"God Cannot Keep Silent" Strong Religious-Nationalism Theory and Practice

Research Questions
/ Questions de Recherche
N°47 – October 2015
“God Cannot Keep Silent”

Strong Religious-Nationalism – Theory and Practice
Eran Tzidkiyahu
Centre d’études et de recherches internationales

Sciences Po
“God Cannot Keep Silent”
Strong Religious-Nationalism – Theory and Practice
Summary
This article wishes to discuss the phenomenon of strong religious-nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a
comparative approach, paving the road for further research to come. The term strong religion-nationalism occurs
when a nation-state unites the nation, state and ethnicity with religion. This kind of cultural political phenomenon
flourishes in areas of conflicts concerning contested central holy sites, in which politicians are likely to mobilize
religious-nationalism. Societies and states containing significant strong religious-national elements are in greater
risk of falling into radical nationalism, fascism and totalitarianism. The term “strong religious-nationalism” is a
paraphrase on the title of the book by Almond, Appleby and Sivan: Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms
around the World (2003). This does not mean that strong religious-nationalists are necessarily fundamentalists as
depicted by the authors. It does correspond with the author’s choice of the term Strong Religion, relating to the
movements they examined as “[…] militant and highly focused antagonists of secularization. They call a halt on the
centuries-long retreat of religious establishments before the secular power. They follow the rule of offense being
better than defence, and they often include the extreme option of violence and death.” The authors “intend the
notion of ‘strength’ to suggest that these are movements to reckon with seriously” (Almond, Appleby and Sivan
2003: 2) Strong religious-nationalists merge successfully within the framework of the nation-state, making politics a
part of religion, politicizing religion, transforming the nation-state into a “vehicle of the divine” (Friedland 2002: 381).
Résumé
Cet article entend débattre du phénomène du strong religious-nationalism dans le conflit israélo-palestinien par le
biais d’une approche comparative, préparant ainsi le terrain pour de futures recherches. Le terme strong religious-
nationalism s’emploie lorsqu’un Etat-nation conjugue nation, Etat, ethnicité et religion. Ce phénomène politico-
culturel prospère dans les zones de conflit où se trouvent de hauts lieux saints disputés, au nom desquels les
politiciens ont tendance à mobiliser le nationalisme religieux. Les sociétés et les Etats empreints de strong religious-
nationalism présentent plus de risques de verser dans le nationalisme radical, le fascisme et le totalitarisme. Le terme
strong religious-nationalism est une paraphrase du titre du livre de Almond, Appleby et Sivan : Strong Religion: The
Rise of Fundamentalisms around the World (2003). Son usage ne signifie pas nécessairement que les strong religious-
nationalists soient des fondamentalistes tels que décrits par les auteurs, mais renvoie plutôt au choix du terme strong
religion : les mouvements qu’ils étudient se caractérisent comme étant « militants et opposés de manière ciblée à
la sécularisation. Ils appellent à mettre un terme à l’effacement séculaire des institutions religieuses face au pouvoir
laïque. Ils suivent le principe selon lequel la meilleure défense est l’attaque, et ne renâclent pas à faire usage de la
violence et de la mort ». Les auteurs « utilisent la notion de “force” pour suggérer que ce sont des mouvements qui
doivent être pris au sérieux » (Almond, Appleby and Sivan 2003: 2). Les strong religious-nationalists s’insèrent avec
succès dans le cadre de l’Etat-nation, appréhendant la politique comme une composante de la religion, politisant la
religion, et transformant l’Etat en un « vecteur du divin » (Friedland 2002: 381).
Eran Tzidkiyahu lives in Jerusalem, where he works for Search for Common Ground, the biggest conflict transformation
organisation in the world, managing a project on conflicted holy sites in Jerusalem. He also works as a geopolitical guide to
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2012 he obtained his master degree in Islamic and Middle East studies from the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem. He is currently a PhD student at the Sciences Po’s Doctoral School, in the program for comparative
political sociology, under the supervision on Prof. Alain Dieckhoff (CERI) and Prof. Yitzhak Reiter (Israel). His research deals
with the national religious element in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on a comparative approach.
Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 2

http://www.ceri-sciences-po.org/publica/qdr.htm
Table of Content
Religion and Nationalism...................................................................................... 4
The Sacred and the Profane.................................................................................. 5
Religion.................................................................................................................... 6
Nationalism............................................................................................................. 9
Religious-nationalism.......................................................................................... 13
Strong Religious-Nationalism............................................................................ 15
Strong Religious-Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict................. 16
Indirect Dialogue at the Turn of the Millennium ............................................17
The comparative approach.................................................................................. 21
References.............................................................................................................. 24

Religion and the nation-state are two total systems that require great control over the individual. Both
are “models of authority, imaginations of an ordering power, and understandings of how one should relate
to those who control forces upon which one depends, but over which one does not exercise control.”
Moreover, they both “partake a common symbolic order” (Friedland 2001: 127; 2002: 381.) Religious-
nationalism is not an oxymoron, yet the two terms differ: while religion deals with the divine, one of
nationalism’s most manifest embodiment – the modern nation-state – is usually perceived as a secular
institution. Both religion and nationalism play an increasing role in the lives of individuals and societies
around the world, yet when dealing with the connection between the two we face a constant difficulty
assuming universal conclusions, due to the particularity of each phenomenon and the need for a deep
acquaintance with the local political, historical and theological context. Borrowing from Clifford Geertz,
we can argue that the universal aspect is that of creating collective symbols, but that the contents of those
symbols are unique and changing and must be understood within their particular context (Geertz cited in
Horowitz 2002: 13). American sociologist Peter Berger concludes that in assessing the role of religion in
world affairs “there is no alternative to a nuanced, case-by-case approach” (Berger 1999: 359-361).
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict involves a specifically strong kind of religious-nationalism, different
from that which appears in other national religious conflicts in which religion mainly plays the role of
a cultural marker in a political conflict. In the Israeli-Palestinian case, religion per se is at the heart of
the conflict, in the sense that “winning” the national-political struggle would also entail a “theological”
religious victory. The initial mainstream Zionist movement was based on a secular interpretation of a
religious ethos and myth. The early Palestinian national movement did not undergo a similar process
of secularization, and at some point in its early stages was actually led by a religious clerk. Therefore,
from the outset, Palestinian nationalism reacted to the Zionist challenge with religious tools of its own
– based on the sanctity of Jerusalem and of Palestine in Islam.
In this strong sense of religious-nationalism the religious concept of the holy becomes intertwined
with the national concept of authenticity. National territory is sanctified, especially that of the Holy Land
where the three Abrahamic religions were founded. In such a place, in such holy languages as Hebrew
and Arabic, God cannot keep silent. He will inevitably find ways back into the reality of life. In a national
ethos that imbibes from a religious myth, religionization is inevitable. In order to better understand the
processes shaping the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the barriers to its solution, we must look beyond
political processes and theories, into the realm of culture and identity embodied in religion, and examine
the interaction between these elements in a comparative approach.
Religion and Nationalism
Understanding the centrality of the religious element in contemporary conflicts worldwide is crucial,
yet it gets little or inadequate attention from scholars and decision makers, who tend to focus on historical,
geographical and political aspects of conflicts. As a response to this “secular bias” which derives from
the Western oriented understanding of modernity, a tendency of de-secularization has appeared in the
research since the 1990s. Today, scholars who wish to keep up with contemporary world affairs cannot
continue to ignore religious feelings and faiths. Religious-nationalists and fundamentalists around
the world mobilize religion for political ends and vice-versa: such a phenomenon can be witnessed in
mainstream politics in the United States and Europe, Latin America, South East Asia and in its purest
and most powerful manifestation in the Middle East’s political Islam (and Arab Nationalisms). Zionism
(and religious-Zionism within it) in contemporary Israel is another strong example of this trend. The
religious-national sentiment in our case study – the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – is rooted in and shaped
by history and theology; it is only wise to give these elements the appropriate attention in order to
lay solid foundations for future research. The study of religious-nationalism poses a multidimensional
challenge, as described by American sociologist Roger Brubaker:

