-52 follow, citing Eisenstadt, Megged, Goldberg and Ben-Zadok, Aviad, and the movement’s own Artzi and Nekuda literature throughout.

Chapter 5: The Range of Disagreement within Jewish Fundamentalism — leadership, territorial scope, and pace of redemption (lines 4619-5618)

The chapter takes the Chapter 4 assumptions as the terms of discourse within tzibur shelanu (our public) and analyses six disputed issues for 1982-1987. Leadership and source of transcendental authority: Tzvi Yehuda, who died in 1982, served even in his lifetime more as a charismatic focus than as effective leader; since his death, anecdotes, transmitted homilies and his father’s writings have been used to support contradictory positions, and at a May 1983 conference Yaacov Ariel called for collective leadership. Activists find their leaders among the pioneering elite (Porat, Beni Katzover) and settlement rabbis; the public rabbis each claim to transmit the Kooks’ authentic message, yet Waldman and Yuval draw opposite lessons on war from the same Orot, and the same authorities — Maimonides’ practical messianism and Nachmanides’ teaching that the Land is equal in weight to all the commandments — are cited by Aviner for an absolute prohibition on transferring any portion of the land and a commandment to conquer by war if necessary, by Zuckerman only against ceding land already ruled, and by Yaacov Ariel, Kahana-Shapira and Ehrenberg with varying openness to expert cession in extremis. The underground debate turned on whether the government is heaven’s representative: Yisrael Ariel defended the machteret, Zoldan held the elected government must be obeyed as a king only as long as its acts are not obviously against the Torah, Shilat held direct action to advance the messianic process wrong at most tactically, and Ben-Nun condemned the Temple Mount plot’s supposed “Laws of Redemption” as “a Sabbatian distortion”. At the extreme of direct authorisation stands Yehuda Etzion, who at his trial challenged the court’s right to judge him and claimed personal responsibility for the purification of the Temple Mount from the Dome of the Rock. The nonreligious wing — no more than 20 percent of activists, but including Cohen, Eitan, Eldad, Haetzni, Neeman, Schweid, Shamir and Shiloach — shares the worldview and objectives while grounding its imperatives in the Jewish national renaissance, heroic models (Stern, Tabenkin) and writers such as Uri Zvi Greenberg and Israel Eldad; a poll of 539 Gush settlers (11 percent nonreligious) found the two groups virtually identical on whether withdrawal from Judea and Samaria falls under ye’horeg ve’al ya’avor (62.1 and 66.8 percent agreeing). Territorial scope: the most extreme positions are secular — Eldad’s Nile-to-Euphrates advocacy of the 1950s-1960s and early-1970s minimum including Jordan and Sinai, Feitelson’s refusal ever to say “here we stop”, Neeman’s annexation of the Red Mountain area and control of the Litani if attacked. Among the religious, Elitzur’s concentric borders make the patriarchal boundaries (to the Euphrates, southern Turkey, Transjordan and the Nile Delta) the ideal, the exodus generation’s conquests required eventually, and Ezekiel’s borders the “dawn of redemption” shape; Aviner requires wars of liberation, Kelcheim conditions extension on spiritual improvement, and Porat after Yamit called for settlement nuclei for the Litani, Gilead, Transjordan and Sinai. Waldman and the religious majority oppose any formal agreement relinquishing the East Bank as a Palestinian homeland; the Lebanon War prompted claims to Lebanon (the book This Good Mountain and the Lebanon; Yisrael Ariel’s call to annex and settle most of Lebanon and divert the Litani), which were severely criticised mainly on tactical grounds, while Sinai irredentism faded with Shvut Sinai. The dominant view fixes this generation’s task as permanent control of Judea, Samaria, Gaza and the Golan, the western Land of Israel as the irreducible minimum, wider aspirations postponed; the mainstream divides over how quickly to declare formal sovereignty, Tehiya favouring it now and most preferring to wait for a demographic shift through settlement and Arab emigration. A dovish fringe (Hammer, Ben-Meir, Amital, Ben-Yaacov, Lichtenstein), shaken by Yeshivot Hesder losses in Lebanon, accepts pikuach nefesh on territorial questions and, in Amital’s formulation, would choose more Jews with less holy land under Jewish rule over fewer Jews with more; Hammer was banned from most Gush settlements and Amital’s views were denounced as heresy. Pace and dynamics: the crucial distinction is between vanguardists (“truth tellers”), for whom redemption may be completed soon but is in jeopardy, requiring dramatic fact-creation and defiance of a government that is neither holy nor authoritative — Katzover’s “return to Sebastia”, Yisrael Ariel’s Yamit call to battle, Haetzni’s Elisha and his argument for resisting and even overthrowing a betraying state, the October 1985 Yesha resolution treating a compromising regime as illegal, Dan Tor’s blame of the leadership vacuum for the underground, and Baruch Lior’s proposed settler declaration of independence — and consensus builders, for whom redemption takes generations and comes kima kima (little by little): Aviner’s fifty-years-to-repair-a-soul argument, Levinger’s affirmation of the holiness of the state, its institutions, army and police, Zuckerman’s rejection of “Messiah now” slogans, and the discipline of saying only that which can be heard, including Ben-Shlomo’s programme of hegemony over the Zionist movement through a selective manifesto and a comprehensive educational campaign.

Chapter 5: Attitudes toward opposition, and the opening of the local-Arabs section (lines 5619-6177)

The range completes the pace section with Levinger’s reassurance that Yamit comparisons are exaggerated and his support for Likud in the national unity government, Uri Elitzur’s fifty-year project of persuading Amos Oz, and Ben-Nun — the consensus approach’s most prolific and sophisticated exponent — for whom the days of Sebastia and Yamit as a vanguard “are gone and will not return” and the urgent task is to renew the state’s authority on a public consensus. Attitudes toward international and Israeli opposition: conflict with the gentiles, even wars against them, is “for their own good”, since reunification hastens mankind’s redemption, yet Levinger divides gentiles into those who hate the Jews and those indifferent to their destruction; all reject a “Judeo-Christian tradition”, many rabbis distinguishing monotheistic Muslims from Christians as idol-worshippers for the Trinity; voting rights in Israel, one quoted passage holds, must be determined by identification with the people’s mission, not by democratic equality as in Europe and America. Moshe Ben-Yosef (Hagar) is the most fervent exponent of the view that Western liberal culture is the source of the people’s problems — the Enlightenment a catastrophe, a “war of extermination against Western culture, which has brought the greatest of holocausts upon us — the Liberal holocaust” to be conducted, a reformed halacha imposed by state power, and the dovish left (Shinui, the Movement for Citizen Rights) denounced as cultural degeneracy; Haetzni, Shiloach, Kahane, Unger, Eldad and others regularly condemn doves as “Hellenizers”, “fifth columnists” and “traitors”, and Peace Now is treated as a categorical abandonment of Zionism. Against Labor’s 1984-1986 Jordanian option, vilification of Peres, Eban and Weizman extended to discussion of the inevitability and even need of civil war: Haetzni’s Peres as “second Reheboam”, his Maccabean civil-war precedent, and his warning that evacuating 100,000 Jews by force would bring civil war; debate among those sharing his views is over tactics. Beneath it lies the unanswered question of democracy’s value, posed by Schweid after the underground’s arrests — democracy as an end or only a means, and absolute halacha against humane and moral sentiments — with Hankin, Tzuriel and Haetzni all denying majoritarianism authority on the Land, Haetzni by the golden-calf precedent. The movement is undecided whether Labor Zionism is salvageable (two opposed Nekuda editorials; Froumin against Mintz); the most moderate position, Amital’s, refuses to subordinate the unity of the people to sovereignty and ranks the interest of the people of Israel before the interest of the Land. Toward the world, support from American ultraconservatives and Protestant fundamentalists is appreciated but wariness is general, Diaspora communities are told their responsibility is to end their own existence through mass emigration, Europe is spineless before Arab oil and Palestinian terrorism, and virtually all members support lowering the standard of living to reduce dependence on the United States; Haetzni (reacting to the Reagan initiative) suggested joining the Soviet bloc, Ben-Nun argued in 1984 for withdrawal from the western democratic front and renewed Soviet ties, and Nisan’s “double discourse” — glowing tributes to America for American audiences, a colonial characterisation of the relationship for Jewish audiences — and a February 1983 Nekuda editorial blaming the Bechtel Corporation’s control of the President exemplify the religious mainstream’s real view. Policy toward and eventual status of local Arabs (opening): no evidence exists of concrete plans for genocidal policies, and no important group publicly advocates genocide, but a number of rabbis supportive of Gush have offered opinions that could provide the halachic basis for such policies, identifying the Palestinian Arabs, or Arabs in general, as Amalekites — the people God commanded be killed, men, women and children, and their memory blotted out; Druckman greeted the crippling of two Arab mayors by quoting “Thus may all Israel’s enemies perish!”, and Haim Tsuria defended him: “In every generation there is an Amalek. In our generation, our Amalek are the Arabs who oppose the renewal of our national existence in the land of our fathers.” Kach, advocating virtually complete expulsion, received 22 percent of the vote in the 1985 Kiryat Arba local council elections, and at least one-third of Gush Emunim appears to believe Jews should consider themselves in a state of war with the whole Arab population; the passages quoted argue that coexistence endangers the Jewish state, that “there is only one solution — the transfer of the Arab population of the Land of Israel to the Arab states”, described as humane against the “final solution” the Arab world plans, that Arabs live in the land “like a malignant and painful tumor — a cancer within the heart of the state”, that settlement must proceed within densely populated Arab areas expropriating land and insulting national feelings because “Arabs or Jews can live in the Land of Israel — but not both peoples together”, and that demographic research showing an Arab majority within 40 years in the state and within 80 years inside the Green Line makes the Arabs’ departure necessary to prevent them democratically destroying the state. The part breaks off mid-quotation (“I am more extreme than Kahane regarding encouragement of Arabs to”), continuing in part 4.

