Israel Now: Doctrinal Tendency First

The developments that have taken place within the Israeli Likud Party since the unilateral disengagement plan from the Gaza Strip, which was implemented in 2005, can be considered among the clearest indications of the process of transforming the Zionist movement into a captive of a religious project that denies its enlightening and secular character that it carried in its discourse. The thinker Azmi Bishara has repeatedly emphasized this.

This can be proven by restoring the most prominent facts of that period in which the former Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon assumed the leadership of the Likud, foremost of which remains Sharon's loss in the referendum on the disengagement plan among the ranks of those affiliated with the Likud, and his loss in this party's conference regarding his endeavor to expand the base of His government is about to fall in terms of including the Labor Party.

It was pointed out at the time that there is a struggle over the "political program" within the Likud itself on the one hand, and on the other hand there is a struggle between circles in the Likud and the parties of the extreme right, the "Greater Israel" parties.

This conflict was outlined by the former Israeli Minister of Tourism, and one of the leaders of the National Union Party (the predecessor of the current religious Zionist party), Bani Alon, by saying that it is a struggle between those he described as "those with a security tendency" (led by Sharon himself) and "those with an ideological tendency", without That this means, in depth, dropping the Zionist ideological character from those with the first tendency.

This caused a "core" question to be asked: Does what is happening constitute an increase in the level of influence of those of the second tendency, at the expense of a decrease in the influence of those of the first tendency in the Israeli decision-making process? Some of them believed that this is what the coming days, after the aforementioned plan, will show more clearly. In the opinion of one of the commentators, "Sharon today (in 2005) finds before him a Likuda he does not know." Perhaps the Likud, which was established and raised by reading it as a party and a secular nationalist movement, quickly turns into a religious nationalist movement due to the role of the settlers in it. This was one of the reasons why some Israeli commentators started talking about "a more extreme Likud", and the reason for the statement of the minister close to Sharon, Tzipi Livni, that the Likud fell "in the grip of hostile hands"!

The strong opposition to that plan was not only due to the religious forces' view of the Gaza Strip as part of the historic, biblical Land of Israel, but was also linked, to a large extent, to the fear of the same public of the continuation of the policy of separation from other areas in the West Bank by those who considered it "Secular Israel," which seemed, in the eyes of some of them, to deviate from basic Jewish values.

It is a deviation that began with the withdrawal from Sinai. At the height of the battle against this withdrawal, in the early 1980s, Rabbi Eli Sadan, one of the theorists of religious Zionism, published an article entitled “Let us re-establish the Jewish state,” in which he called for abandoning the Zionist understanding that he sees in The Land of Israel is "only a security haven," and he does not see it as a "religious goal or obligation." About a decade earlier, another theoretician of the same trend wrote in the settlers' newspaper "Nkodah" that "the cooperation of religious Zionism with secular Zionism succeeded in continuing as long as secular Zionism clearly adopted the idea of Jewish nationalism. And when it became clear that the State of Israel is nothing but a secular democratic state, there is no Judaism." place in its politics, this constituted a betrayal of the roots of Jewish life, even if it was on the part of those who spoke Hebrew."

Against this ideological background, the number of representatives of the “settlements of Judea, Samaria and Gaza” in the Knesset has increased over the years, the overwhelming majority of whom are religious. Their clear message is, as one of them put it: We Knesset members, residents of "Judea, Samaria, and Gaza" and our ideological allies who live within the Green Line, cannot accept the steps that will gradually transform Israel into a secular democratic state, and we demand that Jewish nationalism, Jewish religion, or both be part of it. Essential from the state! About "Arab 48"