(Israeli settlers, wikimedia commons)
If you are one of the people who keep up with Israeli politics, whether out of a desire to self-harm or just morbid fascination, you will have probably noticed that simultaneously with the establishment of the new far-right government there was an uptick in the use of “Messianism” or “Messianic Zionism” by Israeli liberals as a catch-all term for all things they hate. From the likes of Ben Gvir, to the settlements and just the “shameful” parts of Israel, aka “not the real Israel”, their reaction seems to mimic the American liberal’s response to Trump’s election and how suddenly elections don’t represent the will of American society, both evidence that denial is not just a river in Egypt.
But to return to Israel, messianic Zionism (or sometimes religious Zionism) is something that liberal civil society rails against but rarely defines, partially out of genuine ignorance and sometimes fearing that with definition would come an exposure of the lack of material differences between the two sides.
For you see two messianisms exist in Israel, the first being the one that exists in reality and is just a political movement, an increasingly powerful, genocidal, and reactionary movement. Meanwhile, the second is the one that exists in the minds of Israeli pseudo-progressives and secularists; the one that is to blame for everything wrong with Israel and is more a boogeyman than anything coherent.
Both are morbidly interesting in different ways, the former for what it says about the core of Zionism and the latter for what it reveals about Israelis themselves. And more importantly, both need to be understood if one is to grok the Israeli psyche and its seeming paradoxical nature.
Secular theology
(Logo of Haoved Hadati or the Religious Worker, an Religious Zionist party, wikimedia commons)
Despite the claims of many Zionists today, there was always a component of religiosity in Zionism, down to its very name with even the secular founding fathers of Zionism being all too happy to utilize downright religious grounding to justify and legitimize the Zionist project.
This is hardly unusual, for Zionism at its core is a form of nationalism, and nationalisms in turn are secular mythologies at their heart, legends that speak of why this or that subset of humans are so much better than everyone else and fairytales states tell in their attempts to try to weave a grand beautiful narrative out of random chance and messy reality.
But where Zionism differs is the baseline it had to work with, for it was a nationalism that was born before the state it was meant to inhabit, and the peoples it had sought to hammer into a single volk were scattered across the world, speaking different tongues and existing in different social contexts. Adding to that was the very complexity of what it meant to be Jewish in the first place, a question that was equal parts theology as it was ethnography. Setting Zionism up to always have a religious bedrock that would influence its actions from the moment it became a political movement which would, in turn, come to influence the legal groundwork for the future state of Israel, whose laws were often defined by religious undertones as they were by the necessities of waging a war of extermination (such as marriage laws mandating that only religiously officiated marriages are accepted by the states, with only the orthodox rabbinate being recognized).
In any case, it was only natural that some would take the religious undertones of Zionism and invert them into overtones as the next step, and from here comes the idea of messianic or religious Zionism, though, in a bit of twisted irony, it would be the Christian gentiles who would be the pioneers of this train of thought before it had began to gain purchase among the Jewish people (most nationalisms would have been content to root themselves in one religion if any at all, but ever the overachievers zionists latched their ideology into two).
Christian Zionists have an interesting role in the story of Zionism and Israel, they were and remain instrumental in the foundation and continuing existence of Israel, with Israel as we know it being impossible without their efforts. However, they are also an uncomfortable graft to the whole apparatus, not because of their unmasked antisemitism (seeing Zionism as purely a way to get those “filthy Jews” away and be someone else’s problem), naked desire to use Zionism as a proxy in the region and their eagerness to see a prophecy fulfilled that requires the death of almost every jew. All of which was, and remains, perfectly acceptable to the zionist and later Israeli leaders, as the Zionist founding father Herzl himself puts it:
“The governments of all countries scourged by antisemitism will be keenly interested in obtaining sovereignty for us”.
What makes them uncomfortable for Jewish zionists is the fact that their support and aid continually undermine the image of independence and rugged yet civilized self-reliance that Zionism likes to project, of a Jewish people who no longer need to rely on the sufferance of Gentiles to exist (indeed it was a desire to preempt any dependence on arab labor that was part of why the Nakba was undertaken). Yet, the new state of Israel would find itself reliant on many gentile patrons and their money to stay relevant in the shifting geopolitics of the cold war in the middle east, from the USSR to the European empires and America and even Western Germany; a state with so many Nazis in it it might as well be the third Reich’s legal successor (and adding further salt to the wound, Israel would end up reliant on cheap Palestinian labor anyway).
Zionists who are aware of this fact deal with it in two ways that we will look at it later, but for now, its perhaps best to look at other earlier developments such as the evolution of religious Zionism made by and for Jews themselves, though this was a far from seamless process as the doctrines of Zionism and Judaism were antagonistic, often to the point of incompatibility and rejection in many cases.
