Modernity and Religious Zionist Discourse

Steve writes,

"These days, settlers (in the occupied territories)
mostly make arguments rooted in 'ancient', 'biblical',
etc claims."

Yes, but this religious discourse uses very similar
techniques of "being modern" by racializing the Muslim
as being outside of the Judeo-Christian world.  

Here is how it works.  Zionists, including the most
secular sector of the movement, have always understood
the religious symbolic significance of Palestine and
appreciated the fact that many Jews would be drawn to
the Zionist cause only if they insisted on including
them into the aspiration of the nationalist movement. 
In this respect they would set the pace for the future
development of a religious perspective of the Jewish
state.  Secular zionists wanted to use the established
Jewish feelings about the Holy Land to give energy to
their program for establishing a modern nation.  This
is because the battle helped to define a paradox:
modern, secular Zionism showed clear signs of its
roots in the Jewish religion, which it thought it had
transcended, or even denied.  Many of the Zionists no
longer believed in God, but “they refused to give up
the notion that He – or His avatar, history – had
given the Jews an unbreakable claim to the land of
their ancestors.” 

This meant that Religious Zionists eventually would
accept these secular Zionists with the belief that the
latter were preparing the way for the miracles to
come, with the future of the Holy Land belonging to
God.  Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the greatest
theologian to espouse this view (he was chief rabbi of
the Holy Land from 1921 until his death in 1935), was
a big defender of this view.  He could not help
knowing that the Zionist pioneers, who were reviving
Hebrew as a modern language and re-creating Jewish
farming in Palestine, were self-consciously secular. 
Kook insisted that, despite themselves, these men and
women were instruments in God’s hands.  They thought
that they were secularizing Hebrew, but really they
were reviving the holy language.  They thought that
they were creating a new, unprecedented Jewish
community in Palestine, but they were really preparing
the way for the miracles to come.

Here the discourse of modernity is similar for both
the secular and religious sector of the Zionist
movement.  In the case of every Zionist leader, no
matter secular or religious, the objective was to
search for ways by which the Jew could look and feel
European, to shed his Oriental skin, and to be allowed
an entrance ticket to European civilization.  Read
Thomas Cahill's "The Gift of the Jews: How a Tribe of
Desert Nomads Changed the way Everyone Thinks and
Feels" to understand what I am saying.  Here, the
ancient, biblical Israelites are made the founding
fathers of western civilization, and without which,
according to Cahill, modernity would not have been
possible.     

What I am arguing is that in order to understand the
development of Zionism, religious or secular, it is
pertinent to locate its discursive property as
emanating from, and latching onto, the racist
discourse eminating from imperial Europe, especially
as it was conceived by Protestant gentile Zionists. 
Jewish Zionists would appropriate a “gentile” version
of Zionism, and in the process of doing so would alter
a very significant aspect of Christian discourse.  In
the Protestant gentile version of Zionism, although
the Jews were significant for the Second Coming of
Christ, they remained as outsiders, an oriental people
in need of being removed from European lands and
“returned” to their natural home in the East.  For it
is in Palestine that their Semitic, oriental culture
and race naturally belongs.  Jewish Zionism would try
to alter this view by only accepting half of the
equation, the return, while negating the “oriental”.

Zionists thus took it upon themselves to embrace and
adopt the Western racist discourse about the “Oriental
Other” by strategically placing the Jew and his
interests as European.  This was true for both
religious and secular Zionists.  The two claims 
logically fit neatly together and serve the Zionist
project.

Khaldoun

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