Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history.
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Welcome back to our series on Religious Zionism. Last week, I told you about the mini existential crisis that kicked off this whole affair. I was giving a talk in Philadelphia when a man I’ll call Bill asked me a question that stopped me in my tracks.
Hey Noam. Why haven’t you talked about the religious Zionists who are ruining Israel’s global reputation?
Paraphrased, but still: spicy. Especially because if I have to apply a label to myself, “religious Zionist” fits pretty comfortably. After that question, though, that identity started to feel just a liiiiitle less comfortable. And so my team and I decided it was time to explore a question we had been batting around for a while: what IS religious Zionism?
Last week, we kicked off the first part of our answer. We could have started with the Hebrew Bible itself, but we fast forwarded to Rabbi Judah HaLevi’s 12th century poem, Libi B’Mizrach, My Heart is in the East. This poem is perhaps the most famous example of the Jewish people’s ancient longing for the land where we first became a nation. Then we skipped ahead a few centuries, to the moment that spiritual yearning collided with modern nationalism. We talked about the founding fathers of religious Zionism, from Rabbis Yehuda Alkalai to Rabbi Yitzchak Yaakov Reines to perhaps the most famous and influential of them all, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. We touched, briefly, on the difference between Ashkenazi and Sephardic approaches to Judaism and Zionism. And we ended with the triumph of 1967 – and the devastation of 1973.
We’re going to pick up those threads this week, following the Religious Zionist establishment as it moved from the margins to the center of Israeli political life, starting with a snapshot from August 2005.
Chapter One: Uprooted
The sun was setting over Neve Dekalim, as a thousand people gathered to pray beside the commercial center of the largest Jewish community in Gaza.
For 35 years, Jews had thrived in Gaza, building a cluster of settlements known as Gush Katif. This bloc of settlements was relatively small, but it punched well above its weight: the farmers and hydroponic greenhouses of Gush Katif produced roughly 10% of Israel’s total agricultural output and 15% of its agricultural exports.
But in the summer of 2005, after years of talk and debate, the IDF was preparing to remove every last Israeli from Gaza, soldier or civilian, living or dead. By September, roughly 8,000 Israeli citizens would be homeless. The government had promised compensation for this loss. But this was cold comfort to the people about to watch their own army destroy their homes.
Still, they held on to hope. Surely there was still a chance they could avert the coming catastrophe. So they gathered in Neve Dekalim, reciting Psalms, blowing the shofar, and listening to their most trusted rabbis promise them that God would stay their soldiers’ hands.
Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu was a former Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel and beloved spiritual leader of the Religious Zionism movement. When he reassured the people of Gush Katif that the Disengagement would not happen, they believed him – and the other rabbis making similar promises, including some of my own teachers. I remember one of my rebbes assuring me with great confidence that “We are living in the time of redemption. Trust me, there is NO way God will allow this to happen.” No way.
Two months later, it happened. On August 15, 2005, Israeli soldiers entered Gush Katif and forcibly uprooted their fellow citizens. Angry teenagers, kicking and screaming. Mothers who pushed their babies in soldiers’ faces and demanded Explain to my child why you’re making him homeless! Men weeping, leaving the homes where they had raised their families.
Through it all ran a current of hurt and confusion. The people of Gush Katif were among the country’s most passionate Zionists. They loved their state. They proudly sent their kids to the IDF’s most elite combat units, because they saw defending the land and the people of Israel as holy work. After all, they had been raised to believe that their state’s very existence was the first step to the ultimate redemption of the Jewish people. But now, the same state they loved was ripping them from their homes – homes they had a divine imperative to build.
How had this happened? How had everything gone so wrong?
The answer starts in 1973.
Chapter Two: The Loss of Innocence
Last week, we ended on the high of 1967. The miraculous victory that ended with the Jewish state quadrupling in size, controlling Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights. With Israeli citizens standing before the Western Wall, tears streaming down their faces.
For religious Zionists, the victory of ‘67 was nothing short of a divine confirmation of Rav Kook’s belief that the Jews’ return to their Biblical homeland was Step One of the ultimate redemption. Even non-religious folk were suddenly buzzing with newfound spiritual fervor, as ancient prophecies materialized before their eyes.
Still, Israeli leadership remained avowedly secular. The country was still led by the larger-than-life Labor Zionists who had built the state, commanded the army, and led Israel through three wars. Religious Zionists happily joined their coalitions, served their institutions, and remained a bit player in the government’s decision-making.
And then came Yom Kippur 1973, and the people who had built the state now seemed poised to lose it. Legendary war hero Moshe Dayan, who had first taken up arms for his country at the age of 14, like my son’s age, was so badly shaken that Prime Minister Golda Meir had to restrain him from announcing, ON LIVE TV, that the war was lost.
If you’ve listened to our series on the Yom Kippur War, you already know that Israel eventually turned the tide, achieving an extraordinary military victory. But the toll was devastating. 2,600+ soldiers were dead. In a country of barely three million, few homes were left untouched by grief.
Along with fathers and brothers and sons, the war killed something else: Trust. Israelis were shaken, horrified, outraged. How could the country that won the Six Day War have been so horribly surprised?
For Religious Zionists, the agony took on a religious dimension. As the philosopher Micah Goodman explains it, their internal dialogue changed.
The miracle of 1967 had proved their theology right. But the failure of 1973 had made it very clear that their country’s leaders were simply no longer equipped to guide the state in the correct direction.
And many Religious Zionists — particularly the younger generation — were no longer content to follow their lead. Sure, the pioneers of Labor Zionism had made the Zionist dream a reality, and the next generation of Religious Zionists admired them for that service.
But the secularists had had their turn. It was time for new blood to lead the country towards redemption.