Even without the theological aspect (which I will not be getting into on account of my scant knowledge on the subject), Zionism found itself at odds with many influential rabbinical figures and circles for a variety of reasons, with one of them being the realization that applying the European model of nation statehood to the Jewish diaspora was doomed to cause as much pain and erasure to them as to the natives they planned on displacing, for a nation-state abhors diversity and variety by its very nature and the global Jewish community were as varied as the societies they inhabited, from the relatively successful and prospective Jews of America, the oppressed and reviled branch in Russia and the ancient but adaptive communities of the Arab world.
Taking this diasporic amorphous clay of vibrant communities and forging it into a single rigid ethno-nation was going to be a culturally bloody and outright destructive process even with the best of intentions, which most Zionists lacked, and the diversity of Jewish theology looked to make any standardization a nightmare, which helps explain why the initial main driving forces of Zionism were mostly secular and even atheistic, even the typical nationalist theology-myth making being borrowed by intention or mere osmosis from the readymade Christian zionist beliefs (yet another thing zionists rely on gentiles for).
Though none of this stopped Judaism-based Zionism from developing on its own, the general lack of popularity of Zionism pre-1930s meant that these movements and their founders were mostly in the background and focused on riding the wave of more successful movements.
Then came the Holocaust and the Nakba, two shockwaves that would effectively shatter the previous status quo of the entire Jewish community around the globe, upending the entire previous order and leaving a vast gaping void that only needed to be filled.
Eretz Israel
(Wikimedia commons)
In the colonization of Palestine, religious zionists would remain relegated to a secondary role for the most part, albeit one that was seen as vital even by the anti-clerical Ben Gurion. The religious zionists (or the messianic as they would come to be known) were crucial for the demographics game and influential enough that they managed to siphon enough followers from both Labor and Revision so that they had to be accommodated. In doing so, they would manage to inject their DNA into the growing embryo of the Jewish state, in the forms of favorable laws and the addition of religious clauses to the supposedly secular legal edifice of Israel.
Though of course some of the blame for that falls on the secularists themselves, who were eager to take advantage of the spiritual void left by the Shoah combined with the expulsion of the diaspora in the arab world, seeking to meld Zionism with Judaism so much so that they would be the same and indivisible, by extension making it so Israel is the spokesman of all Jewish people, whether they consent or not, and to attack Israel would be a strike against them all (a strategy that has worked too well as liberal protestors end up being labeled as antisemites).
Of course, this did not mean there were no disagreements and disputes, but overall this paradoxical marriage of a supposedly secular state with fundamentalist doctrine was a stable one for the early years of Israel. The nation was young, there was plenty of stolen land and property to go around and a couple of big bad arab states to keep everyone united.
The largely Ashkenazi ruling class was secure enough that they thought of nothing of granting leeway to the largely American, and later Judeo-Arab religious settlers, sure their zealotry made hasabra a little bit trickier but that was a small price to have a ready supply of settlers to place as meatshields in Palestine, and later Syria and Egypt. The added fact that they were so eager to be fruitful and multiply was simply a godsend to the demographics obsessed Israeli state. Bit by bit they would become good proper westerners by the enterprise of colonialism and all would be well in the promised land.
Of course, the Israelis would fail to heed the lesson that Sadat learned all too well when he received some surprise lead supplements: once you let religious zealots onto your schemes, they will immediately work to take it over themselves. And the messianic ideologues were no exception as their numbers and influence within the Israeli state grew with every settlement and Tel Aviv became more and more reliant on them to maintain the frontier in Israel proper, Gaza, and the West Bank, as human shields and legal claims if nothing else.
The movement however was diffuse and incoherent, though it had noticeably matured since its early days, gaining the markings of vicious fanaticism and iconoclast devotion to the holy task of settling every inch of Palestine and beyond, along with the required groundings for settler colonialism such as naked racism and reactionary values. But what they needed is someone to tie all the disparate associations and sects into a movement with a vision, a messiah if you will.
And they would get one in the form of Meir Kahane.
For every Jew a 22
(Meir Kahane, wikimedia commons)
Kahane was a maverick in Israeli politics, an American in an age where Israeli politics was still mostly dominated by the largely European Ashkenazi and an outspoken ultranationalist in a time when Israel was seeking to “normalize” its image to capitalize on the Camp David accords. His naked racism and desire for genocide proved too much for the then still careful Israeli establishment and he soon found himself a pariah within respectable political circles.
In a way, he was simply too American for the establishment’s likings with his love for militias, segregation, and evangelizing style that would be at home in his native United States but was too much for the more centralized Israeli state.