Chapter 5: Policy toward local Arabs — conclusion (lines 6178-6888)

The quotation broken off in part 3 completes: its speaker (identified in note 142 as Eli Susser) is “more extreme than Kahane regarding encouragement of Arabs to leave the country”, favouring payment (the carrot) and “negative means of encouragement” (the stick) implemented “completely arid systematically” [and, as printed]. Aside from Kach, no political party calls officially for wholesale expulsion; Yuval Neeman at the 1986 Tehiya convention in Kiryat Arba declared that a half million Arab refugees in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would have to be relocated to Arab countries in any peace agreement, and Moshe Ben-Yosef sought to legitimize discussion of mass expulsion (“it is kosher to discuss the idea of transfer, and even to put it into effect, despite the fact that Kahane speaks about it”), quoting Berl Katznelson and Yitzhak Tabenkin; “The idea of transfer has deep roots in the Zionist movement.” Lustick’s assessment: commitment to expulsion as a radical solution to the demographic problem is not a dominant view within Jewish fundamentalism, but vigilantism and “iron fist” techniques have wide support — a 1981-1982 poll of 455 settlers showed two-thirds agreeing settlers should respond quickly and independently to Arab harassments; Yesha in summer 1985 called for closure of Arab newspapers and universities, dissolution of Arab cooperatives and youth organizations, loosened restrictions on settler weapons and prosecution of all known PLO supporters; after the April 1987 firebomb attack that killed a young mother, hundreds of settlers rampaged in Kalkilia, Daniella Weiss reportedly among them; Gideon Altschuler advocated shoot-to-kill orders against Arab stone throwers, including children. Beni Katzover endorsed collective punishment (“What we need is collective punishment and harsh measures-so that they learn to fear us”), and a 1987 poll of West Bank and Gaza rabbis found 86 percent judging collective punishment against refugee camps or extended families permissible, deportation the favored method (64 percent); others warn collective punishment may help create a Palestinian “collectivity” that does not exist naturally. The mainstream programme is strict security enforcement, bans on Arab political and cultural activity, closure or supervision of Arab educational institutions and minimal personal relations, in the expectation that, deprived of development opportunities and finding the area ever more thoroughly “Judaized”, Arabs will emigrate in demographically meaningful numbers. Arabs who remain must surrender any claim to political influence (Tzvi Yehuda: “we owe them no part of the government!”). The stance is illustrated by the January 13, 1984 Nekuda cover captioned “A Moment of Coexistence” (Appendix 4): a uniformed settler with machine gun and club leading an elderly blind Arab refugee across a road — Jews young, dominant, armed and in control, Arabs old, helpless, docile and ultimately irrelevant. The halachic literature on gar toshav (resident alien) — the seven Noachite commandments, tax acceptance of Jewish sovereignty, conversion and lo tehonem land questions, Jerusalem residence, de jure/de facto enforcement — and the proposal of a separate subordinate formal status on the dhimmi model (Yaacov Ariel: Arabs are to be “honored guests, who know how to acknowledge and honor the master of the house”, as Jews were in Galut) are set out, with citizenship for West Bank and Gaza Arabs held out only on conditions designed to make it virtually impossible. A minority of Nekuda writers (some 10-15 percent of articles on the subject), Miriam Shiloh’s “Do Not Hate!” among them, criticise the predominant anti-Arab attitudes, in an apologetic tone; the predominant response is condemnation of such naiveté, and in 1985 many rabbis including Ben-Nun condemned government programmes for Jewish-Arab youth meetings as giving a mistaken impression of equality. Tactical voices (Haetzni, Yisrael Harel, Ben-Nun, Yaacov Feitelson) argue for a less antagonistic relationship lest talk of no coexistence and expulsion support the case for a Jewish state in smaller borders. The section closes: despite disagreements, there is complete agreement Arabs have no rights over any part of the land, and an unquestioned assumption that Arab interests must not affect fulfillment of Jewish imperatives — if Arabs cannot accommodate themselves to Jewish rule, they will ultimately have no place in the State or the Land.

Chapter 5: Prospects for peace (lines 6178-6888, continued)

Fundamentalists do not believe a negotiated comprehensive settlement is possible without transformations making the Middle East radically different; differences on peace prospects are narrower than on the five areas already discussed. At one extreme, peace is a messianic phenomenon: war continues until the Kingdom of Israel, the rebuilt Temple and the Messiah; for Waldman the wars against evil are mitzvahs to be done joyfully, and redemption is “spiritual and moral completedness” in which all worship the one God. Porat: “Tidings of peace will come to the world only from the Mountain of the Temple of God”; the shlemut/shalom linkage makes territorial compromise for peace nonsensical, and “the value of the Land of Israel exceeds that of peace” — if the peoples controlling the Land do not accept Jewish sovereignty, “we are commanded to conquer the Land by war, even at a high price”. Aran on the Movement to Halt the Retreat in Sinai: even a peace preserving national honor, moral purity and security “would still be unacceptable”. Hatred, anti-Semitism and war will intensify as redemption nears (Waldman). The secular version: peace with the Arab world is impossible — a Hundred Years War rooted in Arab psychology, jihad, borrowed anti-Semitism and instability; the “House of Islam” precedent is the Crusader state, wiped from the face of the earth; compromise, in the passage quoted, “does not exist in the political lexicon of Islam”. Israel must keep an overwhelming deterrent, wage preventive war when necessary, and wait generations: Raphael Eitan (“(I) do not believe in any negotiations with the Arabs”) and his Tzomet theme of a modern-day Sparta, education for fighting beginning in kindergarten; Abraham Yoffe: “The will of the people is expressed in war. That is the whole Torah.” A few secular ultranationalists envision peace through dissolution of Arab domination: “there is no Arab world” — Tzvi Shiloach’s two federations of ethnic mini-states (a northern federation and a southern, Israel-led “United States of the Middle Fast” [East]), Ezra Zohar’s reorganized Middle East of ethnoreligious entities encouraged by vigorous Israeli foreign policy, and Yuval Neeman’s historical process requiring “the reconstruction of Arab society, the productivization of its mentality, and the realization of its potential”. Religious variants: Ben-Nun’s eventual peace through negotiations between Jewish and Muslim religious leaders on the Torah “designed, first for the peoples of this area, and then for the rest of the world”, and Yaacov Ariel’s peace entailing Arab acceptance of “the Divine Revelation of the Torah at Sinai”. Short-run amelioration approaches (Shiloach’s 1976 Maronite enclave continuity, Sharon’s Jordan-as-Palestinian-state retaliation logic, Haetzni’s 1982 Lebanese alliances) were undermined by the Lebanon War’s Christian-Israeli alliance failure — Haetzni by January 1985 attacked the failure to conduct scorched earth in Lebanon — while Ben-Nun and Levinger suggested de facto agreements with Syria and Meir Har-Noi acceptance of the “cold peace” with Egypt. Ultimately such voices are lost in the chorus of preventing or sabotaging negotiating initiatives: Haetzni’s April 1985 panic over the Hussein-Arafat agreement, and Amiel Unger’s systematically unreasonable negotiating demands (a joint delegation to include Israeli Arab Knesset members, borders from 1921, symmetrical areas free of Arabs for areas free of Jews) designed to rally opinion against negotiations and ensure their failure. The chapter closes: negotiations are understood as times of testing of the Jewish people’s will against imperatives established by God and Jewish history.

Chapter 5: Notes (lines 6889-7876)

Chapter 5’s notes 1-207 complete the chapter. They document the leadership, territorial, pace, opposition, local-Arabs and peace debates almost entirely from the movement’s own Nekuda and Artzi literature and the Whose Homeland symposium volume, with the settler polls of Weisburd (539 settlers, 1981-82; note 30, note 115, note 160) and Waxman (100 American-background settlers, 1984; notes 75, 166), FBIS transcriptions, and the Dawn Publishing (Montreal) literature (Soloway, Eidelberg, Shmuel Katz, Nisan; notes 131, 186-187). Note 135 identifies Israel Hess’s “The Torah’s Commandment of Genocide”, Bat Kol, February 26, 1980, as the most explicit version of the Amalek argument; note 146 forward-refers to chapter 7, page 179, for a 1987 poll of West Bank and Gaza rabbis suggesting support for some transfer option may be stronger than the chapter indicates, and note 152 forward-refers to chapter 7, note 2, for that poll’s details; note 150 cites Michal Capra, Sof Shavua, November 27, 1987, the latest-dated citation in the chapter. Note 51 dates the application of Israeli law to the Golan Heights to December 1982, as printed (see Open questions). Notes 193 and 194 give overlapping page ranges in Ben-Ami’s Book of The Whole Land (Shiloach pp.213-240; Zohar pp.227-240), as printed.