Chapter Three: The Bloc of the Faithful
Rabbi Chanan Porat was four years old when his kibbutz, Kfar Etzion, which sits on the Judean Hills, was destroyed by the Jordanians, its defenders massacred. Nineteen years later, after the triumph of the Six Day War, he petitioned the Prime Minister for permission to rebuild it.
It was the beginning of a long career of activism.
If there were ever a prototypical “Religious Zionist,” Chanan Porat would be it. He had studied at Rav Kook’s yeshiva, Merkaz HaRav, becoming close with the younger Rav Kook. He had helped to found another Religious Zionist yeshiva, Yeshivat Har Etzion. And he had proudly served his country as a paratrooper in two wars, nearly dying in the Yom Kippur War.
A few months later, along with like-minded colleagues, he mounted a response. They founded Gush Emunim, the Bloc of the Faithful, which aimed to settle the territory that Israel had captured in 1967, with a special focus on what the international community calls the West Bank and Jewish history calls Judea and Samaria.
This included Hebron, the first Jewish capital and burial site of the Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs. Beit El, where Jacob dreamed of a ladder reaching heaven. Shechem, modern day Nablus, where Abraham first built an altar to God. Shiloh, where the holy Tabernacle stood. The heartland of the ancient Jewish story.
But if Biblical history wasn’t a good enough reason for the government to authorize new settlements, Gush Emunim offered strategic and political arguments, too. Before 1967, Israel was only 9 miles across at its widest point, its de facto boundaries memorably described by onetime Deputy Prime Minister Abba Eban as “Auschwitz borders.”
Building civilian settlements – not just military bases – gave the country strategic depth. They gave the army a reason to remain in the area. And unlike military bases, a civilian community can’t be so easily uprooted.
Still, for all their strategic arguments, it was unmistakably religion that powered the movement. The Jewish people had returned to their sacred places after two thousand years. They were not about to just pack up and leave.
In 1975, Gush Emunim activists set up shop near the ruins of an old Ottoman railway station in Samaria, near the village of Sebastia. The government had not authorized this new civilian community, and when the government ordered the army to remove them, they just came back and rebuilt. Again. And again. And again, seven times in total, according to Micah Goodman. (Gotta admire the persistence. I usually give up after a website asks me to reset my password once.)
It was their eighth attempt that finally wore the government down. And there it was: a government-approved Jewish community in the heart of Samaria.
Sebastia proved to be a turning point.
For decades, Religious Zionists had mirrored the secular pioneers. The secular movement built kibbutzim, so Religious Zionists built religious kibbutzim. The secular movement joined the army, so Religious Zionists created a system combining yeshiva study with army service.
But at Sebastia, their paths diverged. The settlers of Sebastia believed the rest of Israel would eventually follow them, and Micah Goodman explains why they held on to this belief.
Remember Rav Kook’s theory that secular Zionists were moved by the deep unconscious religious longing that lurked beneath their atheist ideals? Well, his ideological heirs in Gush Emunim carried a version of that idea into the settlement movement.
The settlers at Sebastia knew the government didn’t want them there, that many of their fellow citizens were hesitant to build communities on disputed territory. This mental framework handled those objections neatly.
They thought to themselves something like this: Sure, the nation was saying “hey, what are you doing?” But subconsciously, even the most secular, left-wing Israeli citizen wanted someone to settle the land. Because deep down, every Jew knows these places are a part of us. That we are meant to be here.
In other words, as the newborn settlement movement saw it, they weren’t defying the will of the people, but implementing it – even if the people themselves demanded they stop.
Of course, this is Goodman’s interpretation of the movement’s logic. I’m not suggesting that every person at Sebastia sat around discussing the subconscious will of the nation over Goldstar beers. Still, Goodman’s framework helps explain their confidence. They felt that they were serving the Jewish people by leading from the front, blazing a path for others to eventually follow – just like the original Zionists.
No one had believed the original pioneers would succeed in building a state. A century later, that state was thriving. Like those pioneers, this new generation of activists were mostly young and idealistic, and they gladly gave up comfortable lives to live on a hilltop with no electricity, because they believed they were building something eternal.
Still, some Israelis found the whole movement deeply unsettling (yes, pun intended). After all, it’s hard to compromise or reason with people who believe their politics align with God’s plan. It’s harder still to find common ground when dissent is seen as an obstacle in the path towards redemption.
Then there were the thousands of Palestinians who lived on and around those hills. Many had been there for generations, though some were refugees or the children of refugees displaced in 1948. While the settlers looked around the sprawling landscape and saw Biblical lands, a much-needed security buffer, and the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy, Palestinians saw a military power encroaching on their farms and villages, threatening their way of life, and taking control of their future.
It’s an impasse we still have not bridged.
Chapter Four: A Test
Not everyone was as gung-ho as the Jewish community settling Sebastia. Without realizing it, the Religious Zionist movement itself was splintering, as some big-name rabbis pushed back hard. For every young settler certain they were fulfilling God’s will was a rabbi urging caution, warning of grave moral and political miscalculations.
Some of the most insistent warnings came from rabbis who lived in settlements themselves, who agreed with much of the movement’s theology. But as time passed, many of these rabbis found less and less common ground with the settler movement.
Of course, some never found common ground at all.
Last week, we spoke briefly about Yeshayahu Leibovitz, who was both religious – as in, meticulously observant and learned – AND a Zionist who believed emphatically in Jewish national sovereignty in the state of Israel.
But to call him a quote-unquote “Religious Zionist” would be inaccurate, because he was one of the most ferocious critics of Religious Zionism who has ever lived. Think of him as a religious, comma, Zionist, or a Zionist who happened to be religious, who kept both of those facets of his identity completely distinct from one another.
In 1968, as the rest of the country was celebrating the miracle of the Six Day War, Leibovitz published an unequivocal challenge to the Religious Zionist movement. In an essay called The Territories, he stated flatly that – quote – “The conquest itself has no religious significance.” He even warned that the settlement movement was just a gross form of nationalism masquerading as religious conviction.