“Religion” and “nationalism” have long been contested terms. Both terms – on almost
any understanding – designates large and multidimensional fields of phenomena […]
Because both “nationalism” and “religion” can designate a whole world of different
things, few statements about nationalism per se, religion per se, or the relation between
the two are likely to be tenable, interesting or even meaningful; a more differentiated
analytical strategy is required (Brubaker 2012: 2).
In order to overcome this methodological difficulty concomitant to the study of religious-

nationalism, we shall first try to produce a suitable working definition. As Anthony Smith noted “the
questions of definitions has […] proved to be one of the greatest stumbling block in the study of this
subject” (Smith 2003:16). Smith does not try to define essence but rather provides a contextualized and
limited working definition suitable for studying the relations between these two elements in society
and politics; we shall follow Smith’s approach in that matter.
The Sacred and the Profane
Throughout most of the 20th century, religion was marginalized by scholars who were generally taken
by the prevailing theory of secularization. Today, in a fluid and multipolar world-order, characterized by
globalized markets, technological revolution and apparent transnational and secular reality of progress,
both nationalism and religion are ideally regarded as something of the past. But in reality nationalism is
still one of the most potent forces in the world today (Dieckhoff and Jaffrelot 2005: 1; Birnbaum 1997)
and the same is true of religion. Peter Berger, once a leading proponent of the secularization hypothesis,
asserts: “the world today, with some exceptions […] is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some
places more so than ever” (Berger 1999: Chapter 1, 84-85).
The relations between religion and nationalism in today’s world find their roots in the question of
modernity. British sociologist Anthony Giddens defined modernity at its simplest, as “a shorthand term
for modern society or industrial civilization” (Giddens and Pierson 1998: 94). Samuel Huntington defines
modernization as a comprehensive process that includes industrialization, urbanization, rise in the levels
of literacy, education, wealth, social mobilization and more complex and varied structures of occupation
(Huntington 2003 [1996]: 68). According to Huntington this revolutionary change distinguishes modern
societies from traditional one, and it first took place in the “West” – meaning in Central and Western
Europe and in North America,1 thus modernization has become synonym with the West and its culture.
Modernization was also accompanied by the philosophical evolution of the enlightenment and the
political evolution of the French Revolution, leading to both secularism and nationalism.
Prominent historian of religions Mircea Eliade reminds us that “the completely profane world, the
wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit [...] desacralization
pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modern societies and [...] he finds it increasingly
difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies” (Eliade 1959:
13), but also, one may add, to understand the reality of contemporary religious man and woman. Max
Weber described modern secularism as the “disenchantment of the world.” Weber’s understanding of
the disenchantment embodies an element of liberalism and of the enlightenment philosophy, construing
history as a unilinear process of progress (Gerth and Mills 2009: 1682-1683); secularism is thus a direct
product of Western modernity and it culminates in a pluralistic public space and a democratic political
arrangement that guarantees various individual freedoms. In line with these ideas many sociologists saw
secularization as an almost inevitable result of modernization (Ben-Porat 2013). Calhoun, Juergensmeyer
1. The use of the terms “West” and “East” is problematic. “North” and “South” relate to the poles and are fixed and
acceptable. “East” and “West” do not have such point of reference, thus we must ask West or East of what? It depends
where one stands. Huntington (1996) notes that originally these terms where probably related to eastern and western
Eurasia. Yet from an American perspective the Far East is actually the Far West. Throughout most of Chinese history the
West was India, and in Japan the West was generally China.

and VanAntwerpen, who rethink secularism altogether, note that “until quite recently, it was commonly
assumed that public life was basically secular […] scholars could write with authority about politics,
economics, and social behavior as though religion did not exist at all” (Calhoun, Juergensmeyer and
VanAntwerpen 2011: 113-116). This Western view of modernization is facing growing criticism, not
only when it is uncritically exported to other regions, but also within the modern West itself (Calhoun,
Juergensmeyer and VanAntwerpen 2011: 160). In the words of Robert Keohane, “the attacks of September
11 reveal that all mainstream theories of world politics are relentlessly secular with respect to motivation.
They ignore the impact of religion, despite the fact that world-shaking political movements have so often
been fueled by religious fervor” (Calhoun, Juergensmeyer and VanAntwerpen 2011: 133-139). In other
words, religion was marginalized only within the enclosed discourse of small Western-oriented intellectual
elite, not in the minds of masses around the world. As Philosopher Charles Taylor points out in his book A
Secular Age, the insights that “secularism […] goes hand-in-hand with modern progress” are misleading
“subtraction stories” (Taylor 2007: 22): religion has not declined as expected, it is impossible to simply
“remove such a central dimension of culture and leave the rest intact” (Calhoun, Juergensmeyer and
VanAntwerpen 2011: 250).
Sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt also challenges the commonplace distinction between religion and
modernity by depicting religious fundamentalism as a political-totalistic and even totalitarian modern
phenomenon (Eisenstadt 1999). They sanctify tradition, yet they transform it into a modern ideology,
moreover they contain elements that contradict different religious and social traditionalism. Despite
their religious-conservative character, fundamentalist movements are modern according to Eisenstadt,
not only because of their technological means, but also in their aims and ideologies. These movements
struggle to implement God’s vision on earth through the political arena and activity; they fight to establish
modernism without accepting Western hegemony (Ali 2013: 30). Mark Juergensmeyer sees the global
rise in religious-nationalism and violence throughout the 1990s as a consequence of a current of thought
aiming “to counter prevailing modernism: the ideology of individualism and skepticism that […] emerged
from post-Enlightenment Europe and spread throughout the world” (Juergensmeyer 1996: 1-20). If until
quite recently scholars could write “as though religion did not exist at all” (Calhoun, Juergensmeyer,
VanAntwerpen 2011: 113-115) today, “those who neglect religion in their analyses of contemporary
affairs do so at great peril” (Berger 1999: 360-361). To marginalize religion as secondary to nationalism
and other so-called secular ideologies is to ignore reality as it is perceived by religious-nationalists and
fundamentalists around the world. Roger Friedland writes, not without awe, that religious-nationalism
was apparently a pre-modern spectre, yet “once again God walks in history” (Friedland 2001: 125).
Religion
Seminal thinkers such as Weber, Tocqueville and Durkheim have all studied social, political and
economical change through the study of religion (Levitt, Cage and Smilde 2011: 437-449). Weber’s
landmark essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905) positioned the study of
central sociological questions on the study of religion. In this work Weber goes against Marx’s historical
materialism that focused mainly on economics by stressing the notion that it is not only the modes
of production that matter, but also types of authority and that ideas, traditions and values embodied
in religion also influence and matter. Weber argues for the existence of complex elective affinities
between the material reality and the sphere of ideas and values, between economic arrangements and
religious beliefs. Durkheim’s treatment of the relations between religion and other social institutions
can be summarized by the description of religion as the proto-institution: at least in the early rate of
societal development religion held the supremacy: “religion is not only the best avenue for the study
of what all other institutions have in common; it is also the source from which all other institutions
sprang at the very dawn of each society’s history” (Poggi 1973: 236). As William James already noted