Chapter 6: Present Trends and Future Implications — opening, settlement issues and political competition (lines 7877-8236)

The chapter restates the argument in trend form: the fundamentalist worldview rests on myths of chosenness, mission and territorial sovereignty like those that shaped Jewish politics before the Roman expulsion, and its contemporary role is explained by Zionism’s historic success, the consequences of the Six Day and Yom Kippur Wars, and well-placed elites linking redemptive values to settlement and sovereignty. A messianic interpretation remains dominant in the national-religious sector; the chief rabbinate “has virtually embraced the fundamentalist credo”; in 1984 Tehiya attracted the third-largest number of votes (after Labor and Likud), and 1987 polls showed Tehiya/Tzomet, Kach and the National Religious Party expecting thirteen to sixteen seats in the 1988 Knesset. Given fundamentalist staffing of religious-sector education and high settler birthrates, the number of Israelis governed by these myths will slowly increase; the open question is whether the legitimized vocabulary percolates through wider society as a resource for competing elites, or comes to appear irrelevant and dangerous. Settlement Issues: since 1984 straitened economic circumstances have sharply reduced settlement expenditure, hampering Gush objectives; the parliamentary lobby sponsored in response contradicts the movement’s claim to be not an interest group but the nation’s self-sacrificing representative; the movement has offered no convincing responses to economic inequality and social injustice (Charles Liebman). Only 21 percent of employed settlers work inside their settlements, most of those in public service, making activist livelihoods dependent on government generosity; religious/nonreligious settler friction and screening disputes hamper absorption; Yeshivot Hesder graduates since 1982 have mostly left the West Bank for careers inside the green line. The 1983 Likud-Gush strategy therefore turned to heavily subsidized suburban settlement to make up for the shortage of ideologues — circumstances creating interests that then require ideas, the territories as a “hothouse” for fundamentalist sentiments. Meron Benvenisti’s 1984 analysis is quoted at length: the Gush-Drobles plan to settle 100,000 Jews in the West Bank by end-1986 failed for shortage of ideologically motivated settlers; the new strategy’s first objective was a constituency that would fight territorial compromise to protect its “quality of life”, thrust into friction, dichotomization and Jewish-dominant hierarchy. By end-1987 nearly 70,000 Jews lived in the West Bank outside expanded East Jerusalem, still short of 1983 anticipations; the new settlers outnumber the Gush veterans and over 70 percent of West Bank Jewish residents live in “urban” areas, so Yesha cannot speak confidently for the majority, as the controversy over its 1985 “traitorous government” resolution showed. The strategy’s plausibility: 63 percent of interviewed settlers moved for social and economic reasons but many developed “ex post facto ideologies”; in Maale Adumim 80 percent (Kiryat Arba 99 percent) denied real peace is achievable through territorial compromise, and 60 percent (Kiryat Arba 65 percent) would resist evacuation nonviolently, 10 percent (30 percent) by arms. Settler voting: in 1981 Likud, Tehiya and the National Religious Party took 78 percent of the West Bank vote against 44 percent nationally; in 1984 the annexationist parties took 86 percent of West Bank and Gaza settler votes against 41 percent nationally, with “the Likud bloc” at 77 percent in Maale Adumim and annexationist support at 98 percent in Ariel. Ariel’s mayor Ron Nahman — presenting his city as a non-ideological “yuppie” community — was in fact a Gush activist before subsidization who had proposed the circumstances strategy itself. Political Competition (opening): Labor, stung by 1984, campaigns for the suburban settlers on the September 1984 coalition stipulation that “existing settlements will be developed without interruption”, with United Kibbutzim settlement in southern Mount Hebron claimed under the Allon Plan and Histadrut firms building in the West Bank; at Labor’s November 1987 Maale Ephraim meeting most speakers condemned Peres for moving too far toward compromise, and Rabin declared no controversy over Jerusalem, its environs and Maale Adumim remaining under Israeli sovereignty. On the right, ambitious Likud leaders compete for Gush endorsement: Housing Minister David Levy, who in June 1987 suspended the official Israel Atlas over a passage critical of Gush Emunim and commissioned a substitute chapter from a Gush sympathizer; Shamir (through Mikhael Dekel) and Sharon; and former finance minister Yigal Cohen-Orgad’s November 1987 Nekuda article proving settlement proceeded fastest under him. The National Religious Party’s dismal 1984 showing is traced to Hammer’s and Ben-Meir’s post-Lebanon second thoughts; Hammer was banned from Gush settlements, but his 1986 maneuvering shows he feels compelled to honor the movement’s efforts — the part breaks off mid-sentence as Hammer, chosen to lead the party in summer 1986, “developed”, continuing in part 5.

Chapter 6: Political competition concluded, Palestinian violence, the Haredim, and the leadership and Temple Mount problem (lines 8237-8758)

Hammer, chosen to lead the National Religious Party in summer 1986, developed a position relying on an alliance of his Young Guard faction, Druckman’s Matzad and another Gush-associated Merkaz HaRav group; he rejected talk of a Matzad “takeover”, declared opposition to evacuation of any settlements and support for new ones, and welcomed Matzad “back to the fold” as “flesh of our flesh, separated from us only very briefly”; Druckman, Porat, Uri Elitzur and Yosef Shapira (the party’s second cabinet minister) returned to important positions. The national unity government has obscured the movement’s vitality and its leverage over Likud: the 1984 elections were a virtual dead heat — the Likud bloc (Likud, Tehiya, the National Religious Party, Morasha, Ometz) received 875,001 votes against the Labor bloc’s (Labor, Yahad, Shinui, Civil Rights Movement) 874,821, a difference of only 180 votes — and the coalition deferred decisive action on the territories’ ultimate disposition. Once elections due by the end of 1988 end the arrangement, Gush influence is almost certain to increase: in opposition beside Likud if Labor governs, or as the ally Likud must turn to, and pay the strongest commitments to, if it governs; the spring 1987 World Zionist Organization elections, where Herut and Tehiya ran a joint list with Waldman fifth, Geula Cohen eighth and Sharon and Levy second and third, are a presentiment. The Implications of Palestinian Violence: violence deters settlement and depresses West Bank land prices, but also enhances the appeal of tough anti-Arab rhetoric; the April 11, 1987 molotov attack on a Jewish family driving home to Alfei Menashe — the pregnant wife burned to death, a child later dying of his injuries — triggered a riot by 300 settlers in Kalkilia (shops and cars destroyed, orchards and fields burned), and at the Gush secretariat meeting convened at Alfei Menashe the next day, Levinger, Weiss and Haetzni blamed the authorities’ leniency and Peres’s peace-conference efforts, while a settlement member, a lieutenant colonel, declared they would act in the surrounding villages “in the tradition of Unit 101, of Deir Yasin, Kibya, and Kfar Kassem”. Relations with the Haredim: the movement faces a recruitment problem in its own stronghold — a trend toward ultrareligiosity and otherworldly concerns, called “blackening”, is replacing the national-religious ethos within Merkaz HaRav and similar yeshivas, with growing rabbinic opposition to students’ army service, and Bnei Akiva is shifting toward social, cultural and religious issues, partly in response to Lebanon War deaths of yeshiva students and graduates and the shock of the underground trials. Yet a Haredi alliance is possible if key rabbis decide that wars or struggles over the Land or the Temple Mount herald redemption’s climax: 70 percent of 375 baalei tshuvah surveyed felt they were living in the beginning of a messianic process, Ateret Cohanim studies Temple service and a Hasidic sect weaves priests’ vestments, the ultra-Orthodox West Bank city of Immanuel is being built (4,000 residents by March 1986), Morasha joined Verdiger and Druckman in 1984, Shas won four seats in 1984 with most representatives echoing Gush ultranationalist and anti-Arab sentiments, and MK Menachem Porush warned that if the yeshiva-student exemption is rescinded, “we will go underground, and in the underground (machteret) we shall continue to study”; Sharon’s solicitousness of the exemption suggests he perceives the possibility. The movement’s success is not guaranteed: its very expansion has created practical problems, and its Chapter 5 differences, within a coherent worldview, have complicated a united organizational framework. The Leadership Problem and the Struggle for Jewish Control of the Temple Mount: the most substantial threat to fundamentalist objectives is activists’ difficulty in modulating actions and beliefs and accepting a consensus-building strategy — the excesses or “purity” of some let opponents portray Gush not as “authentic” but as “insane”; fundamentalism’s vitality contains a dangerous tendency toward extremism, and compromise of transcendental imperatives can be legitimized only by charismatic leaders, none of whom has replaced Tzvi Yehuda (Levinger lacks the temperament, scholarly reputation and following). His absence shows in efforts since 1983 to assert Jewish rights over the Temple Mount as a prelude to removing the Muslim shrines and rebuilding the Temple — an issue he had kept off the agenda, whose logic the worldview makes impossible to ignore, given the site’s status as a zone of virtual Arab/Muslim autonomy in “united Jerusalem”; rabbis led by former Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren (supported by Waldman, Mordechai Eliyahu and the chief rabbis of Tel Aviv, Netanya and Haifa) used archeological finds to eliminate the halachic restrictions on Jewish entry, Nekuda items on the Mount went from very few before the early 1980s to dozens in 1983-1986 advocating Judaization, demonstrative Knesset-member visits in early 1986 ignited furious Arab reaction, and 12,000 fundamentalists marched in June 1986 behind the show “The Temple Mount is the Heart of the People”. Nekuda editorials of late 1985 and early 1986 warned that violent steps would be taken if the government did not swiftly change the status quo, and a September 1986 editorial concluded that, having pushed the end for the whole Land and the state, “we must now build the Temple”; in October 1987, fearing a Succoth demonstration, 2,000 Muslims battled police for three hours. Columnist Doron Rosenblum holds destruction of the shrines “only a matter of time” and predicts regional war; a reserve general in May 1987 warned that messianically fervent elite-unit fighters could plant hundreds of kilos of explosives at the Dome of the Rock. The issue is a terrible dilemma: no trend holds more potential for rapid, radical, worldview-consistent change, and none more potential to destroy the movement’s unity and expose it to devastating attack; with Shamir’s assumption of the premiership (1985, as printed) and the disappearance of Jordanian negotiating opportunities the impetus slowed, and Aviner constructed a tortured argument from Tzvi Yehuda for continuing the entry ban — “achieving closeness to it by keeping distance from it” — but should a Labor victory appear possible, vanguardists will again raise the Temple Mount banner, which may also give adroit politicians the chance to divide and discredit the movement. The Weiss crisis of late 1986 — Ben-Nun and Menachem Frumin publicly separating themselves from Gush as led, vanguardists insisting on redemptive immediacy — produced the May 1987 agreement: Levinger identified as overall ideological guide, Weiss remaining general secretary, Ben-Nun resuming secretariat participation, Porat responsible for propaganda and Katzover heading the political committee; the arrangements are unlikely to be a permanent solution. The chapter closes: Kook’s formula merging religious devotion with secular energy requires an ongoing, increasingly “luminous” and challenging redemption process, so both wings have a strong interest in maintaining a sense of crisis; these structural requirements, with the absence of charismatic leadership, may make the movement less effective in the long run but more explosive and dangerous in the short and medium term, and it is far more likely to imitate the self-destructive extremism of the first-century Zealots and the second-century followers of Bar Kochba than to build a new and stable consensus — the larger question being whether the catastrophic consequences of Second Temple-era fundamentalist politics will also be recapitulated.