And then there were the Palestinians living in those hills. Leibowitz warned that ruling over another people would corrupt Israel and bring catastrophe to the Jewish people as a whole. Nearly sixty years later, thousands of Jews across the world who have never heard of Leibowitz have unknowingly adopted that exact position.
Leibovitz even declared that treating the state as an object of religious devotion was a form of idolatry. IDOLATRY! As in, Judaism’s number-one no-no. He wasn’t exactly alone in that charge. Anti-Zionist rabbis – like the Satmar Hasidim and the Neturei Karta – had long insisted that Zionism was a form of idol worship. Now, even some Zionist thinkers warned of the dangers of venerating a state. Of putting land above all other considerations – like, for example, a potential peace deal.
If you’ve listened to our series on the Six Day War, you might remember that almost as soon as the territory was acquired, Israeli politicians were drawing up plans for its return, in exchange for lasting peace. But within months of the war, the Arab League made their position clear: no negotiation with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no peace with Israel.
For the next decade, the prospect of returning the land remained moot. But in November of 1977, an unlikely visit from Egyptian President Anwar Sadat changed that calculus. For the first time, peace with a major enemy was actually on the table. But peace would require compromises. And many Religious Zionist rabbis had to contend with a thorny theological question:
If the Land of Israel is a Divine gift… if settling that land is a step on the way to redemption… were the Jewish people allowed to give that land away?
The biggest names in Religious Zionism came up with some surprising answers.
Rabbi Haim David Halevy, the former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, believed that both 1948 and 1967 were miraculous steps towards redemption. In fact, he wrote that “the redemption of Israel will not be complete if the Land of Israel will not be complete.” He personally opposed the prospect of giving up any inch of the Holy Land.
But his writings on the matter were both nuanced and unexpected.
Yes, Halevy wrote, the land of Israel is holy. But the holiness of a physical object exists in the context of its relationship with God – a relationship that entails real, human obligations. And administering a holy land, even in an age of miracles, requires ethics, prudence, consensus, and a serious accounting of consequences. And so Halevy ruled that the decision did not belong to the rabbis, but to the country’s leaders. The government had access to classified military intelligence. The politicians understood the diplomatic implications. And if giving up land meant buying peace – thus saving lives – then even the most ardently Zionist rabbis ruled in favor.
After all, as we discussed last week, there is almost no Jewish law that trumps pikuach nefesh: saving a life. And if that meant giving up parts of Judea and Samaria for lasting peace, well, wasn’t that a no-brainer?!
Other rabbis made a similar case for territorial concessions.
There was Chacham Ovadia Yosef, the greatest Sephardic halakhic authority of the modern era. The Baghdad-born rabbi had come to Jerusalem at the age of 4, when it was still under British control. He was 47 years old when the IDF’s 55th Paratroopers Brigade burst through the Lion’s Gate, reuniting the two jagged halves of Jerusalem under one flag. No one doubted his immense love for the Land of Israel.
But it was his love for the people of Israel that animated so many of his rulings, and he used his encyclopedic knowledge of Jewish law to ease his people’s suffering. When a generation of husbands went MIA after the Yom Kippur war, leaving their wives in limbo, he ruled that it was permissible to assume they were widowed, enabling them to remarry. When Ethiopian Jews came en masse to Israel, raising questions about their religious status, he ruled that they were in fact Jewish, and had no need to convert.
So his rulings about land-for-peace were equally humanistic. Always, pikuach nefesh came first, and he believed that giving up territory in exchange for genuine peace was not only permitted but OBLIGATORY.
Some rabbis went even further.
As a Holocaust survivor, Rabbi Yehuda Amital had a front-row seat to the destruction of European Jewry. And yet, he saw God’s hand everywhere. Even as the Nazis steamrolled centuries-old Jewish communities from Poland to Greece, the Jews of Mandate Palestine were creating the greatest Jewish renaissance since the construction of the Second Temple.
He felt that God’s hand had guided the creation of the state. It had guided that state’s survival through the War of Independence, which killed 1% of the population. And it had, beyond all doubt, guided the victory of the Six Day War. So Rav Amital chose to build his home and yeshiva in the Biblical heartland of Judea. To this day, Yeshivat Har Etzion remains one of the great bastions of Religious Zionism.
And yet, Rav Amital was entirely prepared to give up his home if it meant saving lives. All lives, not just Jewish ones. Because Rav Amital was a religious humanist in the tradition of Rav Kook — a man who believed that Jewish sovereignty carried significant moral responsibility. And he was not afraid to call out his people’s breaches of that sacred responsibility.
In 1982, in the thick of what would become known as “the first Lebanon war,” Israeli soldiers allowed their Christian Lebanese allies into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where they slaughtered, tortured, and mutilated thousands of Palestinian refugees.
Israelis were horrified, and perhaps none more than Rav Amital, who condemned the IDF in the strongest possible terms.
Israelis had not participated in the massacre, and many soldiers denied knowing it was happening at all. But Rav Amital didn’t care. Jewish soldiers had allowed the murderers into the camps in the first place, knowing the tensions between Lebanese Christians and Palestinian Muslims.
And this negligence, said the rabbi, was – QUOTE! – “a sin not even Yom Kippur can cleanse” – a STAGGERING statement from a rabbi so deeply steeped in the love of his country, his army, his people, and his land. But Rav Amital believed that Jewish sovereignty meant Jewish responsibility. Power carries obligations, and he took his obligation as a leader and a teacher seriously — even when it meant censuring the people and army he loved so deeply. Eventually, he co-founded Meimad, a Religious Zionist political movement that supported territorial compromise if it meant peace.
So many Religious Zionist rabbis called for restraint and humility, for caution and compromise.
But what about those rabbis who didn’t?
Chapter Five: Oslo
Among Judaism’s minor holidays is a fast day that few people have heard of. The day after Rosh Hashana, devout Jews abstain from eating or drinking from sunup to sundown, in memory of a man named Gedaliah ben Ahikam. We call it Tzom Gedaliah. The Fast of Gedaliah.
When the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzer destroyed the First Temple in 586 BCE, killing or exiling Judea’s elites, he left behind the poorest Jews, appointing Gedaliah to rule over this pathetic remnant of the slaughter. Under Gedaliah’s wise and careful rule, the broken land began to thrive once more, and Jewish refugees who had fled began to return home.
Among them was Ishmael ben Netania, a member of the Judean royal family, who felt personally slighted that he hadn’t been chosen to rule Judea’s remaining Jews. So when the King of Ammon, who was VERY worried about this Judean renaissance, approached him about assassinating Gedaliah, Ishmael readily agreed.
Gedaliah had heard rumors of the plot against him. Still, he welcomed Ishmael into his home for a meal. After all, Jews don’t kill other Jews.
Well, that day, things changed. After the meal, Ishmael and his men slaughtered Gedaliah’s entire household. No one was appointed to replace him, and the Judean renaissance died. The pale echo of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel came to an end, and the rabbis lamented that only now did the Jewish people understand the full measure of exile. That’s why, 2,600 years later, we still fast in Gedaliah’s memory. It is seared into our history: a Jew who strikes another Jew will surely call down disaster.
Many thousands of years later, a similar disaster was brewing among the people of Israel.
In the early 1990s, as Israeli and Palestinian leaders talked of peace in Oslo and on the White House Lawn, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad did their best to destroy the negotiations with a series of suicide bombings and other attacks. But no one – not even the most radical fringe of Israeli society – expected that kind of violence from one of their own.
Many Israelis supported the Oslo Accords, but a significant minority was horrified by this so-called “peace process,” convinced that their Prime Minister was selling them out. To start, there was the whole “constant terrorism” thing, which PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat was either unable or unwilling to quell. But for many Religious Zionists in particular, Oslo challenged their most cherished beliefs.
The State of Israel had taken control of Judea and Samaria in 1967 – an important step on the path towards redemption. But now the same state that a generation of Religious Zionists viewed as the vehicle of redemption was transferring this sacred land to the Palestinians. Religious Zionist soldiers started asking their rabbis: Can I be ordered to evacuate a Jewish settlement? Do I have to obey a government decision that I believe violates Jewish law? How far am I allowed to go to stop this heresy?
And the heresy wasn’t just confined to “giving up God’s land.” The concept of pikuach nefesh, saving a life, was still in play. Many Israelis – not just Religious Zionists! – worried that giving up land would not SAVE lives, but endanger them, encouraging terrorism and making Israel harder to defend.
If the settlement movement hadn’t been fractured before, it certainly was now. On one side was the “mamlachti” wing – people deeply committed to the state and its institutions, who opposed the Oslo Accords but respected the legitimacy of the state. On the other were the rebels, so disgusted with their leadership that some prepared to take matters into their own hands.
It was in this febrile atmosphere that a young physician named Baruch Goldstein walked into the Tomb of the Patriarchs on the morning of Purim 1994, and murdered 29 Palestinians while they were praying.
The massacre horrified Israeli society, including most Religious Zionists. It breaks my heart to tell you that a small minority of Jewish Israelis actually praised the murders, with some rabbis justifying the massacre as Jewish self-defense. Rabbi Dov Lior, a leading figure on the religious right, even heralded Goldstein as “a kadosh, a holy martyr.”
This fringe was just that – a fringe. Most rabbis, Religious Zionist or otherwise, were appalled – by the massacre, and by their colleagues’ approval of Goldstein’s act of terrorism.
Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein – one of the great Religious Zionist rosh yeshivas – responded to Rabbi Dov Lior with righteous fury. Their exchange played out in the pages of the Religious Zionist journal Tradition: a public argument for the soul of Religious Zionism. How could a Jewish doctor walk into a holy place and murder people at prayer? And how could religious people, who believe that all humans are made in the image of God, actually defend this? What had happened to Rav Kook’s lofty ideals? To the belief that Jewish sovereignty should elevate Jewish life? That the Jewish State should be a blessing for all of humanity?
The argument was still raging when the next blow came.
November 4, 1995. I was ten years old. It was Saturday night, and my older brother Chanan and I had rushed downstairs after Havdalah to watch Walker, Texas Ranger, because we had sophisticated taste.
As we flipped through the channels, my parents came down the stairs. I can still see their faces, ashen and shocked.
“Yitzhak Rabin has been killed,” they told us. “Assassinated.” I was a kid in Baltimore. I cared as much about Israeli politics as I did about municipal zoning law. Still, I knew who Rabin was. I remembered his awkward handshake with Arafat on the White House Lawn. Even at the age of 10, I understood his assassination would alter the course of history.
And then we learned who had murdered the Israeli Prime Minister. Not Hamas. Not Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Not a Palestinian at all, but a fellow Jew. A Religious Zionist. Yigal Amir looked and dressed and even talked like people I knew. But unlike anyone I knew, he believed he had a moral and religious obligation to kill a fellow Jew, the leader of the Jewish state. And he used Jewish law to justify this murder.
Amir claimed Rabin was a rodef – someone whose actions threatens Jewish lives – and a moser, someone who hands Jewish property or people over to hostile powers. These are loaded terms in Jewish law, which belong in a tightly controlled framework, operating under STRICT limits and conditions, none of which were present in this case.
But Yigal Amir showed not a smidgen of remorse. During his trial, the 25-year-old law student declared proudly that, quote, “Everything I did, I did for God, for the Torah of Israel, the people of Israel and the land of Israel.”
The Israeli court rejected his argument as a cynical exploitation of Jewish law for purposes alien to Judaism and sentenced him to life in prison plus 14 years, though to this day, there are Israelis who push for his release. Not many. But enough that the Jerusalem Post published an editorial in August of 2026, titled “The line we cannot cross: Israel must never free Yigal Amir.”
Most Religious Zionists condemned the murder, flatly rejecting Amir’s twisting of Jewish law. But it was not so easy for the community to wash its hands of Yigal Amir.
In a speech to his community, Rav Aharon Lichtenstein urged everyone to take responsibility. Not for Amir’s action, but for the environment that allowed an extremist to flourish unnoticed. Before the murder, people might have pointed to him as evidence of the Religious Zionist community’s success – bright, devout, with a promising future. Which meant, said Rav Lichtenstein, that they could not disavow him so quickly. As he put it, quote, “If a day before the murder we would have said proudly, ‘See what we have produced,’ we must say it now as well – ‘See what we have produced.’”
It was a searing and necessary call for reflection. Because after the assassination, everything changed for Israel’s Religious Zionists. Overnight, the kippah sruga – the knitted kippah that is the signature headgear of religious Zionists – became a mark of suspicion. Young men took them off in public. Hundreds of thousands of people, most of them devastated by the assassination, suddenly felt guilty by association. And though not every secular Israeli looked suspiciously at Religious Zionists, some wrote off the entire community as a hotbed of extremism, responsible for the man who had killed their leader.
The relationship between Religious Zionism and the state was beginning to fray. Ten years later, it would face its hardest challenge yet.
Chapter Six: Disengaged
We started this episode in Neve Dekalim, the largest of Gaza’s Jewish communities, as roughly 8,000 Israeli citizens prayed that some their government would not uproot them from their homes after all.
But if there was a miracle that summer, it was that no one was injured or killed in the process of uprooting Gush Katif, the cluster of 21 small Jewish communities in the Gaza strip, in the unilateral withdrawal.
Yes, Unilateral withdrawal. Really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? It sounds decisive, definitive, and final. But in reality, nothing about the disengagement was definitive or clearcut. There was no peace treaty, no agreement ending the conflict, no handshake on the White House lawn, no reciprocal Palestinian concessions whatsoever. Israel was simply… leaving the Gaza Strip, as the majority of Israelis looked on approvingly. They believed that administering Gaza was a burden, that protecting a few thousand settlers required too many soldiers and risked too many lives. That the moral cost of ruling over another people was simply too high.
But opponents of the disengagement predicted that rather than peace, the withdrawal would only breed MORE attacks launched from territory Israel had abandoned. And they worried about the precedent. The Jewish state was uprooting settlements without a peace agreement, without diplomatic recognition, without demanding the disarmament of Gaza’s terror groups. Was this a disengagement… or a retreat?
For Religious Zionists, the withdrawal cut especially deep: the state was dismantling Jewish communities they saw as the crowning achievement of modern Zionism, the fulfilment of ancient Biblical prophecy. God had gifted Gaza to the Jewish people amidst the great signs and wonders of 1967, and here they were handing the territory right back, saying “no thanks.”
Religious Zionists organized huge protests. Someone chose orange as the color of the anti-disengagement movement, and soon, orange ribbons sprouted from cars, backpacks, balconies, and wrists, both in Israel and for some Religious Zionists in the Diaspora. Meanwhile, proponents of the disengagement tied ribbons of their own, bright blue signifiers of their political allegiance.
All through that summer, families in Gush Katif boxes up their possessions, even as they insisted they would never leave. Some prepared to resist. Others declared that they would not raise a hand against an Israeli soldier.
The images and videos of the evacuation were heartwrenching. Soldiers – some of them religious, many of them crying – physically carried families out of their homes. They bulldozed the synagogues and shuttered the greenhouses, somehow remaining calm as angry teenagers shouted abuse, comparing the soldiers of the Jewish state to the Nazis.
You can oppose the settlement project and still understand why the disengagement was so devastating. Thousands were forced to uproot their homes, synagogues, businesses, and farms. Even the dead were not allowed to remain. The government exhumed all of Gaza’s Jewish graves, re-burying its dead elsewhere in Israel.
Imagine being a parent in one of those communities, raising your children to pray for the state, to proclaim every Shabbat that the State of Israel is the beginning of the Jewish people’s redemption. And now that same State of Israel is putting your furniture on a truck. It’s no surprise that amidst the pain, the anguish, the anger, another feeling emerged: disillusionment.
If Jewish settlement was part of redemption, how could Jewish settlements be uprooted? If the state was itself part of that redemptive process, how could that same state order the evacuation? Had the rabbis misunderstood the prophecies? Had the people misunderstood the rabbis? Had God changed the plan? Was there even a plan?
Brilliant rabbis – holy, pious, learned men – had promised, “It won’t happen.” But here it was, happening. And so, as the journalist Yair Ettinger would later write, “a rupture emerged between national-religious Israelis’ religious and national commitments.”
A rupture emerged in the Religious Zionism movement, too. There was no center of gravity, no single rabbi or spiritual leader representing the movement as a whole.
Some Religious Zionists gently loosened their grip on the messianic reading, acknowledging that perhaps it was enough to live religious lives in a Jewish state, without reading the Messiah’s imminent arrival into every sign. Some became more open, individualistic, or spiritually experimental. But others lost faith completely – some in the rabbis, others in the state.
And it’s that last group that I want to talk about. The mostly-young, deeply disillusioned crowd who became convinced that the state was no longer an instrument of redemption, but an obstacle standing in the Messiah’s way. Many of these activists fled to the hills of the West Bank, creating illegal and often primitive outposts with zero interest in government approval.
But even as they fought to claim every hilltop in Judea, they turned their attention to another Jewish holy site: the Temple Mount. Some scholars have argued that this was a way of proving that the redemption hadn’t died in Gaza. Instead, the fight to bring the Messiah had just moved to a new location, giving the redemption process fresh momentum.
And what a location it was.
The holiest site in Judaism is, ironically, governed by an Islamic body called the waqf, which administers the mosque and shrine built atop the ruins of two Jewish temples. This is perhaps the world’s most controversial real estate, and the waqf, the Israeli government, AND Jewish religious authorities maintain a delicate agreement to limit Jewish prayer there.
For the Israeli government, limiting Jewish prayer is an important way to quell tensions. But Jewish religious authorities had a theological reason for restricting the Jewish presence at Judaism’s most sacred site. For decades, virtually every major rabbi forbade Jews from setting foot on the Temple Mount, for complicated reasons relating to ritual purity, or our lack thereof. The elder Rav Kook once wrote a public plea begging Jews to observe the prohibition, and after 1967, his son Rav Tzvi Yehuda held the same line. So did onetime chief rabbis Ovadia Yosef, Mordechai Eliyahu, and Avraham Shapira. In fact, the entire Chief Rabbinate council threw its weight behind this ruling.
There were exceptions, of course.
Rabbi Shlomo Goren was not yet Israel’s Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi when he blew the shofar at the Western Wall in June of 1967. After he was appointed to the position in 1972, he advocated for opening parts of the Temple Mount to Jewish worship. Though the Chief Rabbinate Council declined to change the status quo, Rabbi Goren didn’t give up on the cause. In 1993, he wrote an entire book on the subject, mapping the entire layout of the complex and highlighting which areas are permitted to enter and which are forbidden.
Other prominent Religious Zionist rabbis agree. Rabbi Dov Lior, who controversially eulogized Baruch Goldstein in 1994, has said that while parts of the complex should remain off-limits, others should be opened to Jewish prayer, provided the worshippers have ritually purified themselves first. And in 2016, Rabbi David Lau – then Israel’s Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi – told the Knesset Channel in 2016 that he would “like to see” the Third Jewish Temple rebuilt on the Temple Mount, side by side with the Muslim holy sites there. And though this wasn’t exactly an endorsement of Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, it did signal a significant shift in the rabbinate’s thinking.
So the Temple Mount activists were not completely flouting religious authority when they began to organize prayer vigils and technically illegal trips to the Temple Mount. And they did have some implicit rabbinical backing for their campaigns to reassert Jewish sovereignty over the place where two Holy Temples had once stood. Still, their position was – and is – a minority opinion, both among ordinary Israelis AND religious authorities.
But in recent years, members of the Israeli government have taken up their cause.
Chapter Seven: The “Radicals”
Today, when most people hear the words Religious Zionism, they think of the Knesset’s infamous ministers: Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir.
Both identify as Religious Zionists – Smotrich’s party is LITERALLY called “Religious Zionism,” HaTziyonut HaDatit – and both are controversial.
Smotrich has impeccable Religious Zionist credentials: born in a settlement in the Golan Heights, raised in the West Bank community of Beit El, and educated at Rav Kook’s Yeshiva, Mercaz Harav. But I don’t know if Smotrich’s politics were what Rav Kook had in mind when he spoke about a Jewish state that would benefit ALL of humanity.
Smotrich’s activism began in 2005, when he was arrested for blocking a highway in protest of the Gaza Disengagement. Three weeks in detention did nothing to douse his conviction, and a year later, he co-founded Regavim, an organization that claims to “monitor” Palestinians in the West Bank and pushes the government to demolish Palestinian homes.
In 2015, after Jewish terrorists firebombed a Palestinian home in the village of Duma, killing an 18-month-old and both his young parents and leaving a four-year-old grievously injured, Smotrich published an op-ed arguing that, quote, “the murder… for all its severity, is not a terror attack.” A year later, following the birth of one of his children, he called for segregating maternity wards of Israeli hospitals, claiming that, quote: “It’s natural that my wife wouldn’t want to lie down [in a bed] next to a woman who just gave birth to a baby who might want to murder her baby twenty years from now… Arabs are my enemies and that’s why I don’t enjoy being next to them.” As a reminder, roughly 20% of Israeli citizens are Arabs, which means that Smotrich sees a fifth of his country’s population as “the enemy.”
As Finance Minister, Smotrich effectively controls civilian life in the West Bank, from roads and planning to construction permits. A man who calls Arabs “his enemy” wields tremendous power over decisions that directly affect Palestinians’ lives.
So does his infamous counterpart, Itamar Ben Gvir, who currently serves as Israel’s National Security Minister.
Ben-Gvir is a disciple of Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose party, Kach, was banned from the Knesset in 1988 because of its racism. (Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Palestinians as they prayed, was a big fan.) For decades, Kahanism was considered beyond the pale by all but the most radical fringes. The National Religious Party – the official party of Religious Zionists – refused to go near anyone who advocated for Kahane’s ideas.
But a handful of Israeli citizens have kept Kahane’s movement alive, Ben Gvir among them. For years, he kept a framed photo of Baruch Goldstein on the wall of his living room, removing it only when he began running for office.
Many Israelis felt that this alone should have been enough to disqualify him from any government position. But in 2021, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needed every government seat he could find to hold on to his post, and brought Ben-Gvir’s far-right party, Otzma Yehudit, aka Jewish Power, into the government.
And then, he appointed Ben Gvir National Security Minister, giving him control of the very same police force that arrested him dozens of times on charges of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization.
Ben Gvir is a vocal champion of the Jewish right to pray at the Temple Mount, and he has made headlines repeatedly for visiting the Temple Mount, sometimes to pray, sometimes just to hang out. Some of his supporters welcomed his inclusion in the government as a practical way to consolidate the right-wing bloc. Others claim that Ben Gvir is just standing up for the Jewish right to pray at Judaism’s holiest sites. But a number of rabbis have made no secret of their disdain for his religious AND political positions.
