Israel needs a neo-secularist party
The rise of the Religious Zionist Party proves that a new movement and a new party are required to prevent a theocracy and preserve Israeli freedom.
The recent Israeli elections, in which the Religious Zionist Party won a full 14 seats and effectively became the kingmaker of the next government, illustrates the extraordinary rise of the religious Zionist movement. From a relatively small minority in an avowedly socialist and secular country, religious Zionists have forged the vanguard of the settlement movement and reached the heights of power. For those of us who are less than sympathetic to their ideology, it is worth asking how they did it.
A major reason for their triumph is that religious Zionist leaders know exactly what they want: First, a state that is either strongly influenced or dominated by Torah values. Second, mass Jewish settlement of Judea and Samaria that will ultimately end in annexation. Moreover, in pursuit of these intertwined goals, the leaders of religious Zionism have remained patient and pragmatic, willing to employ incremental tactics and often political compromise, but always moving slowly toward their final goal. They are convinced that, eventually, they will get there, and they may well be right.
Above all, this proves the enormous power that a small minority can wield if it fosters a spirit of fanatical devotion and keeps a laser-like focus on its ultimate ambition. Most Israelis are not religious Zionists and some are violently opposed to the movement’s advocacy of religious politics and annexation, but they have proven powerless to stop the juggernaut, because they lack the same intensity and seriousness of purpose.
But perhaps the most important aspect of the religious Zionist movement is that it has often presented a united political front in the form of a single party. It has not always been the same party, and its factions sometimes split and recombine, as Israeli parties often do—and RZP has now done as well. Nonetheless, a consensus ideology has always tended to unite the movement.
This has never been the case with its opponents, who have been spread across numerous fractious parties and ideologies, from Meretz and Labor to Hadash and the Arab parties. In a competition between a tightly organized movement and a scattered and squabbling opposition, the former will always win out over the latter.
All of this should give the opponents of RZP and its allies some pause. This is particularly the case because of religious Zionism’s extraordinary success. The settlement movement, for example, is here to stay. Given intense American opposition, it will not achieve its ultimate goal of annexation anytime in the near future, but it will continue to expand, seize the hilltops, and perpetuate and entrench an occupation that most Israelis—for the moment—consider essential to their security.
More immediately threatening, however, is RZP and its allies’ advocacy of a kind of Jewish Dominionism. Dominionism is an ideology—embraced mostly by some American conservative Christians—that accepts democracy, but seeks to use it in order to place conservative Christians in all major positions of power. They will then enact policies that reflect their worldview. In other words, Dominionism seeks to create a country that is nominally democratic, but for all practical purposes a theocracy.
We are already seeing signs that RZP and its allies will not wait to begin this process in Israel. They have, for example, insisted that only Orthodox conversions should qualify someone as Jewish under Israel’s Law of Return. This would, in effect, make halacha alone the final arbiter of “who is a Jew” and unquestionably alienate large swaths of the American Jewish population.
Perhaps more importantly, this bloc also wants an end to the Law of Return’s so-called “grandfather clause,” according to which anyone with one Jewish grandparent is entitled to immediate Israeli citizenship. This is particularly important because it cuts to the heart of Israel’s raison d’etre as a Jewish state.
The “grandfather clause” was enacted for a simple reason: The Nazis considered anyone with one Jewish grandparent to be Jewish, and therefore to be murdered. The clause sought, in other words, to provide a refuge to anyone subjected to antisemitic persecution, whether they were halachically Jewish or not. Some might view this as a good and noble thing. RZP and its allies do not, mainly because it threatens their concept of a Jewish state as an essentially religious—which is to say, halachic—one.
It is clear, then, that this bloc wants to move and is already acting to move Israel in the direction of a “Torah state,” as RZP leader Bezalel Smotrich has openly admitted. It will not succeed in doing so in full, at least not at the moment, but it will pursue slow and incremental “salami tactics,” pushing Israel slice-by-slice toward Dominionism.
What then, are the majority of Israelis who do not want a Torah state to do in response? It seems to me that the answer is to accept that the primary motivating factor behind the rise of RZP is not Zionism or settlement per se, but religion. The engine of the party and the changes it demands is not the state or the land, but God as its members understand him. The same is true for their allies.
If this is the case, then the only appropriate answer is a direct answer: Non-religious Israelis must embrace a neo-secularism that seeks to prevent the imposition of religious law on Israeli society while simultaneously promoting the virtue of secularism. It should cultivate the same intensity in service of these goals that the religious Zionists have cultivated in service of their goals. It should not deride or demonize religion, and perhaps should even engage with it on its own terms, but it must insist that this is an individual choice and should not be imposed by the state.
I do not believe this is impossible. Israelis are apathetic on the issue at the moment, but if the slow creep of a halachic state gains enough momentum, they will not remain so. I once told a friend of mine that I feared Israel would become a theocracy, a Jewish Iran. He told me that this would never happen, because “we care about Judaism, but we also care a lot about our freedoms.”
In other words, Israelis will not become fanatical about El Al’s refusal to fly on Shabbat, but they will become fanatical about protecting their most basic freedoms. If the history of the modern world has proven anything, it is that people will fight for many things, but freedom is often foremost among them. Thus, an Israeli neo-secularism might gain traction by emphasizing freedom rather than anti-religious sentiment, and advocating for that freedom not simply in a negative sense but a positive one, pointing out the immense benefits of freedom rather than attacking religion per se.
Above all, however, such a neo-secularism must be embodied not in a disparate group of movements, but in a single party. The advocates of a Torah state have risen by concentrating their powers, and thus achieving disproportionate influence due to Israel’s byzantine political system. A neo-secularist movement should copy these tactics exactly. It should form a single-issue party, dedicated solely to advocating and advancing secularism in Israel. This party should be flexible and pragmatic, willing to work with both the left and the right in order to safeguard secularism and secular values, much as the Haredi parties have done in service of their religious values. It would almost certainly not become a first-tier party, but it would likely win enough seats to become a strong influence and perhaps, like RZP, a kingmaker.
Something like this almost occurred in 2003, when the secularist Shinui party—led, ironically, by Yair Lapid’s father Tommy—gained almost exactly the same number of seats as RZP now has done. Unfortunately, Shinui was not a single issue party, and it quickly flew apart, all but completely disappearing within two years. An Israeli neo-secularism should not make the same mistake again, and must maintain a laser-like focus on its fundamental goals.
To accomplish this, however, an Israeli neo-secularism will have to reconnect with itself. The religious Zionist movement has derived great strength from its devotion to its foundations, in particular the ancient traditions of Torah and halacha, along with the more recent innovations of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and his son Tzvi Yehuda. A neo-secular party must put aside the bourgeoise materialism that dominates much of secular Israel and embrace its radical origins.
Fortunately, Jewish secularism, though secular Jews often do not know it, has a long and venerable history of its own. A neo-secularism could, if it wished, stand on the shoulders of giants such as Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Freud, Kafka, Ehad Ha’am, Bialik, Levinas, and innumerable others. The Jews have long engaged with the outside world as much as they have engaged with Judaism, and their efforts to synthesize the two—to embrace both freedom and tradition, the present and the past simultaneously—are only waiting to be rediscovered and resurrected.
The attempt at this revival, and its personification in a political party, must begin soon. Nothing less than the freedom of every Israeli and our right to be as Jewish or as secular, as religious or as non-religious, as we wish to be, are at stake.
Photo by Shai Kendler.