But while being an outsider made him unpalatable for the Israeli urban scene within the Green Line, it made him immensely popular within the margins of Israeli society from the Arab Jews who were caught between the homelands that rejected them and the promised land that wanted to undo them, and the settlers who felt increasingly alienated by the urbanite liberals who were happy to enjoy the fruits of their labor in expanding Israel’s control but felt embarrassment and distaste for the settlers’ methods in achieving this, all tied together by an increasing number of conservatives who were not impressed or pleased by their promised land selling itself as a land of LGBT rights, veganism, and catgirls.
The 80s and '90s were a time of great change and turmoil in Israel, it had been forced to give up land for the first time and its history, which meant it had to deal with settlers angry at being denied their living space for the first time, and other settlers afraid they would face the same fate in the future.
The collapse of the USSR brought an influx of new blood but also heightened racial tensions and a world where wars had no clear lines anymore as the IOF found out the hard way in Lebanon, all the while the rise of neoliberalism, the cultural victory of faux egalitarianism and shifting demographics served to make a society that was confused and scared, not sure what it wanted to be and left in a post-modern world where nothing seemed to mean anything; in many ways, Israel was the beta version of the world we see in the 2010s and the 2020s, with the suffocating failures of free market utopianism giving strength to a long-dormant religious themed far right. Only the far right in Israel was never dormant but simply out of sight, nurtured by Israel’s very nature as a settler state and providing an island of stability in an age where the very foundations of Israel were being called into question, a process only accelerated by the failures of war on terror and the steadily increasing visibility of apartheid.
Kahane would not live to see his movement’s eventual success, having his career cut short by assassination, but his death would give the far right a very convenient martyr to rally around and his ideals would inject a very American dynamism into the settler and religious movements, bolstered by increased immigration rates from America proper, which served to allow the far right to gain influence and power as the demographics game shifted in their favor and every failure of the neoliberal state boosted them along just a bit further all while being tolerated by a largely apathetic liberal urban scene that simply saw them as someone else’s problem or a necessity to combat the Palestinians savages.
Until suddenly they weren’t.
What is messianism?
In every society, there comes a time when its sins catch up to it one way or another, when the crushing weight of its failures and crimes eventually cause a rupture as its past actions catch up to it in the most spectacular way possible.
For Israel, that moment came in 2023 when the desperate Netanyahu would engineer a coalition that resulted in Israel's most far-right government, finally giving Kahane a post-mortem win as his disgusting heirs now held the keys to the kingdom, heralding a new phase in Israel’s endless war of extermination, only this time it was clear that the Israeli liberals, gays, catgirls, and model minorities were not gonna be spared from this coming onslaught.
The Israelis rather predictably refused to do any self-reflection on how this was the natural result of decades of unapologetic settler colonialism and war, instead choosing to label these “messianics” as simply perversions of Zionism. A perversion of the real Zionism, the one that is not openly racist but rather does it quietly, the one that bombs kids but only under respectable leaders as one of the “refusniks” leaders happily stated before betraying her convictions to fight for Bibi anyway. All the liberals and progressives could talk about day and night was the threat of messianic Zionism to the core values of Israel, but few if any ever dared to define what it means for a simple reason.
Messianic Zionism is at once just another reactionary movement in a world full of them, only with a Jewish coat, while also being simply just Zionism without the thin red socialist or blue liberal coats it used to present itself with. It is, if anything, an attempt at a pure Zionism; one that longs for an Israel that isn’t just another star on the American flag while also sucking up harder than ever to more blatant antisemites and seeing no contradictions in that. It is the desire to see an Israel from the Euphrates to the Nile and not have to hide what it is from the world, to be able to commit genocide and be hailed as heroes for doing so.
In short, it is everything “normal” zionists are but refuse to admit to, and hence why they can never truly critique or fight against it for to do so would be to fight themselves. In the messianic, the liberal Hebronite or Tel Aviv cosmopolitan sees a mirror that reflects back all that they are without the hasbara, a revelation that he or she is a blood-soaked thug at heart and that the fascism they see is but what they have been inflicting on the “filthy natives” for decades now and recoil at the very idea, having based their whole identities on being “good” “moderate zionists”. They will deny that this is them as much as a climate change denier will refuse to believe the science even as the sea swallows them whole.
Of course that was case until it became time to commit genocide in Gaza again, and like always all the differences evaporate as Israeli society smells one more chance to gasp at the release valve of more lebensraum. And in ten years we will be back to square one except with thousands more dead children and a stronger far-right. And they will ask how this could have happened all over again.
(Big thanks to Pirate Enthuasist for betareading)