Chapter 6: Notes (lines 8759-9128)

Chapter 6’s notes 1-57 complete the chapter. They document the trend analysis from Liebman and Don-Yehiya (note 1), the 1979 chief rabbi ruling banning transfer of any part of the Land to gentiles on the basis of the “Covenant between the pieces” (note 2), the 1986-1987 Modi’in Ezrahi and Dahaf polls (note 3), Grossman’s prediction that Gush children’s upbringing guarantees more undergrounds (note 4), Benvenisti’s 1984 West Bank Data Project and 1986 Report throughout (notes 7, 11-13, 16, 21-22, 24), the Maale Adumim/Kiryat Arba poll in Counterpoint (note 19), Tehiya’s extraction of Shamir’s commitment to 100,000 West Bank Jews by the end of 1988 (note 33), Grossman on the Alfei Menashe aftermath, with the note’s gloss that each village named by the lieutenant colonel was the scene of a massacre of Arab civilians by Jews and that Sharon is one of Unit 101’s best-known veterans (note 34), the “blackening” literature (note 35) and the Haredi-alliance literature (note 37), Etzion’s 1984 Nekuda Temple Mount article and its rebuilt-Temple photomontage, cross-referred to Appendix 5 (note 44), Goren’s Holocaust-memorial sculpture overlooking the Mount whose fire and water recall the Temple libations (note 43), Rosenblum’s “The Temple Mount Will Be Blown Up” (note 52), and the Nekuda nos.104-109 debate over Weiss’s leadership (note 55). Note 25 cites Haaretz, November 6, 1982 for the chapter’s November 1987 Labor meeting, and note 27 cites Davar, June 10, 1986 for the Atlas suspension the text dates to June 1987; note 44 dates Nekuda no.75 to July 6, 1984 (see Open questions).

Chapter 7: Conclusion (lines 9129-9400)

Assessing Jewish Fundamentalism’s Long Term Potential. The conclusion restates the book’s arc from Elon’s 1968 and 1987 portraits: Labor Zionist Israel became a deeply divided, highly politicized society; right-wing Zionism, exploiting Sephardic resentments and anti-Arab attitudes and capitalizing on the romance of the Six Day War and the fears of the Yom Kippur War, rose to power, and the redemptionist fundamentalist movement arose as both Likud’s instrument and a powerful influence on it. Virtually no serious observers believe a negotiated solution is possible unless Jewish fundamentalism’s key goal — permanent Jewish rule over the whole Land of Israel — is thwarted, yet the movement’s leverage will for the foreseeable future prevent the Israeli political system from responding positively, by normal peaceful parliamentary means, to opportunities for such an agreement no matter how attractive its terms; nor can Israel stably incorporate the territories, because of international opposition, sharp internal divisions, and the entrenched interests and extremist proclivities of Gush settlers, which make any arrangement even minimally satisfactory for West Bank and Gaza Palestinians unlikely to be agreed and implemented. The overheated climate this produces enhances fundamentalist ideas’ attractiveness: the message is but one authentic expression of Jewish political culture, and Gush relies not only on the absence of movement toward peace but on the inability of any other force to offer an equally authentic, equally reassuring formula grounded in accommodation rather than isolation and confrontation. Labor’s “demographic problem” argument exemplifies the failure: meant to frighten Israelis out of attachment to the territories, it has, given a rapidly growing Arab population of nearly 700,000 inside the green line and no acceptable compromise plan, done little but convince many Israelis of the need to get rid of the Arabs, not the territories. At the end of October 1987 Minister without Portfolio Yosef Shapira publicly suggested paying $20,000 to each Arab willing to leave permanently, citing his party’s survey of West Bank and Gaza rabbis — to “What is your opinion regarding the emigration of gentiles from the country?”, 62 percent responded “We must force them to do so by any means at our disposal and see in it an exchange of populations”, 13 percent favored encouraging voluntary emigration and 10 percent said it was not the time to discuss it — and Shapira was joined in a lively, sustained debate over voluntary, semivoluntary and forcible transfer schemes by Rehavam Ze’evi, Mikhael Dekel, Ariel Sharon, Gideon Altschuler, Geula Cohen, Yuval Neeman and National Religious Party colleagues, against new statistics showing that in 1988 a majority of children under fifteen within the area ruled by Israel will be Arabs. The debate’s importance is not the likelihood of implementation but the widening of acceptable political discourse to include mass transfer as a discussible option — Gush, in Rosenblum’s words, transforms “the criminal to the crazy, the crazy to the odd, the odd to the mistaken, the mistaken to the good, the good to the excellent, the excellent to the accomplished reality, and the accomplished reality to the consensus view”. Israel is not Iran — a Khomeini-style social revolution is virtually inconceivable — and Likud should not be underestimated for autonomy or pragmatic potential (late in 1987 Likud politicians clashed with Gush in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to take control of the Yesha Council; Peres’s June 1987 claim that Likud had “ceased to exist” and become an appendage of Gush, Tehiya and the religious parties, leaving “only a Rabbi Levinger and Daniella Weiss”, was exaggeration), and organizational difficulties have drained the movement’s self-confidence and vitality since 1984 — but the unity government’s severe constraints must also be remembered; fundamentalist ideas and elites are now part of the political landscape, the hawkish right cannot differentiate itself from them, the dovish left lacks a compelling vision, and new elections, polarization, Likud’s coalition needs, territorial unrest and regional tensions can all let fundamentalism flourish. Jewish Fundamentalism and American Foreign Policy: the question for liberal democratic Israelis and American policy-makers is not how to respond to a fundamentalist Israel but how to shape and interpret circumstances to undermine the message’s attractiveness; spasmodic Israeli oscillation on negotiations and on the territories’ Arab inhabitants will intensify after the unity government, vanguardist arguments will gain support, and pressure will build for actions irrevocably alienating gentile and Arab opinion. Implementing territory-for-peace would trigger opposition reminiscent of the French Fourth Republic’s 1958 collapse over Algérie française — mass demonstrations, violence against Jews and Arabs, rabbinical decrees, scores of new illegal settlements, civil-war threats, an influx of militant Diaspora Jews, and spectacular actions such as destruction of the Muslim shrines — which skillful leaders characterizing compromise as a superpower diktat might overcome, but not guaranteedly; and should such an attempt fail, the movement might exploit a breakdown of parliamentary democracy: a January 1987 poll found 34 percent of Israeli Jews agreeing it is preferable to have strong leadership that can set the house in order without dependence on elections, 21 percent “do not quite agree” and 38 percent “definitely disagree”, and the most-discussed scenario is unscrupulous right-wing politicians joining ambitious commanders to “restore order and sanity”, with Gush providing support and ideological legitimacy. A regime dependent on or led by fundamentalist elites would destroy the special relationship with the United States; an Israel decoupled from the United States, opposed in principle to negotiated peace, unfettered by liberal-democratic norms, animated by redemptionist imperatives and disposing of a large and sophisticated nuclear arsenal would challenge American interests at least as profoundly as the Islamic Revolution in Iran; Washington should stress how central the shared democratic, libertarian and universalistic values are to the relationship and make clear that American support ultimately depends on them, values unrealizable in the fundamentalists’ “greater Israel”. Jewish Nationalism and Jewish Fundamentalism: the largest measure of responsibility for neutralizing Jewish fundamentalism rests with Jews in Israel and the Diaspora; contemporary fundamentalism is dheikat haketz, pushing for the end by achieving Jewish rule over the whole Land at any cost, and the question, new for the West Bank, Gaza and the Palestinian Arabs, is in another sense very old. Gershom Scholem in 1959, recalling the catastrophic revolts against Rome and the Sabbatian episode, warned that “the blazing landscape of redemption” is a hazardous field for political ambition, and asked whether Jewish history can endure Zionism’s entry into the concrete realm “without perishing in the crisis of the Messianic claim which has virtually been conjured up”; the Jewish people, still reeling from the Holocaust, must find the political maturity to resist the seductive but perilous temptations of redemption and find instead the earthly, and imperfect, alternatives.

Chapter 7: Notes (lines 9401-9498)

Chapter 7’s notes 1-12 complete the book’s notes. Note 1 cites the author’s State-Building Failure in British Ireland and French Algeria (1985) for the argument that settler vested interests and intransigence prevented permanent incorporation of Ireland and Algeria. Note 2 gives the rabbis poll’s provenance: conducted by the Tzomet Institute, 120 questionnaires distributed and fifty-two (43 percent) returned, full results in Nekuda, no.115, November 1987, p.37 — the poll behind both this chapter’s 62/13/10 figures and the 1987 collective-punishment figures of Chapter 5. Note 4 gives the population estimates published at the end of 1987: 750,000 Arabs within Israel (including expanded East Jerusalem), 830,000 in the West Bank and 650,000 in the Gaza Strip. Note 8 documents civil-war warnings by Porat, Otheniel Shindler, former secret-service head Avraham Achitov and intellectuals including Talmon, A. B. Yehoshua, Friedlander and Saltpeter, often drawing Weimar parallels, and Medad’s 1982 Nekuda argument that Yamit’s evacuation could be halted only by an immediate Jewish takeover of the Temple Mount. Note 9 cites the Modi’in Ezrahi poll in Yochanan Peres, “Most Israelis Are Committed to Democracy” (February 1987). Note 10 documents the coup literature (Sharon as possible leader, Oriental Jews as mass base, Amos Kenan’s fictional The Road to Ein Harod). Note 11 cites the author’s Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy articles for the American policy suggestions. Note 12 cites Scholem, “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism”, in The Messianic Idea in Judaism (Schocken, 1971), pp.35-36.