it is difficult to define “religion” in general terms. James thus calls to admit at the outset “that we may
very likely find no one essence, but many characters which may alternately be equally important to
religion” (James 1902). James’ insight in mind, we shall start with the notion of religion as a human
phenomenon founded on the experience of the “holy” or the “sacred” (Momen 2009: 21). According to
Mircea Eliade “the first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane” (Eliade
1959: 10). In such a dichotomy, as with the distinction between “religion” and “secularism,” one is
defined in relation to the other. This takes us back to the emergence of the secular within the particular
context of the European enlightenment project.
Wilfred Cantwell Smith traces the emergence of the term “religion” itself back to European
enlightenment by noting that the word “religion” was not frequently used by Christians until the
Enlightenment’s deployment of the distinction between the “secular” and the “religious.” Up until
then the terms “faith” and “tradition” were more commonly used (Calhoun, Juergensmeyer and
VanAntwerpen 2011: 212-214). According to Smith the concept of “religion” did not exist throughout
history as a distinguished phenomenon, but rather “religion as a systematic entity, as it emerged in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a concept of polemics and apologetics (Smith 1991 [1962]: 43).
According to this attitude religion as a concept was born out of the western-Christian experience and the
history of secularization.
Durkheim asserted that “religion is something eminently social” (Durkheim 1964: 10.), yet such a
social approach to religion risks missing the very essence of the religious experience – the experience
of the “holy.” William James, as a psychologist, concentrated on the private experience of faith and
belief disconnected from religion and liturgy (James 1902: Lecture II). In his essay The Varieties of
Religious Experiences, James argued that “the preoccupation with religion in all its manifold forms as a
specific experience […],” can shed light on human nature (Otto 1936 [1917]: X). These ideas were further
developed in Rudolf Otto’s influential works The Idea of the Holy. An inquiry into the non-rational factor
in the idea of the divine and its relations to the rational (Otto 1936: X). Instead of studying the ideas
of God and religion, Otto undertook an analysis of the modalities of the religious experience (Eliade
1959: 8), and started a new path in the phenomenology of religion by allocating religion an independent
existence in human culture, separate from other forms of human existence such as the rational, the
ethical or the aesthetical. Thus, for Otto, the religious feeling – Holiness – is a mental state “perfectly sui
generis and irreducible to any other” (Otto 1936: 7). This distinction of religion as independent and a
priori existent within human spirit constitutes a significant breakthrough. Following Otto we must take
into account the assumption that there is an authentic religious experience, and that we will never be
able to completely, rationally and verbally understand its essence (Persico: 2007). Otto’s own religiosity
(he was a devoted protestant) singled him out from most scholars of his time: as a man who experiences
Holiness a part of the world, he feels more at ease to designate it as driven from an independent and
distinguished source in the spirit of man, an assertion that according to Persico, an Israeli researcher of
new age spirituality and religions, “before him only Kierkegaard dared to make and after him only very
few […]” (Persico: 2014). At the other end of the scale, Weber spent a good part of his scholarly work
“tracing the effects of religion upon human conduct and life,” yet he defined himself as “religiously
unmusical” (Gerth and Mills 2009: 23). W. C. Smith, himself a secular professor of comparative religion,
affirms that it is not obvious that people who see no point in religion are the most qualified to generalize
about its essence (Smith 1962: 11). In his famous book The meaning and End of Religion, Smith uses
an essentially comparative and generalizing approach and touches the problem of scientific scrutiny of
the holy (Smith 1962: 11). How can we subject the holy, the transcendent and the infinite to rational
analysis, empirical investigation, comparison and human interpretation? Thus it is argued that any study
of religion is either inherently inadequate or inherently unscholarly. Smith stresses these difficulties only
to teach us some modesty when approaching the topic at hand, paraphrasing Alexander Pope’s famous
phrase: “where only angels tread, he would be a fool to rush in; though perhaps the wise may preserve
their dignity if, aware of their presumption, they enter cautiously” (Smith 1962: 12-13).

Yet the religious phenomenon goes beyond the manifestations of the numinous (a word use by Otto
to define the feeling of terror before the sacred, from Latin numen, god) (Eliade 1959: 9; Otto 1936: 5-7).
Anthony Smith distinguishes between a substantive and a functional approach to religion. In the former
Smith relates to Weber’s treatment of religion, defining it as: “a quest for individual and collective
salvation in a supra-empirical cosmos that guides and controls our everyday world” (Smith 2003: 25). In
the functional analysis Smith defines religion as a moral or social force, relating to Durkheim’s famous
definition of religion: “A unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, […] which unite into
one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them” (Durkheim 1964 [1915]: 47).
Smith’s substantial/functional distinction is adequate for our purpose – studying the relations between
religion and nationalism – by examining the adaptation of these approaches to nationalism as a culture
and ideology. Substantively speaking nationalism is mundane and secular, terrestrial and anthropocentric.
Yet in this new political ideology “a worship of the secular nation replaces that of the deity, while the
nationalist movement takes the place of the church and posterity becomes the new version of immortality
in place of the after-life” (Smith 2003: 25). Durkheim describes the similarity between religious and national
sentiment by asking: “What essential difference is there between an assembly of Christians celebrating the
principal dates of the life of Christ, or of Jews remembering the exodus from Egypt or the promulgation of
the decalogue, and a reunion of citizens commemorating the promulgation of a new moral or legal system
or some great event in the national life?” (Durkheim 1964 [1915]: 427; Smith 2003: 27).
Moojan Momen defines religion thematically in a multilayered fashion, connecting the numinous
and the social aspects by intertwining the individual, conceptual and social levels, with a substantial,
symbolist and functional definition (respectively): 1) religion is the individual experience of the “holy”;
Substantively “Religion is humanity’s response to what is experienced as holy” (Momen 2009: 27-28).
2) On the conceptual (and doctrinal) level it is the universal idea that there is some “ultimate reality”
and that humanity must establish and clarify its relationship with this reality; symbolically “a religion is a
system of symbols that creates a universal order that is so cohesive […] that it becomes “reality” for the
social group […].” 3) On the social level religions create social cohesion and integrate the individual into
society. Religions create social and institutional order that is the source of their ethical and social aspect;
functionally religion provides humanity with “a worldview which unifies society, which provides a moral
code, and within which human beings can orient their lives” (Momen 2009: 27-28).
Throughout the last 200 years, European modernization and the philosophy of the enlightenment
have been manifested in secularization and adoption of new ideologies such as liberalism, capitalism,
socialism, and nationalism. Ernest Gellner described this process as if religion was transformed into culture,
fused with ethnicity and over the years with the state (Gellner 1994: 100-101) thus with nationalism.
Momen’s social-functional definition of religion corresponds with the nation-state. The conceptualization
of national ideology within the state or the national movement is done through symbols, in many
cases the same old pre-national cultural and religious symbols. In some cases even the concept of the
holy and the divine can be traced in national and ideological ideas – promising meaning, salvation,
authenticity (which is for nationalism what “holy” is for religion) and eternity. German intellectual Carl
Schmitt evoked these ideas in his 1922 essay “Political Theology”: “All significant concepts of the modern
theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development
[…] but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological
consideration of these concepts” (Schmitt 1985: 36). Faced with the collapse of the faith in progress and
the discourse of culture-crisis, Schmitt’s understanding of “political theology” signifies the transformation
of modernism to a stage of self-criticism and the end of the modernist-utopist tendency (Schmidt and
Schonfelf 2009: 24). Modernism seemed to be the liberation of man from authority in general, and
from religious authority in particular. As Schmitt points out, Kant defines the project of enlightenment
and modernism as the “liberation of man from slavery in which he is to be blamed,” yet he uses the
theological narrative of the Exodus to liberate man from religious control and authority. This contradiction
between content and rhetoric in Kant’s words is not coincidental; it “exposes the double standards of
enlightenment towards religion […]” (Schmidt and Schonfelf 2009: 18).