Former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Rav Yitzhak Yosef, son of the late Sephardic Chief Rabbi Chacham Ovadia Yosef, calls Ben Gvir’s ascent to the Temple Mount a “sin” that, quote, “causes others to sin. Because of him, people falter and enter the Temple Mount.” End quote. Worse, according to Rav Yosef, he is “desecrating God’s name” by flouting hundreds of rabbis’ explicit prohibition against visiting the Temple Mount.
Meanwhile, Religious Zionist Rabbi Moshe Lichtenstein – son of Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, who condemned the Goldstein eulogies – objects to Ben Gvir’s presence in the government on “moral and religious” grounds. To him, support of Ben Gvir’s, quote “power-worshiping gang, which is tolerant of violence and honors a mass killer,” is a clear desecration of God’s name. (A big no-no in Judaism.)
Rav Lichtenstein is far from the only Religious Zionist to condemn Ben Gvir, or the growing extremist wing of the settler movement. Israel’s 13th Prime Minister, Naftali Bennet, who served between June 2021 and July 2022, is a Religious Zionist himself. He supports the settlements and opposes a Palestinian state. But his parallels to Smotrich or Ben Gvir end there. As Prime Minister, he formed a diverse coalition encompassing right-wing, centrist, left-wing, and – for the first time in Israel – an Arab Islamist party.
Many Religious Zionists viewed this as betrayal. But Bennett argued that after four elections in two years, Israel needed a functioning government more than it needed ideological purity tests, and he was willing to sit with people he disagreed with to end the country’s political deadlock.
He used his inaugural address, which Ben Gvir and other ministers angrily interrupted, to really bring home that point. Listen for yourself:
[start at 14:31 – 15:07 – In English, Noam doesn’t have to read]
Twice in our history my friends the people of Israel have lost their first house the first temple and the second temple precisely because the leaders of that generation did not have the wisdom to sit with each other and to compromise – yes even with other people, exactly. I see right here in front of my own eyes Bar Giora and John of Giscala. They are all right, but out of justice they burnt our home down.
[back to Noam]
Here, he’s referencing the rival warlords Simon bar Giora (gee-OH-RAH) and John of Giscala (gis-KA-la), who spent the years before the fall of the Second Temple duking it out for control of Jerusalem. In a bid to consolidate their own power, they burned the city’s food stores, hoping to spur their fellow Jews into a doomed stand against the Romans. That strategy didn’t work as planned, and when the Romans finally broached the city’s walls, they found its people starved and withered, without the strength to resist the ensuing slaughter.
It was a not-so-subtle reminder that the downfall of the Jewish people has always started from within.
Whether you admire Bennett or cannot stand him, his politics grew from the Religious Zionist imperative to take responsibility for the Jewish people. Remember that even before the birth of the state, Religious Zionists championed a Jewish sovereignty that preserves human dignity and advances humankind.
Once the state was formed, the movement took its civic responsibility seriously, participating in all its institutions.
Because the movement was first and foremost based on love of the land, God, and the Jewish people. Rav Kook had visited a deeply secular kibbutz and danced with its farmers under the stars. He didn’t need to agree with them to see them as partners in the holy work of building a Jewish state.
Bennett belongs to that pragmatic tradition. So does Matan Kahana, who despite his last name is as far from Meir Kahane as you can get. He too is a Religious Zionist. But as minister of religious affairs, Kahana went and did something nobody had ever dared. He broke the Chief Rabbinate’s monopoly on kashrut certification. Then he went after the conversion courts and appointed ten women to religious councils. Not because he hates religion. He IS religious! But because, as he says, quote, “you cannot force an identity on people.” And he wanted to make room for a more expansive vision of what Judaism can and should look like in the Land of Israel.
Then there’s the Religious Zionist left wing, which advocates for the rights of Palestinians. (Did you know there was a religious Zionist left wing? It’s the country’s best kept secret.) Among its most vocal groups is Bnei Avraham, Children of Abraham, whose activists grew up within the Religious Zionist world. Same schools. Same youth movements. Same Torah. Same settlements.
Today, they travel into Palestinian villages in the West Bank to act as a, quote, “protective presence,” accompanying Palestinian farmers to fields they are afraid to traverse alone. When extremist settlers arrive, these Bnei Avraham activists literally put their bodies between their fellow religious Jews and Palestinian farmers. They spend Shabbat in Palestinian homes – bringing kosher food, lighting candles, and reciting prayers and words of Torah – just in case extremists decide to attack Palestinians on shabbat.
In 2026, leaders of Bnei Avraham wrote a fierce public letter about the world in which they had been raised. They remembered their Religious Zionist high school class building a summer camp from the ground up for children with disabilities, raising the money, organizing the activities, volunteering as counselors. It is this same instinct, they wrote, that drives them to protect Palestinians and to condemn their fellow Religious Zionists who burn Palestinian fields and homes. They called on the movement’s leaders to lower the temperature. To roundly and unequivocally condemn settler violence. To remember their civic and moral responsibility to the Palestinians who live among them.
Often, other Religious Zionists dismiss these activists out of hand. They point out the fact that the vast majority of settlers are not violent. That many have suffered Palestinian terrorism themselves. And that most live peaceful and unremarkable lives alongside Palestinian neighbors, without fanfare or open letters or public calls. They point out that the settlement movement is wide. That it contains radicals and moderates and everyone in between – including those who defy categorization.
Take Rabbi Yehuda HaKohen, who believes deeply in settling Judea and Samaria – the West Bank – and rejects a two-state solution. So far, pretty standard. Until he tells you his vision for peace: a single shared state, governed by Jewish–Palestinian partnership. He explained to me that, quote: “The Jewish people know how to be weak and just, and we know how to be strong and a little unjust. Right now we have to learn how to be strong and just.”
All this was spinning around in my head on that fateful night in Philadelphia, when Bill asked me why I failed to acknowledge the problem of Religious Zionism.
Because, Bill, here’s my honest answer: Religious Zionism was never just one thing. It’s a 120-year-old argument between people who agree about almost nothing except that the Jewish return to history carries serious religious weight and sacred obligations. As of September 2026, the loudest and most extreme wing of the movement holds the microphone. But holding the microphone is not the same as winning the argument. And no one owns Religious Zionism, no matter WHAT they’ve named their political party.
I hope you gained a lot from this story of Religious Zionism, and here are your Five Fast Facts:
1) Modern Religious Zionism emerged in the 19th century in response to rising antisemitism and emerging nationalism, turning the ancient Jewish longing for Zion into an organized political movement.
2) Rabbi Yitzhak Yaakov Reines founded Mizrachi, the first-ever religious Zionist party, in 1902. He believed that saving Jewish lives — pikuach nefesh — outweighed all other obligations, including settling the Holy Land.
3) The movement’s foremost spiritual leader, Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, came to Ottoman Palestine in 1904, where he refined his belief that even secular, atheist Zionists were active participants in the Jewish redemption.
4) 32 years after Rav Kook’s death, the victory of the Six Day War renewed Israelis’ interest in his messianic theology. But the Yom Kippur War, six years later, weakened his disciples’ confidence in Israel’s secular political leadership, inspiring the rise of Gush Emunim and the settlement movement.
5) The 2005 Gaza disengagement was a theological earthquake for messianic religious Zionism. In the aftermath, some Religious Zionists re-evaluated their theology, while others began to rebel against the state’s authority.
Those are the facts, but here is one enduring lesson as I see it.
I want to return, briefly, to Bill, and to his statement that Religious Zionism has become a major problem. He’s got receipts for that belief, as we discussed. But as these two episodes have demonstrated, I believe the movement has always been deeply ideologically diverse.
It includes rabbis like Yitzhak Yaakov Reines, who was prepared to consider a temporary Jewish home in East Africa because Jewish lives were in danger. And Abraham Isaac Kook, who believed that EVERY Jew had a part to play in the coming redemption, regardless of how they chose to play that part. Who warned that Jewish nationalism required moral restraint and Jewish ethics. Who believed that a Jewish state should be a blessing for all of humanity.
It includes Yehuda Amital and Ovadia Yosef and Haim David Halevy, who loved the Land with fierce and unquestionable devotion – and still insisted that the big decisions were best left to an informed and responsible government, including the exchange of sacred territory for lasting peace.
The tent is big enough for Naftali Bennett and Bezalel Smotrich, two people who agree on some fundamentals and disagree mightily on everything else. For the activists of Bnei Avraham and Itamar Ben Gvir. For religious feminists, settlers, soldiers, rabbis, critics of settlements, and people who can’t decide whether they still claim the label of “Religious Zionists” at all.
Which brings me back to me. Noam. A man who hates labels. By the way, many of the people I just mentioned would probably also hate being labeled. But if I have to choose one, Religious Zionist mostly fits.
Sometimes I share my personal opinions on this pod. This is one of those times. If it means something to you, then great. If not, also great and I deeply understand.
I believe the return of Jewish sovereignty carries deep spiritual significance. I believe the Land of Israel is central to the Jewish story – not just as the place where just under half of the world’s Jews happen to live, but as the place where we became the Jews. I believe the love and stewardship of this land is inextricable from Jewish identity. I believe that Judaism’s long moral and ethical tradition should shape the values of the Jewish State – without coercion or theocracy.
And I love that Religious Zionism requires direct engagement.
Religious Zionists build communities. They serve in the army. They study Torah. They enter politics. They farm, teach, and volunteer. They believe Jewish history asks something of them, and they stand ready to answer its call. I agree. I strive to live my life the same way. They are the community of “And,” not “Or.”
But I also believe that all this admirable intensity and conviction must be tempered with humility. Because something dangerous has crept into Religious Zionism, just as it creeps into any successful movement.
Absolute, unbudging certainty.
Now, I want to be clear. There’s nothing wrong with believing that Jewish history has religious meaning. And there’s nothing wrong with being certain of that fact. Certainty can be good, even necessary, in lots of situations. Like deciding who to build your life with. Or what you want to be when you grow up.
But here’s the problem with overwhelming certainty. It can calcify. Can blind. Can make us forget that things change. People change. Opinions change. History changes. And hanging on to certainty, without humility, without doubt, can make us forget that. To ignore other opinions and perspectives, to miss other people in the room, to see only what confirms our beliefs.
There is a difference between believing that “this could be redemption” and “this is redemption, so get out of the way.” There is a difference between believing that God has a plan, and believing that you understand it completely. Because when you are so profoundly certain of your own ideals, you have no reason to listen to anyone else. To consider that maybe you don’t have all the answers.
And the less we listen to each other, the easier it becomes to treat other people, especially people who disagree with us, like obstacles, instead of fellow human beings.
It was this certainty that caused Yigal Amir and Ishmael ben Netania and Shimon bar Giora and John of Giscala to raise their hands against fellow Jews, calling down disaster.
No movement is exempt from this kind of exclusionary, megalomaniac certainty. And so it is our duty, no matter our movement, to keep asking ourselves the uncomfortable questions.
What are we building?
Who will we affect, and how?
Do we tolerate dissent?
Are we allowed to change our minds?
I believe that God has a plan.
I never, ever want to feel certain that I know exactly what it is.
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Unpacking Israeli History is a production of Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify, it really helps other people find our show. And one more time, I love hearing from you. So email me at noam@unpacked.media.
This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our team for this episode includes Simon Apfel, Adi Elbaz, Jenny Falcon, Rob Pera, and Ari Schlacht. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for being here, see you next week for a special conversation with Yehuda Mirsky.