# Religious Zionism The strand of [[Zionism]] holding that the return to the land and the Jewish state carry **religious** significance rather than merely political or refuge value — *dati leumi*, "national-religious." Founded as **Mizrachi** in 1902 at a conference of religious Zionists convened in Vilnius by Rabbi Yitzchak Yaacov Reines, on the principle that the Torah should be at the centre of Zionism. Its labour wing Hapoel HaMizrachi followed in 1921 and was the fourth-largest party in Israel's 1951 elections. For most of Israel's first two decades this was a junior partner: pious, institutionally loyal, and politically marginal next to Labour Zionism. **It is now the ideological engine of the Israeli right**, and the transformation is dateable. ## The 1967 hinge The Six-Day War is the pivot. Before it, religious Zionism was a religious accommodation to a secular national project. After it, the capture of the biblical heartland — Judea, Samaria, the Old City — made the state's territorial expansion legible as **redemption in progress**, and the theology of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook as developed by his son Zvi Yehuda Kook supplied the framework: secular Zionism had been the unwitting instrument of a messianic process now entering its active phase. Gush Emunim ("Bloc of the Faithful"), founded 1974, converted that theology into a settlement programme. The distinction that matters: **secular territorial maximalism can trade land for peace at a price; a religious claim that settlement is redemption cannot.** That is why the settler movement proved far more resistant to the Oslo framework than Revisionist Zionism had been to earlier partitions. See [[Oslo Accords]] and [[Yitzhak Rabin]]. ## The 1995 rupture and the 2022 arrival Rabin's assassination in November 1995 by a religious-nationalist student is the case the vault returns to: **domestic right-wing violence that achieved its political objective at no cost to the movement that supplied the rhetoric.** The faction most associated with the incitement went on to govern for most of the following thirty years. [[Kahanism]] is the other line, and its trajectory is the vault's standing lesson on proscription: Brooklyn 1968 → Knesset 1984 → disqualified as racist 1988 → outlawed as terrorist 1994 → US foreign terrorist organization 1997/2004 → **delisted May 2022 → cabinet December 2022**, with [[Itamar Ben-Gvir]] as National Security Minister. **Banning a party removes a vehicle, not a constituency**, and a 120-seat chamber makes small blocs pivotal. On **3 August 2025**, Ben-Gvir became the first Israeli minister to openly lead Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, with a record 3,527 Jewish visitors on Tisha B'Av — [[Benjamin Netanyahu]] insisting the status quo "has not changed and will not change." ## The American connection Religious Zionism is the bridge between American Orthodox Jewry and the Israeli right. [[Modern Orthodox Judaism]] is religious-Zionist by default, which is a substantial part of why American Orthodox Jews vote Republican at rates roughly inverse to American Jews overall. American donor money, yeshiva-year programmes and dual-citizen settlement all run along this channel. It is **not**, however, the same thing as [[Christian Zionism]], and the two should never be collapsed. Christian Zionism supports the Jewish return to the land as a precondition for events in which Jews fare very badly; religious Zionism is a Jewish messianism about Jewish redemption. They cooperate operationally and disagree about the ending. See [[John Hagee]] and [[Christians United for Israel]]. ## See also [[Zionism]] | [[Judaism]] | [[Modern Orthodox Judaism]] | [[Haredi Judaism]] | [[Kahanism]] | [[Itamar Ben-Gvir]] | [[Israeli History Hub]] | [[Israel]] | [[Christian Zionism]] | [[Judaism Timeline]] | [[Six-Day War]] | [[Oslo Accords]]