Nationalism
There is close affinity between the evolution of the national phenomenon and its conceptualization
in the scholarly discourse. The modern historiography and nationalism were always connected in a
Gordian knot. Historian Shlomo Sand mentions that “historical writing carries a national birthmark from
its beginning, and nationalism began its long journey tenderly caressing in its bosom the profession of
history” (Sand 2006: 7). Nation-states nurture historians, who in return provide the state with collective
memory and identity. In the 19th century the national structures were stretched to the edge of historic
time, tracing the roots of modern nations in ancient kingdoms, whether it was the Gauls, Franks or
Romans, the ancient Egyptians or the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea. Sand demonstrates how historians
radiated this national time into the entire education and culture systems of the modern era. Their stories
were deposited to the hands of teachers and other cultural agents and became general knowledge,
until the free market of symbols reacted accordingly and authors, poets and journalists accomplished
the mission of constructing the national culture (Sand 2006: 8-9). During the 19th century European
identities went through a process of unification and standardization, turning from a mixture of linguistic
and cultural groups to nations that correspond to the forming modern market-economy. The little
existing common denominators did not suffice for this project so the nation-state recruited the past,
constructing shared memory and culture. This Gordian knot between history, culture, ethnicity and
nationalism was tied up with the help of intellectuals; later on it was also untangled by them. Ernest
Renan was maybe the first to “untangle” this knot in his famous Sorbonne lecture from 1882: “Qu’est-ce
qu’une nation?” (“What is a nation?”) (Renan 1904). Renan’s idea that “a nation is a daily referendum”
emphasizes the voluntary and political aspects of modern collective identity. Renan argues that the
nation is a community of memory, giving the Jewish collective memory as an example. These ideas were
greatly innovative in 1882 and they stayed so for another century (Sand 2009: 20). Only in the second
half of the twentieth century, when nationalism itself was challenged, did scholars who doubted the
historicity of the nation move from the margins to the centre of the academic discourse.
Early in the twentieth century non-academic Marxist thinkers such as Gramsci, and later on
sociologists and historians evoked some hesitations about the historicity of nations and nationalism. The
first and foremost were Carlton J. H. Hayes (1882-1964) and Hans Kohn (1891-1971), who wrote in the
interwar period. Both scholars reflected, as Smith noted, “the growing importance of nationalism as a
political ideology and movement, and as a subject of investigation in its own right” (Lawrence 2004: 83-
86). Hayes, being both American and religious, was an external observer of European (so-called secular)
nationalism, a fact that might have contributed to his depiction of nationalism as a competing religion.
In his book Essays on Nationalism Hayes devotes a whole chapter to “nationalism as a religion,” arguing
that nationalism mobilizes a “‘deep and compelling emotion’ that is ‘essentially religious’” (Hayes 1926).
But Hayes’ primary concern was “to delineate his theory that nationalism (a belief in the desirability of a
single state for each nation) was ‘a modern, almost a recent phenomenon’” (Lawrence 2004: 85). What
tipped the balance in favour of modern nationalism according to Hayes was a combination of the French
Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of romanticism (Hayes quoted in Lawrence 2004: 86),
three elements that are crucial for the understanding of modernism as a whole. Hayes was also one of
the first to criticize the correlation between nationalism and race (before the term “ethnicity” became
common) and the elevation of nationalism above all other collective identities (Sand 2006: 10). Hans
Kohn’s post war writings were eventually more influential than Hayes’. Born in Prague Kohn immigrated
to British Mandatory Palestine as a Zionist, where he tried to mediate between his universal approach
and his Zionist sentiment, but to no avail. A few years later he left the Holy Land and the Jewish national
project altogether and became one of the most influential researchers of modern nationalism (Cohen
2013: 355; on Kohn’s retirement from the Zionist movement, see Gordon 2008: 67-92). In agreement with
Hayes, Kohn argues that “nationalism is first and foremost a state of mind, an act of consciousness, which
since the French Revolution has been more and more common to mankind” (Kohn 1944: 10-11). Kohn’s
historical theory depicts a dichotomy between the political-civil nationalism that became hegemonic

around the North-Atlantic West (USA, Britain, France, Netherland); and the ethnic nationalism that
prevailed East of the Rhine (Germany, Poland, Ukraine and Russia). In his dichotomy of East-West or
political versus cultural nationalisms, Kohn laid the foundations for the more recent typology of civic
versus ethnic forms of nationalism (Dieckhoff 2005: 63-65). In accordance with his theory, Kohn also
made a clear personal political and moral choice.
The most important successors of Hayes and Kohn after the Second World War were Elie Kedourie
(1926-1992) and Karl Deutsch (1912-1992) (Sand 2006: 7-19; Birnbaum 1997: 1-33). In his 1960 essay
Nationalism Kedourie accused the “prophets” of nineteen-century nationalism, especially the Germans,
of spreading this new and contagious “disease” of identity. For Kedourie politics replaced religion in the
same way as for to Michel Aflaq the revival of the Arab nation supposedly preceded the commandments
of faith and even of Islam (but unlike George Antonius) (Smith 2003: 10). But later on Kedourie’s early
assumption regarding the role of religion in nationalist ideology both in the West and beyond evolved
into a more complex approach. In his second book, Nationalism In Asia And Africa (1971), Kedourie
argues that African and Asian nationalists imported the Western ideas of nationalism and secularism
to their homelands, adapting them to their needs and eventually turning them against European
imperialism itself. These new non-Western nationalists discovered that they could fuel mass emotions
if they turned traditional prophets into national heroes and religious holidays into national festivities,
thus enabling them to exploit the atavistic emotions of the masses. In this way, Smith notes, “Kedourie
brought religion back onto the analysis of nationalism: nationalism often became an ally, albeit a false
one, of religion” (Smith 2003: 12; Kedourie 1971: 92-103). In yet a third stage of his writings Kedourie
traces the origins of nationalism in distant medieval sources arguing that nationalism is the “secular
heir of Christian millennialism and proclaims the same apocalyptic message.” In this way nationalism
is exposed as “the secular, political version of heterodox religion, with the same consuming desire for
purity and an all-embracing brotherly love, the same concern for the elect of faithful believers, and the
same belief in the imminent advent of a new age of absolute love and justice” (Smith 2003: 12; Kedourie
1971: 92-103). Here nationalism is a substitute, a kind of heterodox religion that opposes traditionalism
yet inherits traditional symbols, liturgies, rituals, and messianic fervour – politicized and charged with
national meanings. According to Smith this last point “may help to account for the predominant secular
content but religious forms of so many nationalisms, as well as for their ability to transmute the values
of traditional religion into secular political ends” (Smith 2003: 14). Thus religion is seen as vital for the
sources of nationalism and for its persistence and appeal, without which it is difficult to explain the depth
and strength of emotion that nations and nationalism provoke. Smith however objects to Kedourie’s
focus on heterodoxy and millennialism. While eschatology and messianism take an important place in
medieval and contemporary monotheistic religions, Smith sees nationalism as mundane and does not
wait for a supernatural – divine – intervention, but rather for a human auto-emancipation, which is
necessary for national fulfilment. This assertion is true of some religious-nationalisms, but is not valid in
the case of strong religious-nationalism, which unites the mundane with the divine.
Kedourie’s reflections on the nature of the relations between nationalism and religion were
reinforced by the political reality of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, which saw a
revival of religious-nationalisms around the world – “nationalisms that are specifically religious in form
and content,” not only in an Islamic context (Smith 2003: 14). One of the early proponents of this trend
is Conor Cruise O’Brien who wrote in 1988 a short book titled God Land – Reflections on Religion and
Nationalism, analyzing types of sacred nationalisms starting with the bible and up to contemporary
United States. O’Brien argues that “nationalism, as a collective emotional force in our culture, makes its
first appearance, with explosive impact, in the Hebrew Bible. And nationalism, at this stage, is altogether
indistinguishable from religion; the two are one and the same thing. God chooses a particular people and
promises them a particular land” (O’brien 1988: 2-3). This fusion of religious features into nationalism
was also demonstrated by George Mosse, who examined nationalism, especially in Germany, focusing
on “the background, genesis and effects of national festivals, monuments, and remembrance rituals
[…] as vital components of the liturgy and choreography of nationalist movements and of fascism”

(Smith 2003: 264). Jules Monnerot and Raymond Aron introduced the idea of “secular religion” through
communism (Monnerot 1953: 224; Aron 1957: 265-294).
Hayes, Kohn and Kedourie were all historians who worked with texts, thus their research was
restricted to the ideological-political aspects of the rise of nationalism. The first who diverted the look
from words-manufacturing elites towards a wider social and cultural direction was the social scientist
Karl Deutsch. His 1953 book Nationalism and Social Communication was an early attempt to understand
nationalism from below (Deutsch 1966: v). Deutsch tried to tackle the lacuna in the literature of his time
and developed a methodology for the social sciences to study nationalism, focusing on socio-economic
modernization processes that are the base of this new and shared consciousness which is nationalism (Sand
2006: 12). Focusing on mass communications, Deutsch “considers that modernization, and the explosion
of communications encourage ethnicity more than national integration. The ethnic form of nationalism
thus benefits from modernization, and generates the failure of the national form of nationalism which is
turned towards progress and assimilation” (Birnbaum 2005: 91; This Weberian primordialist approach is
dealt with by Connor 1994). This analysis of Deutsch converges with Eisenstadt’s understandings on the
modernity of fundamentalists, and brings us to the realization that fundamental religious-nationalists –
who see the state as a vessel of the divine, though they may well root their consciousness in some golden
age taken from the past – are actually a political-totalistic and even totalitarian modern phenomenon.
The most striking example of this phenomenon today is the Islamic State that emerged during the
summer of 2014 in Iraq and Syria, and its wide use of mass and social media.
In 1983 two landmark essays on nationalism appeared: Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism
and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. These two short essays had an immense and long term
influence on the study of nationalism (Anderson 1991; Gellner 1983). Gellner focuses on industrialization
processes, centralization, and bureaucracy as aspects of modernization which cause social cohesion
and form the unified mass culture of the nation (Gellner 1983: 52-56). Anderson argues that neither
“economic interest, Liberalism, nor Enlightenment could, or did, create in themselves the kind, or shape,
of imagined community [...]” (Anderson 1991: 65). It was rather the construction of culture and the
role of “print capitalism” that developed the new consciousness of the nations. He argues that national
identity is based on imagined rather than on actual acquaintance between members of the nation, made
possible by new means of communication, most notably the simultaneous availability of printed books
and newspapers in a well defined territory: this process was coined by Anderson as “print capitalism.”
In 1990 Eric Hobsbawm, a prominent English historian, published his book Nations and Nationalism
Since 1780, Programme, Myth, Reality, which explicitly launched the post-nationalist current. Holding
a Marxist view of nationalism as “a temporary and irrational relic” (Dieckhoff and Jaffrelot 2005: 1),
Hobsbawm asserts that “no serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political
nationalist […]” since “nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so, as Renan said:
getting its history wrong is part of being a nation” (Hobsbawm 1990: 12). From this moment onward,
critical discussion of nationalism became common in academia. An increase in the numbers of studies
holding supra-national and post-national theories from various disciplines collapsed the dogma of the
antiquity and continuousness of nations (Sand 2006: 15). Accordingly, this tendency also deepened the
secular bias: if in 1926 Carlton Hayes depicts “nationalism as a religion,” in 1996 Liah Greenfeld argues
that “nationalism is an essentially secular form of consciousness” and that “religion now exists […]
mainly as a tool for the promotion of nationalist ends” (Greenfeld 1996: 169).
Reality, so it seems, opposed the scholarly discourse: while the intellectual deconstruction of
nationalism occurred, nationalism itself spread during the second half of the twentieth century, both
within the communist bloc as well as the Non-Aligned and post-colonial states and the third world
in general. This invited an intellectual response to the deconstructionist trend. The most manifest
scholars of this counter-reaction are Walker Connor and Anthony D. Smith, who tackled the most
significant flaw in the work of Hobsbawm: the portraying of pre-modern masses as lacking any identity
or popular cultures and deprived of traditions and memories. Connor emphasizes the emotional and

non-rational aspects of nationalism, establishing a conceptual grounding for the study of nationalism
(Conversi 2004: 1). People do not need factual and scientific basis for their nationalist feelings: ignoring
this is similar to ignoring the holy when dealing with religion.
Today most scholars refer to nationalism as a distinctively modern way of constructing collective
identities, most widely connected to state-power (Calhoun 1977: 29). This goes back to Weber who linked
national solidarity to language, but also to other great “culture value of the masses,” namely a religious
creed and ethnic elements, yet above all to memories of a common political destiny (Weber 2009: 168).
Weber wrote that “insofar as there is at all a common objet lying behind the obviously ambiguous term
‘nation,’ it is apparently located in the field of politics,” offering a possible definition to the concept: “a
nation is a community of sentiment which would adequately manifest itself in a state of its own” (Weber
2009: 171-172). Connor argue that due to the terminological chaos most researchers confuse the nation
with the formal representation of it – the state – thus missing out the range of competing allegiances within
a society, in which the informal is actually stronger than the formal. Indeed nationalism was identified
with the state, in its various expressions and forms, since the middle of the 19th century. In this respect,
based on Kohn’s theoretical dichotomy and the more recent civil versus ethnic typology of nationalism,
Connor notes that nation based states (that is “real” nation-states like Japan and Germany) can go as far
as radical nationalism, fascism and totalitarianism, in contrast with “weaker” or more political expression
of nationalism elsewhere. For this reason strong religious-nationalism, uniting nation, state, ethnicity
and religion, are more likely to fall into radical nationalism, fascism and totalitarianism.
Anthony D. Smith, who studies the complex relationships between ethnicity, nationalism, and
religion, argues that, in a similar way to our above treatment of religion, whoever searches the
foundations of nationalism in external factors will never understand its force and that this is the
mistake of both classical Marxism and individualist liberalism. This understanding of nationalism calls
for a “different kind of analysis of its forms and contents, one that focuses on the cultural resources
of ethnic symbols, memory, myth, value, and tradition, and their expression in texts and artifacts –
scriptures, chronicles, epics, music, architecture, painting, sculpture, crafts, and other media […] in
the hope of uncovering some of the fundamental sacred sources of national identity and nationalism”
(Smith 2003: 18). It is indeed a tricky road for the researcher to take, but it is more dangerous to ignore.
Smith cautiously and critically discusses issues like the covenant, the sanctity of the homeland and
the status of mythic and national heroes, in his quest to discover “some of the reasons for the wide-
spread persistence of national identity in the modern world […]” despite the common feeling that we
live today in “a post national epoch” (Smith 2003: 1). Smith provides a functional working definition
of nationalism suitable for examining its relations with religion: “[…] an ideological movement for
the attainment and maintenance of autonomy, unity, and identity on behalf of a population some
of whose members deem it to constitute an actual or potential ‘nation’” (Smith 2003: 24). The main
ideals rising from such a definition are national autonomy, unity and identity, which together with
authenticity furnish the main concept of nationalism. Smith then defines the “nation” as “[…] a named
human population occupying a historic territory and sharing common myths and memories, a public
culture, and common laws and customs for all members” (Smith 2003: 24). The elusive and more
dynamic “national identity” is defined by Smith as “the maintenance and continual reinterpretation of
the pattern of values, symbols, memories, myths, and traditions that form the distinctive heritage of
the nation, and the identification of individuals with that heritage and its pattern” (Smith 2003: 24-25).
Despite the variety in which different nationalisms are manifested, nations are confined by interior
and exterior boundaries: externally it is territory and politics, meaning the geopolitical location of
the community and its political and economic resources that limit its scope for action and change;
Internally, the “aspirations, cultural resources, and traditions that help to create and sustain it as a
nation set limits to the development of its members’ national identity.” (Smith 2003: 25).

Religious-nationalism
In some cases, as in the catholic-protestant conflict in Ireland or the Catholic-Orthodox-Muslim

conflicts in the Balkans, religion is used more as a cultural mark and manipulated for the service of
national ends. However, in the religiously strong form of religious-nationalism, like in the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict, the essence of the conflict is theologically charged and its religious aspects are
inseparable from its national one. Juergensmeyer divides religious-nationalism into three types: 1)
Ethnic religious-nationalism – linking people and land and politicizing religion by employing religious
identities for political ends (Both Catholics and protestants in Ireland; Muslims in Chechnya and
Tajikistan; Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia; Tamil Hindus
in Sri Lanka; Muslims in Kashmir etc.); 2) Ideological religious-nationalism – this approach religionizes
politics by putting political issues and struggles within a sacred context (as in the Islamic revolution in
Iran); (3) Ethno-ideological religious-nationalism – this type combines the first two and is both ethnic and
ideological. This last type seems the most suitable for the Israeli-Palestinian case study since religious
violence issued by fundamentalists from both sides is directed both against ideological foes from within
their ethnic group and against their ethnic enemy. This approach also demands a more thorough study
of the connections between religious-nationalism and ethnicity.2 Brubaker also identified four distinct
approaches to study the connection between religion and nationalism (Brubaker 2012: 2-20): 1) treating
religion and nationalism, along with ethnicity and race, as analogous phenomena; 2) specifying ways in
which religion helps explain things about nationalism – its origin, its power or its distinctive character
in particular cases; 3) treating religion as part of nationalism, and specifying modes of interpenetration
and intertwining; 4) positing a distinctively religious form of nationalism. The first of these approaches
indicates that like religion, nationalism involves faith in some external power, feelings of awe and
reverence, and ceremonial rites. This brings us back to Smith’s description of nationalism as a “new
religion of the people” both in a substantive sense as it entails a quest for a kind of worldly collective
salvation, and in a functional sense (Smith 2003: 26; Brubaker 2012: 3). This new religion both “parallels
and competes with traditional religions” (Smith 2003: 41-42; Brubaker 2012: 3). The heroes of the
nation embody and exemplify such authenticity and sacrifice themselves for the community, they are
the equivalent of prophets and messiah-saviors. Posterity, in which the legendary deeds of the fallen
live on, is the national version of the afterlife (through rituals of memorialization) (Smith 2003: 41-42;
Brubaker 2012: 3). Brubaker also discusses three ways of considering religion and nationalism alongside
ethnicity, under more encompassing conceptual rubrics: as a mode of identification; as a mode of
social organization; and as a way of framing political claims. In this regard ethnicity and nationalism,
just like religion, can be understood as “perspectives on the world rather than things in the world”
(Brubaker 2012: 3-4). Yet religion is an order that goes beyond this world, for this reason many religious-
nationalists consider the religious element to be more important than nationalism and politics, the last
two becoming a tool in the service of religious ends.
According to Brubaker it is clear that religion influences the origin and development of nationalism
through the appropriation of religious symbols and narratives. But it does so in more indirect ways,
for example the Protestant reformation contributed to the development of nationalism through the
process of confessionalisation. Seeing religion as deeply imbricated or intertwined with nationalism
rather than as something external to it, transform the former into a part of the national phenomenon.
This happens in two main ways, the first of which being the coincidence of religious and national
boundaries. In its stronger variant the nation is imagined as composed of all and only those who belong
to a particular religion (Sikh and Jewish nationalisms), while in weaker forms religion serves to mark
2. This connection is usually studied in the context of conflicts. Jonathan Fox analyzes the theories dealing with
ethnic and national conflicts in which religion is a central factor: Fox (1999: 431-463); Coakley (2002: 206-226). Paul
Zawadzki, whose conclusions are opposite to those of most scholars cited in this paper, uses the term “ethnolatry” to
convey the notion of the sacralization of the nation and the absolutization of identity (Zawadzki 2005: 180).

ethnicity or nationality, yet the religious community extends beyond the nation. For this reason, in our
view, empirically testing the robustness of these assumptions by applying them to Israeli-Palestinian
conflict will prove the boundaries of this theory and the specificity of the Israel-Palestinian case study.
Religion does not only serve to define the boundaries of the nation; it supplies myths, metaphors
and symbols, central elements in the discursive or iconic representation of the nation (in a way that
relates to the study of discourse) (Brubaker 2012: 9). Yet focusing on language and discourse in our
regard entails some methodological difficulties as noted by Brubaker: it is hard to assert that every use
of “religious” language and rhetoric in political context is indeed religious and not merely a metaphor,
or to judge the degree of religiosity within the religious language being put to political use, for example
with the term “sacred values.” To properly judge and measure this use, Brubaker suggest to conduct a
systematic discourse-analytic study of the field of nation-talk as a whole, so as to avoid sampling on the
phenomenon of interest (Brubaker 2012: 11).
Friedland conceptualizes religious-nationalism as a particular type of nationalism bounding
together state, territory, and culture. According to Friedland the power of religion is in that it provides
“models of authority,” “imaginations of an ordering power” and that it is a “totalizing order capable
of regulating every aspect of life.” Simply put, religious-nationalism joins state, territory and culture
by managing, beyond national politics, private life, focusing to a great extent on family, gender and
sexuality (Friedland 2002: 390; Brubaker 2012: 12-13). When religion is the key diacritical marker that
defines the parties to a given conflict, like in Northern Ireland, the conflict itself is not necessarily about
which religion is the true religion. Political rhetoric will use religious motifs, images and symbols to
appeal to people’s religious affiliation (the cultural group), not necessarily to their religious faith. Thus,
religious-nationalism has a recruitment potential that goes beyond the limits of its religious dogma.
Even in the strong sense of religious nationalism, the popular resentment against the secular political
and cultural elites is used by religious-nationalists as a mean of recruitment, demonstrating once again
that religious movements with a strong anti-secular bent can appeal to people with resentments that
sometimes have quite non-religious sources (Berger 1999: 246-247). Strong religious-nationalism
exists in the USA, India and Pakistan and throughout the Middle East, obviously in Iran but also in
Turkey, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Iraq (in a new form within the “Islamic State”) and in Israel and Palestine.
Brubaker and Friedland argue that religious movements cannot ignore the state and are obliged to act
within its framework if they seek power, but this does not necessarily mean that they are nationalists.
Brubaker warns us from overstretching the concept of nationalism: “it must be limited to forms of
politics, ideology or discourse that involve a central orientation to ‘the nation’; it cannot be extended
to encompass all forms of politics that work in and through nation-states.” According to Brubaker the
Palestinian Islamic resistance movement Hamas is an example for combining “a classical state-seeking
nationalist agenda with a distinctively religious programme of Islamisation, although not without
considerable tension” (Brubaker 2012: 14).
Bearing this in mind, religious-nationalism in its most manifest expression is a complex set of
identification in which both components of the combination are inseparable, when one’s nationality
is “religious” and when one’s religion is “national.” In the less strong manifestations of religious
nationalism, one can belong to a nationality and in addition to be religious; one might even connect
the two, in some way left open for interpretations. But in its strong manifestations, a symbolic
hyphen connects between the two components of the phrase, demonstrating the inseparability and
interdependence of both parts of a national-religious identity. Both adjectives, though not identical,
are equal in importance. Strong religious-nationalism plays an important role in ethnic, religious and
national conflicts throughout the world. It seems particularly striking in the contemporary Middle East,
where it can be argued to be exhibited not only by fundamentalists and dissident groups but also by
states and political parties, and appears in mainstream social norms. To better understand this, we need
to be able to assert what the place of religion is in a national movement: this interesting and important
question is hard to answer, both on the individual and the collective level. How can an observer of the