Appendix 1: Glossary (lines 9499-9696)

The glossary defines some sixty terms and persons, from Achdut Haavodah to Yishuv, in the terms established in the reading notes: Amana as “(Covenant) the settlement-building arm of Gush Emunim”, Kach as emphasizing “the expulsion of Arabs from the entire Land of Israel”, Kasher as author of The Great Period (as printed), Levinger entered as “Levinger, Mosh”, Matzad as founded by Druckman after his departure in 1982 from the National Religious Party, Morasha as founded in 1984 by Druckman combining Matzad and Poalei Agudat Yisrael (Pagi), Nekuda as the monthly journal of Yesha that began publishing in 1979, Orot as both Abraham Isaac Kook’s multivolume work and Porat’s short-lived 1984 political movement, Sebastia as the location of Gush Emunim’s first successful illegal settlement attempt, dated 1974 as printed, Tzomet as founded by Rafael Eitan after the Lebanon War, merged with Tehiya in 1984 and leaving it in 1987, and Yesha’s acronym spelled out with the note that the Hebrew yeshua means “salvation”.

Appendix 2: Polling Data (lines 9697-10051)

The appendix collects Israeli Jewish polling 1974-1987 under Territorial Compromise, Settlement of the West Bank, Arabs and Miscellaneous, each item with its source in the appendix’s notes 1-35. Territorial compromise: 30 percent would make no concessions for peace (January 1975); 54 percent chose annexation over peace (July 1984); 54 percent disagreed that Israel should suggest territorial compromise against security guarantees (September 1986); proportions against any concession in a Jordan agreement giving up territory in Judea and Samaria ran 48.9, 43.6, 44.9, 47.7 and 46.4 percent (November 1985-April 1987); 66.8 percent cited annexation or permanent control without annexation as closest to their position (July 1987); of those aged 22-29, 56 percent, and of those aged 18-29, 73 percent, opposed a Jordan agreement giving up territory (March 1986). Settlement: 46.3 percent supported Jewish settlement in Hebron (March 1980); 31.2 percent supported continuing settlements in all of Judea and Samaria (March 1981); 50 percent opposed relinquishing any West Bank settlements (September 1984); 62 percent refused evacuation of settlements for a Jordan peace agreement (April 1987 — the figure Chapter 1 cites); proportions against freezing new settlements ran 35.4 to 37.9 percent (November 1985-April 1987). Arabs: 36.6 percent of Israeli Jews, and 46 percent of Oriental Jews, supported using terror to confront Arab terror (May 1980); 37.3 percent agreed there cannot be peace with all the Arab countries (1981); 18.7 percent agreed a Jewish group to fight terror with terror should be created (December 1983); 15 percent agreed the Arab population across the green line should be deported (July 1984); 62 percent could justify or relate with understanding to the Jewish terrorist underground (June 1984); 55.1 percent of 15-18-year-olds agreed Arabs in Israel should not be permitted to criticize the government (August 1984); 24 percent would deny Israeli Arab citizens the vote (1985); 42.1 percent of 600 Jewish high school students agreed with Kach’s ideas regarding the Arab minority (1985); support for “those working to make the Arabs leave Judea and Samaria” rose from 22 percent (1983) to 35, 29, 34 and 38 percent (August 1985-September 1986). Miscellaneous: 36 percent believed in the coming of the Messiah and 57 percent that the Jewish people is a Chosen People (1974); 38.2 percent would sharply reduce their standard of living to end dependence on America (June 1980); 18.3 percent supported rebuilding the Temple before the Messiah (May 1983) and 25 percent of Oriental Jews supported razing the Muslim shrines to rebuild the Third Temple (May 1982); 20 percent called themselves “rightist” (January 1982); 60 percent would outlaw the Committee for Solidarity with Bir Zeit (March 1983); 20 percent agreed the political system should be radically changed for a strong regime of leaders not dependent on parties, and 17 percent preferred an undemocratic government whose positions they approve (March 1983); 61.4 percent would definitely deny the vote to Jews known to be PLO supporters against 33.4 percent for known Kahane supporters (January 1987); 30 percent of Israeli Jewish youth agreed the right of dissent is of no importance (April 1987).

Appendix 3: Biographies of Selected Gush Emunim Activists (lines 10052-10262)

Seven biographies, each sourced. Uri Elitzur: Jerusalem religious household, son of Professor Yehuda Elitzur, Bnei Akiva and three years at Merkaz HaRav in the mid-1960s interrupted by Nahal service, mathematics degree and teaching; resentment at perceived discrimination against religious soldiers, the Yom Kippur War trauma and photographs of settlers manhandled by soldiers brought him and his wife to Gush Emunim and Ofra in summer 1974; he worked for the National Religious Party in 1977 (Druckman second on its list), was bitterly disappointed by its support of Camp David, helped form Tehiya with Porat (eleventh on its 1981 list while working in Amana), was a major force in the Movement to Halt the Retreat in Sinai, spent a year in meditative study after Yamit, became one of Amana’s two general secretaries, left Tehiya with Porat for Druckman’s Morasha, and, disappointed again, rejoined the National Religious Party in charge of information and propaganda (source: Hagai Segel, Nekuda, no.110, May 27, 1987). Yoel Ben-Nun: state religious education and Bnei Akiva in 1950s Israel, a sense of exclusion by “the aristocracy and oligarchy of Mapai”, Merkaz HaRav, then study and teaching at Yeshiva Har Etzion (printed “Hat Etzion”) and activity in Alon Shvut’s establishment; a Gush founder of 1974, he moved to Ofra, contributed regularly to Nekuda, and led in editing Artzi (from 1982) and Megadim (first issue 1986); his vigorous criticism of efforts to free all convicted Jewish terrorists, and his sit-down-strike threat, preceded the May 1987 leadership shake-up. Tzvi Shiloach: born in southern Poland in 1911, came to Palestine in 1931, a nonreligious high-ranking Labor politician and publicist (editor of Hador under Ben-Gurion’s tutelage, head of the Israel Institute of Productivity’s Information Department, Labor Central Committee member, editor of Hamifal) who after the Six Day War left Labor for the Movement for the Whole Land of Israel, edited its Zot Haaretz, helped establish Tehiya in 1979 and briefly served in the Knesset for it, and now lives in a West Bank settlement contributing to Yediot Acharonot. Daniella Weiss: born in Palestine in the mid-1940s to American- and Polish-born parents, Orthodox upbringing, Bar-Ilan degree in English literature and political science, uninvolved in politics until the early 1970s; she joined the Elon Moreh nucleus led by Katzover, which tried unsuccessfully seven times to establish itself near Nablus and succeeded on its eighth attempt, and has lived in Kedumim since; active in Tehiya from 1979 and in the Movement to Halt the Retreat in Sinai, close to Levinger, chosen as Gush general secretary in 1985 and two years later the focus of intense criticism for her strident style, she is called “the queen of the Knesset cafeteria”. Aharon Ben-Ami: born in Palestine in the mid-1920s to second-aliyah agricultural workers, religiously educated but not observant; Palmach in the 1940s, then the Irgun, 1948 war service, on Herut’s 1949 Knesset list but not elected, a sociology Ph.D. in the United States, teaching at Tel Aviv and Haifa Universities in the mid-1960s alongside Rafi participation; a co-organizer of the Movement for the Whole Land of Israel after 1967, impressed by Gush religious settlers after the Yom Kippur War, one of Ariel’s first residents and a Tehiya supporter, and since 1986 editor of Hayarden, designed to bring the Gush message to a wider audience. Romem Aldubi: born in 1963, raised in Tel Aviv in a nonreligious home, son of sculptor Tzvi Aldubi, his dovish parents’ views diametrically opposed to his own; at a Jerusalem yeshiva in the early 1980s he heard of the Shechem garin and heard Tzvi Yehuda say building a yeshiva in Shechem was more important than in Hebron, and, inspired by a Yamit resister, devoted his life to reestablishing Jewish life in Shechem — he felt “Abraham knocking on my door” — modeled himself on Katzover, began studying alone near Joseph’s grave, and now (1987) heads the fifteen-member Joseph Still Lives Yeshiva and a thirty-family garin, refusing housing elsewhere and reportedly sleeping mostly in his car, while lobbying and consulting Amana and Gush leaders. Abraham Bar-Ilan: raised religious, from whose traditions he strayed; sent by the Housing Ministry as an engineer to Yamit in 1975, he came under Yamit Yeshiva Hesder director Yisrael Ariel’s influence and became an observant Jew convinced of settlement’s decisive importance; head of Yamit’s building board, the movement’s administrative and logistical director during the anti-evacuation struggle, creator of the Amichai marketing company financing the effort, he moved with his family to the Gaza Strip in 1982 after Yamit’s destruction, founded Neve Dekalim, and serves as chief engineer for the Gaza Coast regional council.

Appendixes 4-5 (lines 10263-10292)

Appendix 4 reproduces the Nekuda cover discussed in Chapter 5, captioned “A Moment of Coexistence”, with a cross-reference to page 136 for its significance. Appendix 5 reproduces the widely known photomontage of the Temple Mount with a rebuilt Temple in place of the Dome of the Rock and the el-Aksa Mosque (see Chapter 6, note 44), captioned: “Naturally, when the peoples of the world come to learn from us, they are attracted not just by Holiness-the Land of Israel-but by the holy of holies.” The text copy ends here; the book is complete.

Key passages

• “emerged as the greatest obstacle to meaningful negotiations toward a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace settlement” (Preface to the 1994 Edition, line 254; Introduction, line 400)

• “He planned to do this in order to stop the peace talks. He did this for the sake of the people of Israel.” — Goldstein’s widow, as quoted in the Preface to the 1994 Edition (line 169)

• “a belief system is defined as fundamentalist insofar as its adherents regard its tenets as uncompromisable and direct transcendental imperatives to political action oriented toward the rapid and comprehensive a reconstruction of society” (Introduction, line 519, as printed)

• “The Land of Israel, for the People of Israel, According to the Torah [Bible] of Israel.” — Gush Emunim’s slogan, as given in the Introduction (lines 623-624)

• “Prime Ministers have come and gone,” “but Levinger is still riding high. All of us have adapted ourselves to his dimensions and his scale.” — Boaz Epplebaum, as quoted in the Introduction (line 810)

• “Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] is part of the very essence of our nationhood; it is bound organically to its very life and inner being.” — Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, as quoted in Chapter 2 (line 1700)

• “The State of Israel was created and established by the council of nations by order of the Sovereign Lord of the Universe” — Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook, as quoted in Chapter 2 (line 1810)

• “the collapse of the Jewish hold on Judea and Samaria” — Gush Emunim leaders on the consequence of the Elon Moreh decision if law or policy did not change, as given in Chapter 3 (lines 2500-2560)

• “sufficient and unambiguous commitments… that a legal and immediate solution will be found for the problem of the existence, development and expansion of the existent settlements in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza district” — Yisrael Harel, ending the 1980 hunger strike, as quoted in Chapter 3 (lines 2650-2750)

• “The Land of Israel is neither religious nor secular. It belongs to the whole Jewish people.” — Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook on the founding of Tehiya, as quoted in Chapter 3 (lines 2850-3000)

• “that the Jewish nation is a normal nation and ought to be treated as such by the so-called international community… is the original delusion of secular Zionism” — Harold Fisch, as quoted in Chapter 4 (lines 3750-3850)

• “The Covenant rests on a triad of relationships: God, land and people.” — Harold Fisch, as quoted in Chapter 4 (lines 4000-4060)

• “conquered, possessed, and settled” — the entire Land of Israel as the Promised Land, Chapter 4 (lines 4060-4118)

• “the Temple Mount is in our hands” — Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook on the wars of the last fifty years, as quoted in Chapter 4 (lines 4300-4450)

• “Thus may all Israel’s enemies perish!” — Haim Druckman, quoting the Book of Deborah on the crippling of two Arab mayors, as quoted in Chapter 5 (lines 6119-6177)

• “In every generation there is an Amalek. In our generation, our Amalek are the Arabs who oppose the renewal of our national existence in the land of our fathers.” — Haim Tsuria, defending Druckman, as quoted in Chapter 5 (lines 6119-6177)

• “The idea of transfer has deep roots in the Zionist movement.” — Chapter 5, on Ben-Yosef’s defence of transfer (lines 6178-6677)

• “the value of the Land of Israel exceeds that of peace” — Hanan Porat, as quoted in Chapter 5 (lines 6178-6677)

• “rapid creation of a strong constituency of Israelis who, while they may not necessarily hold with Likud ideology, can be relied upon to fight any scheme involving territorial compromise” — Meron Benvenisti, as quoted in Chapter 6 (lines 7877-8236)

• “flesh of our flesh, separated from us only very briefly” — Zevulon Hammer welcoming Matzad back to the National Religious Party, as quoted in Chapter 6 (lines 8237-8330)

• “We will act in those places in the tradition of Unit 101, of Deir Yasin, Kibya, and Kfar Kassem.” — an Alfei Menashe settler, a lieutenant colonel, at the Gush Emunim meeting after the April 1987 attack, as quoted in Chapter 6 (lines 8330-8450)

• “we will go underground, and in the underground (machteret) we shall continue to study” — MK Menachem Porush on rescinding the yeshiva-student exemption, as quoted in Chapter 6 (lines 8450-8600)

• “achieving closeness to it by keeping distance from it” — Shlomo Aviner on the Temple Mount entry ban, as quoted in Chapter 6 (lines 8600-8736)

• “the criminal to the crazy, the crazy to the odd, the odd to the mistaken, the mistaken to the good, the good to the excellent, the excellent to the accomplished reality, and the accomplished reality to the consensus view” — Doron Rosenblum on Gush Emunim’s transformation of discourse, as quoted in Chapter 7 (lines 9129-9400)

• “We must force them to do so by any means at our disposal and see in it an exchange of populations” — the majority response (62 percent) in the 1987 poll of West Bank and Gaza rabbis, as quoted in Chapter 7 (lines 9129-9400)

• “the blazing landscape of redemption” — Gershom Scholem, as quoted in Chapter 7 (lines 9129-9400)

• “Naturally, when the peoples of the world come to learn from us, they are attracted not just by Holiness-the Land of Israel-but by the holy of holies.” — caption of the “Rebuilt” Temple photomontage, Appendix 5 (lines 10277-10292)

Evidence the work relies on

• Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons (1971) and Elon’s “Letter from Israel”, New Yorker, July 27, 1987, for the 1968 and 1987 Independence Day moods framing Chapter 1 (ch.1 notes 1-2).

• The comparative and Israeli fundamentalism literature cited in Chapter 1: Lionel Caplan (ed.), Studies in Religious Fundamentalism (1987), including Tapper and Tapper on a Turkish town, for the political definition (note 4); Janet Aviad, David Newman, Ehud Sprinzak’s Gush Emunim: The Politics of Zionist Fundamentalism in Israel (1986), Baruch Kimmerling’s Zionism and Territory (1983), Jacob Katz and Jonathan Webber for corresponding uses of the concept (note 5); Danny Rubinstein’s On the Lord’s Side: Gush Emunim (Hebrew, 1982), Ilan Peleg, Gershon Shafir, Goldberg and Ben-Zadok, and Amnon Sella on the Likud-Gush symbiosis (note 7).

• Gush Emunim’s own journal Nekuda throughout Chapter 1 (the Lobby, Hazani, Eldad’s “Before the Fire”, Zohar), the Hadashot person-of-the-generation panel via Thomas L. Friedman’s New York Times report of June 11, 1987 (note 17), and reporting in Maariv, Yediot Acharonot, Koteret Rashit and the Jerusalem Post, and FBIS transcriptions, on the amnesty campaign and the Herzog pardons (notes 11-13).

• Israeli public-opinion polling — Modi’in Ezrahi and Dahaf polls and the polling data collected in the book’s Appendix 2 — for the support levels given for fundamentalist beliefs, the amnesty and territorial maximalism (ch.1 notes 11, 22-25).

• David Newman (ed.), The Impact of Gush Emunim (1985), including David Schnall’s impact assessment and contributions by Gideon Aran and Myron Aronoff, and Eliezer Don-Yehiya in Middle Eastern Studies (April 1987), for the assessment of Gush Emunim’s influence (notes 19-20); Ofira Seliktar, New Zionism and the Foreign Policy System of Israel (1986), on settlements and the expected crisis of territorial compromise (note 21).

• For Chapter 2’s history as far as read in this part: Myron Aronoff on revitalization movements (ch.2 note 1), Jacob Neusner on messianism in the Talmudic era (note 2), and Joseph Klausner’s The Messianic Idea in Israel (note 3, begun at line 2059); the chapter’s in-text quotations from Maimonides, Gershom Scholem, Nahum Glatzer, David Vital, Rabbi Haim Soloveichik, Samson Raphael Hirsch, and the writings and sermons of Abraham Isaac Kook and Tzvi Yehuda Kook, each credited in the reading notes to its note number.

• For Chapter 3: the Movement for the Whole Land of Israel’s August 1967 manifesto in Rael Jean Isaac’s translation (ch.3 note 2); FBIS and JPRS translations of Jerusalem Domestic Service, Haaretz, Davar, Yediot Acharonot and the Jerusalem Post for the Elon Moreh crisis, the hunger strike and the Tehiya founding (notes 8-19, 24-25); Lustick’s own “Israel and the West Bank after Elon Moreh: The Mechanics of De Facto Annexation”, Middle East Journal (1980), for the state-land mechanics (note 20), and his “Israeli State-Building in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip”, International Organization (1987), for the subsidized settlement effort (note 30); Gideon Aran, The Land of Israel Between Politics and Religion (1985), on the Movement to Halt the Retreat in Sinai (notes 22, 27-28, 36); Nekuda throughout, including its 1984 settler-vote figures (note 31), the “Gush Emunim Arises” editorial (note 34) and Etzion’s prison articles (note 41); and, for settler violence, Israeli Settler Violence in the Occupied Territories: 1980-1984 (Palestine Human Rights Campaign, 1985) and Dedi Zucker’s Report on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (1983) (note 37).

• For Chapter 4 as far as read in this part: the writings and homilies of Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook and the interpretive articles of his disciples, above all Shlomo Aviner’s “Messianic Realism” and his Artzi dialogue; Rabbi Menachem Kasher’s messianic treatises on the Great Era; and Harold Fisch, The Zionist Revolution (1978) / The Zionism of Zion (1982), the movement’s only systematic presentation, based directly on Kook and Kasher (ch.4 notes 1-30 as cited in the reading notes).

• For Chapter 4’s beliefs 6-7 and Chapter 5: the movement’s own journals Artzi (vols.1-4, 1982-1986) and Nekuda (including no.75, the May 1983 conference, the 1985 Yesha resolution and editorials of 1983-1986), the writings of Fisch, Kasher, Aviner, Waldman, Porat, Zuckerman, Yisrael and Yaacov Ariel, Kahana-Shapira and Ehrenberg, Zoldan, Shilat and Ben-Nun on the Kooks, Maimonides and Nachmanides (ch.4 notes 1-52; ch.5 notes 1-36 as cited in the reading notes), Elitzur’s biblical geographies and the 1982 book This Good Mountain and the Lebanon (ch.5 notes 40-49), Haetzni’s The Shock of Withdrawal from the Land of Israel (ch.5 note 66), a poll of 539 Gush Emunim settlers (ch.5 note 30), and Nisan’s American Middle East Foreign Policy: A Political Reevaluation (1982) against his article for a Jewish audience (ch.5 notes 132-133).

• For Chapter 6’s completion and Chapter 7: Nekuda through no.115 (November 1987) for the leadership and Temple Mount debates (ch.6 notes 44-57), including Etzion’s 1984 Temple Mount article and the nos.104-109 Weiss debate; the 1979 chief rabbi’s ruling (ch.6 note 2, via Uriel Tal); David Grossman’s Koteret Rashit reporting on Alfei Menashe and on Gush children’s upbringing (ch.6 notes 4, 34); Benvenisti’s 1986 Report and 1984 West Bank Data Project (ch.6 notes 7, 11-13, 16, 21-22, 24); the Tzomet Institute’s poll of West Bank and Gaza rabbis, 52 of 120 questionnaires returned, in Nekuda no.115 (ch.7 note 2); the Statistical Abstract of Israel 1986 and 1987 for the population estimates of 750,000 Arabs within Israel, 830,000 in the West Bank and 650,000 in the Gaza Strip (ch.7 note 4); the January 1987 Modi’in Ezrahi poll on strong leadership (ch.7 note 9); and Scholem’s “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism” (1971), pp.35-36 (ch.7 note 12).

• For the appendixes: the polling series collected in Appendix 2, conducted by the Israel Institute of Applied Social Research, Modi’in Ezrahi, Dahaf, PORI, Hanoch Smith, the Van Leer Institute and others, 1974-1987, each item credited in Appendix 2’s notes 1-35; and the Appendix 3 biographies’ named sources — Hagai Segel on Uri Elitzur (Nekuda no.110, 1987), Aviva Shabi on Ben-Nun (Yediot Acharonot, May 15, 1987), Rael Jean Isaac’s Israel Divided (1976) on Shiloach, Malka Eisenberg and David Shipler on Weiss, Uri Orbach on Ben-Ami (Nekuda no.95, 1986), and Bembi Erlich on Aldubi and Bar-Ilan (Nekuda nos.106, 110, 1987).

• For Chapter 5’s completion and Chapter 6’s opening: Nekuda through no.115 (November 1987) and Artzi vol.4 (Spring 1986) for the local-Arabs and peace debates (ch.5 notes 135-207), including Hess’s “The Torah’s Commandment of Genocide”, Bat Kol, February 26, 1980 (note 135), the 1984 Waxman survey of American-background settlers (notes 75, 166), and FBIS transcriptions of Jerusalem Domestic Service (notes 144, 149); and, for Chapter 6, Meron Benvenisti’s 1984 analysis of the subsidized settlement strategy (ch.6 notes 11-13, 22, 24 as cited in the reading notes), settler opinion studies and the Maale Adumim/Kiryat Arba poll (ch.6 notes 18-19), and the 1981 and 1984 settler voting figures (ch.6 notes 20-22).

Analysis

The work’s method in this part is political-scientific: it stipulates a comparative, dimensional definition of fundamentalism designed to separate political redemptionism from piety, then measures the Israeli movement against it — organizational weight, parliamentary reach, polling support and state resources — and explains its emergence through a legitimacy-crisis framework joined to a long Jewish history of activist messianism and its rabbinic suppression. Its central interpretive move is to treat Zionism itself as the revolution that made activist messianism politically available again, with the Kooks supplying the doctrine that sacralized secular Zionist action and the Likud supplying the state resources to implement it. The Preface to the 1994 Edition applies the same frame retrospectively to the Popper and Goldstein killings, insisting they be read as ideology in action rather than individual pathology.

The completed work’s evidence is overwhelmingly endogenous: the movement is documented from its own journals (Nekuda, Artzi), its rabbis’ and ideologues’ treatises and homilies, its symposium volumes, and FBIS/JPRS translations of the Hebrew press, supplemented by Israeli polling (Appendix 2, including the Tzomet Institute’s 52-return survey of West Bank and Gaza rabbis on which the Conclusion’s most striking figures rest) and by the author’s own earlier state-building studies and his Ireland/Algeria comparison. That evidentiary choice is the book’s strength and its limit: the worldview is established from the believers’ own words, checked against votes, settlement counts and state budgets, but Palestinian voices appear almost exclusively as the objects of fundamentalist discourse, never as sources in their own right, and the work’s claims about Arab intentions are the movement’s claims, attributed as such. Its predictions are framed as tendencies, not forecasts — the movement is “far more likely” to imitate the Zealots than to build a consensus; a fundamentalist-dependent regime is a scenario whose conditions are specified, not asserted — and the Conclusion is explicit that success is not guaranteed, that Likud retains autonomy, and that the unity government then in force was itself constraining the movement it describes. Two internal tensions stand as printed and are recorded under Open questions: the work’s own figures for Tehiya in 1984 (83,000 votes and five seats in Chapter 3; “third-largest number of votes” in Chapter 6) and its settlement totals across chapters do not reconcile, and several dated citations in the notes (Chapter 6 notes 25 and 27) do not match the dates in the text they support. The 1994 Preface extends the analysis to 1994 — the loan-guarantee withholding the Conclusion had recommended is claimed as vindication — but the body of the book remains a work of 1987-1988, written before the first intifada’s full course, and its “as of” horizon is the end of 1987.

People, organizations, places and events

Ian S. Lustick, Abraham Isaac Kook, Tzvi Yehuda Kook, Moshe Levinger, Baruch Goldstein, Menachem Begin, David Ben-Gurion, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Gush Emunim, National Religious Party, Likud, Haredim, Hebron, Israel, West Bank, Hanan Porat, Haim Druckman, Eleazar Waldman, Meir Kahane, Harold Fisch, Menachem Kasher, Shlomo Aviner, Yehuda Etzion, Rafael Eitan, Arik Sharon, Yuval Ne’eman, Movement for the Whole Land of Israel, Tehiya, Yesha, Amana, Kach, Bnei Akiva, Jewish Underground, Movement to Halt the Retreat in Sinai, Elon Moreh, Elon Moreh Case, Kiryat Arba, Yamit, Temple Mount, Yoel Ben-Nun, Eliyakim Haetzni, Yehuda Elitzur, Yehuda Amital, Eliezer Schweid, Tzvi Shiloach, Daniella Weiss, Beni Katzover, Meron Benvenisti, Maale Adumim, Ariel, Gershom Scholem, Yosef Shapira, Shlomo Goren, Uri Elitzur

Concepts

Jewish Fundamentalism, Eretz Israel, Zionism, Yeshivot Hesder, Transfer

How it relates to other sources

• Lustick’s Gush Emunim is the same movement Said treats as the vanguard settler fanatics of the post-Camp David West Bank and Makdisi as the spearhead of the mountain-ridge settlement phase after 1977 (The Question of Palestine, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation); Lustick, writing as an analyst of the movement itself, gives its self-understanding, organization (Amana, Yesha, the Lobby), polling base and Likud symbiosis in a detail the other ingested sources do not, and dates its political beginning to the National Religious Party Young Guard’s post-1967 ascendancy.

• On Baruch Goldstein, Lustick’s 1994 Preface and Makdisi agree on the toll — twenty-nine Palestinians killed in the Hebron mosque — and on the Purim timing; they differ on the date as printed, February 28, 1994 in Lustick against February 25, 1994 in Makdisi (see Open questions), and Lustick adds the farewell note, the widow’s defence and the funeral rabbi’s remark, where Makdisi records Goldstein’s subsequent veneration by Hebron settlers and his tombstone inscription.

• Lustick’s account of Begin — co-opted and legitimized in 1967, elected in 1977, at once visiting Elon Moreh and committing over $1 billion to settlement by the end of 1984 — stands beside Said’s portrait of Begin the former Irgun head rehabilitated into statesmanship while pressing settlement after Camp David (The Question of Palestine); both treat 1977 as the turning point for permanent incorporation of the territories.

• The Kook doctrine that the Land is of the essence of Jewish nationhood and that secular Zionist settlement carries out a divine plan is the theological counterpart to the territorial maximalism Sayegh attributes to Zionism’s programme for Eretz Israel (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine); Lustick records the maximalist claim from inside the movement’s own authorities, including Tzvi Yehuda’s claim to Transjordan as well as Judea and Samaria.

• On Elon Moreh, Lustick’s sequence — a garin formed in 1973, eight settlement attempts in the Nablus area in 1974-1975, Sebastia in December 1975 and permission to remain at Kadum — stands beside Makdisi’s account of the Elon Moreh convoy of 5 June 1974 setting out for the hills overlooking Nablus with Peres’s sympathy (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation); Lustick adds the full legal and cabinet history of the 1979 Supreme Court case, which no other ingested source gives, including the state-land regime and Sharon’s administrative circumvention that followed compliance.

• Lustick’s count of the 1980-1984 settler-violence wave (more than 380 attacks on individuals, 23 killed) is explicitly sourced in his Chapter 3 note 37 to the Palestine Human Rights Campaign’s Israeli Settler Violence in the Occupied Territories: 1980-1984 and to Dedi Zucker’s report — a rights-report evidentiary base for the same years in which Said and Makdisi describe settler violence qualitatively (The Question of Palestine, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation).

• The Chapter 4 worldview — Palestinians classed as Canaanites with flee/submit/fight choices, and individual rights without any national rights over any part of the land — is the movement’s own doctrinal statement of the position Sayegh attributes to Zionism’s programme and that the 3D Test of Anti-Semitism debate and Sharansky’s delegitimization framework address from the opposite direction (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, 3D Test of Anti-Semitism: Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization); Lustick records it attributed, from the movement’s own authorities (Fisch, Aviner, Porat, Waldman, Kasher).

• The Conclusion’s transfer debate — Shapira’s $20,000-per-person proposal of October 1987 and the rabbis poll behind it — is the latest-dated point in the post-1967 Transfer genealogy Makdisi traces, in which pressure replaces outright expulsion as the operative strategy (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation); Lustick’s own assessment in Chapter 5, that induced emigration under “Judaization” is the mainstream fundamentalist expectation rather than formal expulsion, matches that mechanism, while Chapter 7 records the discourse widening to make forcible transfer discussible at ministerial level.

• Lustick’s closing appeal to Scholem’s 1959 warning — that pushing for the end (dheikat haketz) has repeatedly exacted a catastrophic price — restates, from inside Jewish historiography, the same structure of activist messianism his Chapter 2 traced from the Zealots and Bar Kochba through Shabbatai Zevi; no other ingested source gives the Scholem passage.

Open questions

• The Preface to the 1994 Edition dates the Hebron mosque massacre to February 28, 1994 (lines 125-130); Makdisi dates it to 25 February 1994 (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.278). The discrepancy is in the texts as printed and is recorded on both pages.

• The Preface dates Goldstein’s attack “Approximately six years later, on February 28, 1994” (line 134), after Popper’s killings of May 1990 (lines 120-121); by those dates as given in the work, the gap is about four years (computed from the work’s dates), not approximately six years.

• In Chapter 1 the 1983 Dahaf poll is described as showing that more Israeli Jews were ready to outlaw Peace Now than favored declaring Gush Emunim illegal, followed by (22 vs. 27 percent) (lines 867-870), an order that, as printed, does not show more for outlawing Peace Now.

• The text copy’s contents list spells the Chapter 2 title “The Emergence of Jewish Fundamentalsim” and Appendix 2 “Illustratiuve”, and the About the Author block garbles several words (“Middle Fastern”, “American Political Scicnce Review”, “France andAlgeria”); Chapter 1 contains the slips “a major comparative study often fundamentalist movements” (for: of ten), “the rapid and comprehensive a reconstruction of society”, and “in chapter 61 discuss” (for: chapter 6 I discuss), and Chapter 2 “in l65 B.C.E.”, “Zionist! Israeli political history”, and both spellings of Bar Kochba’s name glossed identically — “Bar Kochba (Son of a Star)” and “Bar Kochba (Son of a Lie)”. Whether these are the online edition’s transcription errors or the text copy’s OCR cannot be settled from the text copy alone.

• Chapter 1 gives the movement’s polling support as approximations drawn from Appendix 2 (approximately 20 percent, 30-35 percent, 45-50 percent), which is not read until a later part; the figures cannot be checked against the appendix within this part.

• Chapter 3 states that Yehuda Etzion “began serving a seven-year prison sentence in 1982” for the mayors attack and the Temple Mount conspiracy (line 3347), while the same chapter dates the arrests that uncovered the underground network, and established responsibility for those attacks at interrogation and trial, to April 27, 1984 (lines 3350-3450). The chronology as printed does not reconcile and is recorded as printed on the source and Etzion pages.

• Chapter 3 note 42 cites Nekuda no. 75 as July 6, 1987, in a sequence of 1984 issues (nos. 73, 77); whether 1987 is a transcription slip for 1984 cannot be settled from the text copy alone.

• Chapter 3 note 10 cites Haaretz of October 15, 1979 and the Jerusalem Post of October 16, 1979 for the October 23-24, 1979 meetings with the Elon Moreh settlers, dates that precede both those meetings and the October 22 Court decision as the chapter gives them; the notes are recorded as printed.

• Chapter 4’s running head in the text copy reads “The Worldview of Jewish Fundamentalism: The Breath of Consensus” (line 3622), against the chapter title itself and the contents list, which read “The Breadth of Consensus” (lines 27, 3626).

• Chapter 4 says fundamentalists embrace the notion of Jews as am segula “to reunite the classical Zionist idea of Jews as a normal people” (line 3757, as printed); the sense requires a word such as replace or supplant, and the passage is recorded as printed.

• Chapter 3 prints a scrambled passage on the Camp David prohibition on changing the territories’ legal status (an interleaved “the cabinet deci”), and a stray page number “48” after the paragraph on Gush’s pressure-group effectiveness; Chapter 2’s notes print “Aggrippa”, “renguin” for Penguin, “ground-bracking”, “Gideon Atan” for Aran, and “New Terse” for New Jersey, among other slips recorded in the reading notes. Whether these are the online edition’s transcription errors or the text copy’s OCR cannot be settled from the text copy alone.

• The work’s settlement figures move across chapters without a single as-of table in this part: approximately 70,000 Jews in the West Bank in Chapter 1, nearly 70,000 inhabitants in the West Bank, Gaza and Golan (excluding expanded East Jerusalem) for the settlements as Gush’s base in Chapter 3, and 46,000 settlers in the West Bank alone by August 1984 in Chapter 3’s Likud narrative; the figures are recorded with their contexts and are not reconciled in the text as far as read.

• Chapter 4 note 33 cites Schweid’s article to Nekuda no. 75, July 6, 1984 (line 4560); Chapter 3 note 42 cited Nekuda no. 75 as July 6, 1987. The two notes give different years for the same issue and date; which is correct cannot be settled from the text copy alone.

• Chapter 5 prints the halachic formula for the duty to die rather than transgress in several spellings — “yehareg yelo ya ayor”, “ye’horeg y’al ya’ayor” and “ye’horeg ve’al ya’avor” — and Nachmanides’ name as “Nachnianides” and “Nachimanides” as well as Nachmanides; the passages are recorded as printed in the reading notes.

• Chapter 5 note 51 dates the application of Israeli law to the Golan Heights to December 1982 (line ~7130, as printed in the notes); the date is recorded as printed and is not reconciled within the work as far as read.

• Chapter 5 notes 193 and 194 give overlapping page ranges in Aharon Ben-Ami (ed.), The Book of The Whole Land of Israel — Shiloach pp.213-240 and Zohar pp.227-240 — as printed; whether both ranges are correct cannot be settled from the text copy alone.

• Chapter 6 states that in the 1984 elections Tehiya “attracted the third-largest number of votes (after Labor and the Likud)” (lines 7877-8100), while Chapter 3 gave Tehiya’s 1984 result on its joint list with Tzomet as 83,000 votes and five seats; the two statements are recorded as printed and are not reconciled in the text.

• Chapter 5 note 133 cites Nisan’s Jewish-audience article as “A Strategy for Israel: Confrontation or Conciliation?”, American Zionist (May-June 1976), pp.19-21, for the “double discourse” passage summarised in part 3 from an article for a supportive Jewish audience; the 1976 date as printed predates the 1982 book it is contrasted with, and the passage is recorded as printed.

• The text copy in this range repeatedly prints “arid” for “and”, “Arid” for Ariel (Yaacov Arid; Arid Sharon), “Middle Fast” for Middle East, “Haying”/“haying” for Having/having, “raking shape” for taking shape, “Hotmuz” for Hormuz, “Match” for March, and “cp”7stallizatiOn” for crystallization, among other slips recorded in the reading notes. Whether these are the online edition’s transcription errors or the text copy’s OCR cannot be settled from the text copy alone.

• Chapter 6 note 44 and Chapter 4 note 33 both date Nekuda no. 75 to July 6, 1984, against Chapter 3 note 42’s July 6, 1987 for the same issue (see the earlier entry); two of the work’s three citations now agree on 1984.

• Chapter 6 note 25 cites Haaretz, November 6, 1982 for the Labor Party mainstream meeting the text dates to November 1987 in Maale Ephraim, and note 27 cites Davar, June 10, 1986 for David Levy’s suspension of the Israel Atlas, which the text dates to June 1987; the notes and text do not reconcile as printed.

• Chapter 6 states that the impetus toward changing the Temple Mount status quo slowed with Yitzhak Shamir’s assumption of the premiership in 1985 (lines 8600-8736, as printed); the work elsewhere treats Shamir as foreign minister under the unity government before his elevation (Chapter 6 note 33 calls him Prime Minister in July 1987), and the 1985 date is recorded as printed.

• The Glossary dates Matzad’s founding to Druckman’s departure from the National Religious Party in 1982, while Chapter 3 dates the departure and founding to March 1983; the Glossary dates Sebastia as the first successful illegal settlement attempt (1974), while Chapter 3 dates the eight Nablus-area attempts to 1974-1975 and the Sebastia success to December 1975; the Glossary also gives Kasher’s book as The Great Period against Chapter 4’s Great Era, and enters the name as Levinger, Mosh. The passages are recorded as printed in the reading notes.

• Appendix 2’s Jordan-agreement item gives overlapping age bands as printed — of those aged 22-29, 56 percent said no; of those aged 18-29, 73 percent said no (March 1986) — and Appendix 3’s biography of Daniella Weiss has the Elon Moreh nucleus succeeding on its eighth attempt after seven failures, where Chapter 3 describes eight attempts in 1974-1975 culminating at Sebastia/Kadum; neither is reconciled in the text.

• Chapter 7 note 8 opens by stating that warnings of civil war “are not offered” by leading and responsible personalities within the movement, as printed, before citing warnings by Porat and others; the sentence is recorded as printed in the reading notes.

Coverage

lines 1-10292 of 10292 read in full in parts 1-5 of 5. The book is complete: front matter, Preface to the 1994 Edition, Chapters 1-7 and Appendixes 1-5.