zionism_unsettled_scan

These changes had the effect of erasing Palestine not
only from maps but also from the minds of Israelis.
At the same time, by providing biblical justification
for the military conquest of Palestine, it demonstrated
the intentional merger of political and religiOUS
Zionism.
The nationalist religious settler movement took
a leap forward in 1974 with the formation of Gush
Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), a messianic religiOUS
group committed to the establishment of jewish religious
settlements in the West Bank, Gaza, and the
Golan Heights. The new Zionism of Greater Israel
gained official sponsorship when the Likud Party
was elected to power in 1977 under Prime Minister
Menachem Begin, marking a shift to the right in
Israeli politics that continues to the present. The
government began to provide financial incentives for
the establishment of settlements in the West Bank,
now identified as "judea and Samaria."The purpose
was to solidify jewish control of what was claimed to
have been Israelite territory in biblical times and to
prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
In their recent book, Chosen Peoples, Todd Gitlin
and Liel Liebovitz conclude that Israeli national
messianism, whether in its overt religiOUS form or in
the form of a civil religion, reflects a conscious or unconscious
recognition of divine election to be God's
chosen people. Gitlin and Liebovitz write/'Zionism's
inability to shake the messianic ideal became manifest
in the hold that the West Bank settlers exercised
on the conscience of the whole nation."4 In spite of
its thoroughly secular origin, Zionism flourished,
especially after 1967, because of the inextricable
blending of its political and religiOUS agenda. This
is one example of the similarities between Zionism,
South African apartheid, and jim Crow segregation
in the Southern US: All three ideologies are a political-religiOUS
blend, providing religious justification
for the politics of racial or ethnic discrimination.
THE CONSOLIDATION OF AMERICAN ZION ISM
During the 1940s the American jewish Committee
(AjC), the most influential jewish civic organization
of the time, comprising largely members of the Reform
movement, remained anti-Zionist. In January
1948 the AjC committee on Palestine expressed
grave concern that "the Zionists will now make an
attempt to organize the community along Zionist
lines and will try to capture the communal organizahons."sThis
concern was prophetic. The Anti-
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The inexorable expansion of Israeli control over former Mandate Palestine is, by now, virtually complete. Fully half the population w ithin this land
area is not Jewish.7 For Israelis committed to the principle of a Jewish state, the population issue poses a demographic threat to the ethno-religious
character of the state. Palestinians are faced with the prospect of, at best, second-class status in a state that classifies them as outsiders and. at
worst, deprivation in isolated enclaves without autonomy or self-determination. As Palestinian population centers in the occupied West Bank have
become isolated "bantustans" administered under a discriminatory. two ~tier legal system that privileges Jewish Israelis. an inevitable-if contested-comparison
has been made to apartheid-era South Africa.
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18 ZIONISM UNSETTLED