Religious Zionism is not simply a pious mood inside Israeli politics. It is a political theology that reads the Hebrew Bible as a land deed and a mobilisation order.
On the eve of the 1967 War, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook asked “have we the right to give up even one grain of the Land of God?” His disciples took that question as a programme for permanent territorial maximalism.
Over decades this theology has fused with a settler project that denies the existence of another people with equal claims. It treats the map from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River as exclusively Jewish space and translates scripture into policy.
This is not an academic quarrel. Today the most hardline custodians of that vision sit at the heart of the Israeli government. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has openly advanced the E1 settlement plan that would sever East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, presenting it as a way to “bury” Palestinian statehood.
Religious nationalism acquires its sharpest edge when rabbis produce rulings that normalise domination or violence. A notorious volume, Torat HaMelekh, framed the killing of non‑Jews, including children, as permissible under certain circumstances. Senior figures in Israel were investigated for endorsing it. This is the kind of literature that moves extreme ideas from the margins into classrooms and military barracks.
The same pattern appeared in 2010 when dozens of state‑paid municipal rabbis in Israel signed a letter urging Jews not to rent or sell property to Arabs. The international rights group Amnesty condemned the edict as discriminatory and dangerous. When clergy treat neighbours as permanent outsiders, the step from delegitimisation to dispossession is short.
These ideas have had a cost in blood. In 1994, Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. In 2015, the Dawabsheh family in Duma was firebombed in their home; the perpetrator received multiple life sentences. These are not isolated tragedies. They reveal a current within religious Zionism that sacralises conquest and licenses cruelty.
The Gaza war has not restrained that current. It has supercharged it. While global attention has fixed on Gaza, West Bank settlement expansion has accelerated and settler violence surged. The United Nations recorded well over a thousand settler attacks across 2024 and into 2025. The international rights group Human Rights Watch documented assaults, expulsions, and the destruction of property “under the cover of the ongoing hostilities.” This is how a theology becomes a system: facts on the ground, backed by force.
Equally alarming is the normalisation of eliminationist rhetoric among senior officials in Israel. Smotrich said the Palestinian town of Huwara “should be wiped out,” a statement the US called incitement to violence and which he later described as an emotional slip. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben‑Gvir has repeatedly advocated encouraging Palestinians to “migrate” from Gaza and has flirted with the idea of resettling it. Such words from ministers shape the permission structure for violence.
This is not only a moral crisis. It is a security dilemma with global reach. As Israeli settlements expand and violence spirals, the risk of a broader regional war grows. The International Crisis Group has warned that Israel and Hizbullah are hovering on the edge of open conflict and that escalation dynamics are acute. UN briefings have repeatedly flagged that intensifying settlement activity and settler attacks are a driver of wider instability. The longer religious triumphalism dictates policy, the more combustible the region becomes.
A durable peace requires de‑sacralising violence and re‑humanising the other. That starts with political accountability. Governments and allies should condition engagement on concrete steps: a freeze on settlement expansion, enforcement against settler violence, and the disqualification of officials who advocate expulsions. Where states have used targeted sanctions against violent actors and funders, the signal has been clear that the West Bank cannot be turned into a law‑free zone.
Religious leaders have their own work to do. Faith can heal where politics divides. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim clergy should reaffirm that the sanctity of land never cancels the sanctity of life, and that scripture cannot be wielded to erase an entire people. There is rich teaching in every tradition about justice, neighbourliness, and the dignity of the stranger. Those texts, not apocalyptic manifestos, must frame public religion.
The alternative is a perpetual state of holy war. That is a dead end for Israelis and Palestinians and a hazard for everyone else. Marginalising the extremists, investing in equal dignity, and restoring the rule of law in the West Bank are not favours to one side. They are prerequisites for any peace worthy of the name.
If we want a future where the children of this land can sleep without fear, the politics of sacred entitlement must give way to the ethics of shared humanity. The time to choose is now.
The writer is senior adviser to the Grand Mufti of Egypt.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 21 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: