Standing on Mount Nebo in Jordan and looking towards the west, you see the ‘Promised Land’ before you: a yellowish-brown landscape of rolling hills and ravines that stretches into the distant Mediterranean haze. The Jordan River crosses the land somewhere in that haze, and across it lies the West Bank and Jerusalem. It was on Mount Nebo, the Old Testament says, that God showed Moses the land “flowing with milk and honey” that he had promised the Israelites when he brought them out of exile in Egypt and took them through the Sinai Desert over 40 years. The God of Israel does go on to mention that there are many tribes who already inhabit these lands, but they are an afterthought, meant to be removed: “You shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land and dwell in it, for I have given you the land to possess,” the Old Testament says in the book of Numbers, chapter 33.
The later passages of the Old Testament are filled with stories of battles, victories and losses, exile and return, with a common thread running through them: that this land was promised to the Israelites, descendants of Abraham and ‘God’s chosen people’. This idea of a geographic heart to the faith, remains with the Jews as the Roman pogroms in the early centuries of the Christian Era ejected them into the wider world, creating the original ‘diaspora’. As they migrate further west and spend centuries on the margins of anti-Semitic European society, “Next year in Jerusalem” became a hope and a prayer to the Jews.
Secular Zionism
When Zionism emerged in Europe in the 19th century, it was primarily as a political movement to create a separate state for Jews, not a religious one. Theodor Herzl, who mobilised Zionism in Europe into one cohesive movement at the turn of the century, was a secularist. In fact, some of the European Zionist settlers to arrive in Palestine in the second aliyah (Jewish immigration to the Holy Land) at the start of the 20th century were radical socialists. This included David Ben-Gurion, the founding father of the state of Israel.
However, even the socialist and atheist Zionists could not stay away from the pull of Eretz Israel, the land of Israel as promised in the Bible. It is this broad contours of the biblical land that the various military actions of the state of Israel has aimed to conquer, right from the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, when Israeli forces took control of most of the land earmarked for a Palestinian state by the United Nations, or the Six-Day War of 1967, from when Israel has de facto control of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights.
The early socialist Labour Zionist settlers would morph into the Leftist secular section of Israeli politics that controlled the government of the newly-formed state till the 1970s, before the rise of the Right. Israeli irredentism, however, remains a common feature across the political spectrum.
“If you look at Likud or the Labour Party or any other parties that have been in power, they all were driven by this idea [of greater Israel],” says Stanly Johny, author of Original Sin: Israel, Palestine and the Revenge of Old West Asia. “Right-wing politicians like Itamar Ben-Gvir or Bezalel Smotrich never use the term West Bank. For them, it is Judah and Samaria, which are the biblical references. And whether it is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Benny Gantz or even Yair Lapid—who are from the three main political pillars of Israel today—they all will say that Jerusalem is the eternal, undivided capital of Israel. Even if you look at the Labour Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, the settlements in the West Bank only expanded when he was in power. So while Labour may not be talking about biblical references, land is still a critical component here,” says Johny.
Religious Zionism
Returning to the early days of Jewish settlement in Palestine, we can trace the roots of another form of Zionism—the religious version—that now motivates most of the 440,000 settlers who have moved into the West Bank after 1967, taking over land, perpetrating violence against the Palestinians and pushing a two-state solution further and further into oblivion.
The root of religious Zionism lies in the teachings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who was the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the British Mandate Palestine from 1921. Rabbi Kook established the Mercaz HaRav in Jerusalem, a religious school that, under his son and successor Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, would become the ideological driving force for the Gush Emunim, the radical settler movement in the West Bank.
Assessing the influence of the teachings of Mercaz HaRav on Israeli politics, Moshe Hellinger of the Bar-Ilan University states, “According to the religious-Zionist messianic ideology, as promoted by the rabbinical figures affiliated with Mercaz HaRav, the settlements and their activities manifest the working of the divine providence toward an all-embracing spiritual redemption of the Jewish people and its land.”
‘A Land That Cannot Be divided’
Religious Zionism assigns an almost divine quality to the Promised Land; and in some Jewish mystical traditions like Kabbalah, the land is the divine feminine, a form comparable to the Bharat Mata of the Indian imagination, says Yeshaya Rosenman, head of the India-Israel Maitri programme of the Tel Aviv-based NGO Sharaka. Rosenman, who describes himself as a religious Zionist, recalls a defining moment for the movement: While the Israelis were on the streets celebrating the declaration of independence in 1948, Rabbi Yehuda Kook was in his room crying because this would mean partition of the land as per a UN resolution into an Arab state and a Jewish state, rather than the Jews taking over the whole of biblical Israel. In the same year, Israel went on to occupy much of the territory slated for the Arab State in the Arab-Israel War, and 20 years later, in the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel took over almost the whole of historic Palestine.
The revenge of the religious Zionist for the Oslo Peace Process, and its promise of an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, comes with the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at a peace rally in 1995. The death of Rabin, who won the Nobel Peace Prize along with Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat for facilitating the Oslo Accords, effectively ended the peace process and paved the way for the rise of Netanyahu and the hardline right of Israel, along with the corresponding rise of the Hamas—and the state of affairs of October 7, 2023 and after.
‘The Dispossessed Tribes’
It was on a flight from Cairo to Dubai in 2019 that I mentioned to a young Arab marketing executive seated on the next seat that I had been to Tiberias, by the Sea of Galilee. A flash of recognition mixed with pain crossed his face. His grandfather, who was once one of the biggest landowners in Tiberias, had left during the Nakba, the ‘catastrophic’ eviction of Palestinians from the newly-created state of Israel in 1948. “If we had been in Tiberias, you would be one of the richest persons there,” his grandfather had told him once. Now, he is one of the 5.6 million Palestinians adrift in the Arab world as a result of the quest for a ‘Greater Israel’.
Original Article – ‘Promised Land’: How The Biblical Idea Of Greater Israel Fuels Conflict
