The coalition of secular and religious ultranationalists that has governed Israel since 2022 is unprecedented. However, a messianic narrative took hold there long ago. Rhetoric infused with religion was used to lend the Zionist project an air of legitimacy from the start, employing terms like ‘Promised Land’ and invoking the 2,000-year-old Jewish dream of bringing together those who had been exiled. This was despite the fact that most Zionist pioneers were atheists, and scorned ‘backward’, ‘passive’ religious Jews whom they wished to replace with ‘rational’ ones – go-getters and workers ready to rebuild the Jewish nation in the land of Israel. Observant Jews, from liberal to ultraorthodox, saw the burgeoning Zionist initiative as a betrayal of tradition. They decried the movement, calling it an instrumentalisation of Judaism to help create a national religion.

The historian of Judaism Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin describes this as a secular messianism. In today’s Israel, Zionism and nationalism feed off each other ‘because they are central to the secular Zionist myth’, he writes. ‘Nothing settlers have done is new. Their approach is no different from that of secular Zionists; they have simply taken it to its logical conclusion’. Raz-Krakotzkin isn’t alone in arguing that Zionism is a repackaging of Judaism’s core themes, including exile and redemption.

‘At the heart of Judaism lies the idea that living is itself exile’ – the banishment of the people of Israel after the second temple was destroyed, which Jewish tradition presents as the consequence of straying from the divine precepts: ‘The house of Israel went into exile for their iniquity’ (Ezekiel 39:23). But while in exile, the Jews were to observe the Torah’s commandments and repair the world through good deeds. The displacement thus has a spiritual dimension – another historian, Yakov M Rabkin, presents this as a state of the world where the divine presence is hidden – and a universal meaning for humanity. (…)

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