Israeli or Palestinian society evaluate the extent to which it is religion that motivates national activists?
When discussing the creation of national consciousness, can we separate feelings of rage, deprivation,
insult, and fear, from economic, religious, cultural, and ideological motives? Moreover, can we even
separate between religion and nationalism in the Muslim-Arab-Palestinian and the Jewish-Zionist-
Israeli national movements and oppose them as if they were two separate systems? (Cohen 2013)
Strong Religious-Nationalism
Religion and nationalism are both independent phenomena that stand for themselves, completely
sui generis and irreducible to any other in the human experience. Nevertheless in the study of religious-
nationalism, political and “national” aspects usually treated as superior to religion. This imbalance is
all the more astounding when realizing that religion stands on its own as the ultimate proto-institution
and the “source from which all other institutions sprang at the very dawn of each society’s history”
(Poggi 1973: 236) but any definition of nationalism that ignores religion will be incomplete. Smith
defined the different religious-nationalisms around the world as “nationalisms that are specifically
religious in form and content” (Smith 2003: 14), yet this definition is not true to all manifestations
of religious-nationalism, only to a specific type characterized by especially strong religiosity, in which
the two adjectives are fused together into one conceptual unit, creating a hyphenated identity which
produces a specifically strong kind of religious-nationalism. When religion and nationalism merge
successfully within the framework of the nation-state, politics becomes a religion, religion is politicized,
and the nation-state is transformed into a “vehicle of the divine” (Friedland 2002: 381). Such a religious
state is called a “theocracy,” a term coined by the first century Jewish-Roman historian Josephus Flavius
to describe the Jewish political-religious form of governance throughout antiquity, “by ascribing
the authority and the power to God” rather than man (Josephus 1814). The most manifest modern
theocracy of our time is the Islamic republic of Iran, founded following the 1979 Islamic revolution.
The relation between religion and nationalism is complex and multilayered. Certain nationalisms
are related to the reinforcement of pre-modern religious tradition of some ethnic communities:
such is the case of Gush Emunim (Block of the faithful) in Israel and of the Hamas. In other cases we
see that religion goes against nationalism, as with some pan-Islamic Salafi movements and Jewish
Ultraorthodox fundamentalist ideologies. On the other hand, some nationalisms negate religion, as can
be seen in the French concept of laïcité, in Turkish Kemalism and in a variety of socialist nationalisms,
while others rely on it, such as in Poland, Russia, Greece and Israel. Juergensmeyer points out those
religious-nationalisms which, in their strong manifestation, aspire to force the nation to abandon “the
corruption and alienation of such secular and often atheist nationalisms to what they consider the true
and holy path of the community” (Juergensmeyer 1993; Smith 2003: 14). While western scholars tend
to focus on the secular aspects of nationalism and to subject religion as a tool in the service of national
ends, from the perspective of strong religious-nationalists “it is secular nationalism, and not religion,
that has gone wrong. They see the Western models of nationhood – both democratic and socialist
– as having failed, and they view religion as a hopeful alternative, a base for criticism and change”
(Juergensmeyer 1993: 2). Religious-nationalists are seen by many in the West as religious fanatics, but
they are political activists seriously attempting to reformulate the modern language of politics and
provide a new basis for the nation-state (Juergensmeyer 1993: xiii). As nationalism and religion meet
and mold, religious-nationalism emerges as a new phenomenon, inspired by a historic golden age
while rooted in modernism and influenced by the enlightenment, the study of which requires a new
and separate approach.

Strong Religious-Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
On risque de ne rien comprendre au conflit du Proche-Orient si l’on refuse d’envisager, à

côté des autres aspects d’un problème entre tous complexe, la composante religieuse,
ou, pour mieux dire, le coefficient religieux (Stétié 2010: 23).
In a book from 2015 titled The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious
Counterrevolutions, Michael Walzer examines three non-Christian and non-Western new secular
democracies that experience the return of religion and deals with constant national-religious conflicts:
Israel, India and Algeria (Waltzer 2015). These newly liberated countries were led to independence by
secular elites. But the masses, although rejoiced by their liberation, were not ready to separate from
their tradition. That was the background for the appearance of new religious-nationalists, who came to
reclaim their place. This is, in large, Walzer’s “paradox of liberation,” which is today the fate of Israelis
and Palestinians in the Holy Land.
Our case study – the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – is a political, national and territorial dispute, yet it is
painted with strong religious shades from the outset. A territorial conflict cannot be completely secular
when the land itself is holy. Nation-talk, as referred to by Brubaker, cannot be completely secular if the
language is holy. We should take here into account the words, written in 1926, of the Jewish scholar
Gershom Scholem on the secularization of the newly revived Hebrew language, which had persevered
up to that point as a holy language used for liturgy: “They think they have secularized the Hebrew
language, have done away with its apocalyptic point. But that, of course, is not true: the secularization
of the language is no more than a manner of speaking [...] Because at the heart of such a language, in
which we ceaselessly evoke God in a thousand ways, thus calling him back into the reality of our life, he
cannot keep silent” (Scholem quoted in Ben-Porat 2013). Reflecting on Scholem’s remark, Hillel Cohen
asks whether the same argument cannot be applied to the Palestinian discourse: will Allah keep silent
in a language with which he was evoked in a thousand ways to return into the reality of life? (Cohen
2013: 351). The Palestinian and the Zionist movements (like other national movements) are created and
shaped by their own discourse no less than they control it. This discourse flows from the deep currents
of a people’s social existence, necessarily from its language and the political terminology at its disposal.
What is true for holy languages is even stronger for holy sites. One place embodies this process
more than any other: a hilltop in Jerusalem, flattened and defined by men more than two millennia
ago, referred to by Jews as the Temple Mount and by the Muslims as al-Haram al-Qudsi al-Sharif (the
Jerusalem noble sanctuary) also known to Palestinian Muslim as al-Masjid al-Aqsa (hereafter “the Holy
Esplanade”). Mircea Eliade explains that “for religious man, space is not homogeneous; he experiences
interruptions, breaks in it; […] the religious experience of the nonhomogeneity of space is a primordial
experience, homologizable to a founding of the world. It is not a matter of theoretical speculation, but
of a primary religious experience that precedes all reflection on the world. For it is the break effected
in space that allows the world to be constituted, because it reveals the fixed point, the central axis for
all future orientation” (Eliade 1959: 20-21). Eliade describes this central axis as connecting between
heaven and earth, “this communication is sometimes expressed through the image of a universal pillar,
axis mundi, which at once connects and supports heaven and earth […]” (Eliade 1959: 36). The Holy
Esplanade is the most manifest example of such a central axis, described by both religions as the centre
of the earth and the place of divine ascensions and descent.
The definition of a space as sacred is a political act meant to “occupy the space.” From the moment
it is defined as holy, it is expropriated and changes hands: it is a political symbol recruited for political
ends. A holy space also relates to diaspora – losing a sacred space or feeling nostalgia towards it (Reiter
2005: 13). Exile, diaspora, and nostalgia to Jerusalem are founding experiences of both the Jewish and
the Palestinian collectivities. In the strong sense of religious-nationalism the territory is holy, especially
if it is the holy land itself, where religions were created and formulated. In such a space God cannot keep
silent, and He will find his way back into the reality of life.

In a national ethos that imbibes from a religious myth, maybe religionization is inevitable. When a
national-religious conflict is involved, different groups can mobilize religious symbols and sites in order to
serve nationalist or political ends. Beyond mobilization, however, the sanctity of sacred space stands on its
own, sui generis. It will therefore eventually better serve the cause of religiously driven zealots than that
of cynical politicians (Hassner 2009: 10-12). A prime example of this phenomenon and a demonstration
of the centrality of the Holy Esplanade can be found in a letter sent to the British High Commissioner for
Palestine by the Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the first Palestinian national-religious leader, following
the violent events of 1929. In his letter, the Mufti explains that Jewish control over the Holy Esplanade and
the reconstruction of the third Temple – replacing the mosques – is part of the very essence of Zionism.
He further explains that this forces him to utilize religious feelings in his struggle with Zionism since the
latter is religiously driven: the primary driving force of the Jews and the basis for their national claim
over the land was the Bible. For this reason, argued the Mufti, he had to pose religious argumentations
himself to counter those of the Jews (Porath 1977: 232; Cohen 2013: 144). There is place to question if
the Mufti really needed the Zionist threat in order to mobilize religious feelings and holy sites to promote
his political and national aspirations, this letter demonstrates that the Zionist challenge, embodied
through a contested holy site in Jerusalem, justified if not obliged the Palestinian National Movement
to fuse together so bluntly religious and national feelings. This dynamics did not fade all throughout the
twentieth century and burst out once more with full force at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Indirect Dialogue at the Turn of the Millennium
According to Imad Faluji, a former senior in the political wing of Hamas who left the movement
around the mid 1990s to join the Fatah, “Palestine is not completely free until it is an Islamic state”
(Juergensmeyer 1996: 1). Bezalel Smotritz, a member of the Israeli religious Zionist political party the
Jewish Home, refers to the same piece of land when he says: “I see the state of Israel as the beginning
of our salvation and an important step towards complete redemption” (hakol hayehudi [the Jewish
Voice], www.hakolhayehudi.co.il/, July 31 2012). Despite the obvious collision between these two
currents of thought, they actually consist of a similar national-religious response to one another and to
the challenges of modernity. As Juergensmeyer explains, these “politicized religious movements are the
response of those who feel desperate and desolate in the current geo-political crisis” (Juergensmeyer
1996). Israeli and Palestinian religious-nationalism are contradictory but similar currents of thought
that constantly influence and enhance each other in an auto-catalytic process through the indirect
dialogue they conduct both externally with one another, and internally within each side, between the
political and religious spheres. If Palestinian religious-nationalists stress is a consequence of occupation,
discrimination, poverty, etc., the religious-Zionist distress is caused by the difficulty to settle faith and
politics, spirituality with secularism. This process can be studied through the dynamics around the Holy
Esplanade from the early 1990s until today. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process started, creating a
political watershed line, but also a juncture in the indirect dialogue in the Holy Land between Jewish and
Muslim religious-nationalists. Moreover, this timeframe also corresponds to a void in the literature on
religious-nationalism, which is scarce for the last two decades.
Contested holy sites provide the outmost expression of the relation between religious-nationalism
and geopolitics, and constitute an arena where the Zionist-religious movement and the Palestinian
national-religious meet not only on the ideological and doctrinal levels, but also physically interact on
the ground. The central role of holy sites, their potential to generate violence and the belief that they
require the sacrifice of lives, is characteristic to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Holy national sites and
spaces throughout the country, especially when they are shared, are the main channel through which
religion, nationalism, politics and violence mix and influence one another. This is why we chose to focus
our study on the holiest of these shared spaces: the Holy Esplanade in Jerusalem.

A harbinger of the new dynamics between Muslim-Palestinian and Jewish religious-nationalists
around holy sites was given on October 8 1990, when violent clashes broke out on the Holy Esplanade.
The Temple Mount Faithfuls, a Jewish fundamentalist movement dedicated to the construction of the
Third Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem on the spot where today stands the Islamic Dome of
the Rock (Inbari 2009: 81), conducted a symbolic ceremony pretending to lay down the corner stone
of the Third Temple (Tzidkiyahu 2012: 101-103). The ceremony took place south of the Old City due to
police restrictions. At the same time thousands of Palestinian Muslims rushed to the Holy Esplanade,
responding to the mūeḏin’s call in the mosque’s loudspeakers system to come and protect al-Aqsa. It
was the Jewish holiday of Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles) and tens of thousands of Jews were present at
the Wailing Wall, adjacent to the Holy Esplanade of the mosques, for the traditional birkat kohanim (the
priestly blessing) of the Jewish holiday. Over a thousand police officers secured the event. As tension
soared violent clashes erupted, in which 21 Palestinians were killed by the police and hundreds were
injured. About 20 Israeli police officers were also injured. It was a dramatic event that claimed the
highest number of Palestinian casualties throughout the first intifada (Reiter 2005: 87-95; Meir Litvak
1990: 265; Abdul Hadi 2007: 228-238; Sabri 2007; Resolution 673: Territories occupied by Israel 24
October 1990; Resolution 672: Territories occupied by Israel 12 October 1990). This was the beginning
of a bloody “dialogue” between Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian-Muslim religious-nationalists. One of the
members of the Temple Mount Faithful concluded the event saying: “with all the sorrow and pain, this
was an awakening catalyst; the Temple Mount entered the public and international agenda” (quoted
in Tzidkiyahu 2012: 102). Palestinians collective memory labelled this as the (first) al-Aqsa massacre
(majzarat al-ʾaqsa). The religious seat of the event strengthened Hamas’ opposition, which openly
called for an escalation of violence (Tzidkiyahu 2012: 102), forcing the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO) to radicalize its reaction as well. On both sides, the encounter around the disputed Holy Esplanade
helped marginal groups to influence and radicalize the central stream discourse. This event also exposed
the cleavage between the American interests in the Middle East in the new world order that was forming
and the Israeli policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and East Jerusalem.
The new world order of the 1990s of American hegemony started in the Middle East. The gulf war
in Iraq ended in February 1991 and in March the USA Secretary of State James Baker came to the region
to launch the international peace conference in Madrid in October (Tzidkiyahu 2012: 105-119). The
Oslo Accord, in which Israel and the PLO mutually recognized each other in September 1993, marked a
strategic change on both sides and the dawn of a new era. It covered an interim period of five years, in
which a Palestinian autonomy would be administering in the West Bank and Gaza, and by 1999 the final
agreements were to be signed, putting a final end to the conflict. The accord was full of loopholes that
were used by its opponents with religious zeal. A territorial compromise and a process of reconciliation
completely contradicted the worldview of religious-nationalists on both sides, threatening the integrity
of their most basic religious beliefs, an issue that got no attention in the agreements. Both Hamas and the
radical wing of the religious-Zionist settler movement decided to bear arms and violently fight what they
saw as a disastrous agreement signed by illegitimate governments that would cause irreversible damage.
The radical wings on both sides were not isolated but won wide support from the moderate centre-right
public on both sides, demonstrating how national-religious talk around holy sites strike a specifically
emotional note in territorial disputes, thus constantly radicalizing the national (not necessarily religious)
centre. The Hamas political wing and the right-markers of the Likud party in Israel had a mutual cause
– to stop history and to reverse the “damages” already made by the “reckless” “overenthusiastic” and
“opportunist” leaders who betrayed their nation and their faith. Desperate and frustrated they took
extreme actions to reverse the process that had already been set in motion by the forming a Palestinian
National Authority (PA). An extremist Jew from Hebron, Baruch Goldstein, a follower of the ultranationalist
Rabbi Meir Kahane, entered on February 25 1994 the Grave of the Patriarchs in the West Bank city of
Hebron, a holy site revered and shared by Muslims and Jews, and opened fire towards a crowd of Muslim
men while they bowed in prayer, killing 29 and wounding about 125 before he was killed by the crowd.
The brutal massacre was pouring with religious significance (Juergensmeyer 1996: 2). It was not only

the beginning of the Month of Ramadan, it was also the beginning of Purim, the Jewish feast of “lots.”
For the believers Purim also carries a violent message as it commemorates the events described in the
Biblical Book of Esther, in which the Jews were not only saved from their enemies but were also allowed
to butcher them. The symbolism of the act is difficult to overlook: shooting men in their back while they
pray to God, in the second most important Mosque and synagogue in the Holy land, where Jews and
Muslim compete not only over the present and future but also over the past, not only over the ground
but also over the divine.
Matti Steinberg, an Israeli academic who served as special consultant to the head of the Israeli
general intelligence service (shabak) at the time of the event, argues that the Goldstein massacre took
place at a critical moment – when Hamas leaders were considering to broaden their targets beyond
military and settlers in the West Bank to include Israeli citizens and suicide attacks in Israel (Steinberg
2008: 279-280; Schweitzer 2010: 34). The massacre determined the outcome of the debate within
Hamas. A short while after the traditional forty days of grief, the first suicide bombing in Israel took
place.3 The Goldstein massacre also influenced the mind of a young man called Yigal Amir, from the
central stream of religious Zionism, who on the evening of November 4 1995, shot and killed the
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in order to stop the Oslo process. Amir was later quoted as saying
“everything I did, I did in the glory of God” (Juergensmeyer 1996: 2). In his investigation Amir confessed
that he was inspired to commit the murder in Dr. Goldstein’s funeral in Qiryat Arba next to Hebron
(Eldar 2008). His motive, said the murderer, was given to him by the politicians opposing the peace
process, Ariel Sharon, Rehavam Ze’’evi and Rafael Eitan (Eldar 2008) three Major-Generals and hawkish
politicians who, together with Binyamin Netanyahu, ran a rigorous campaign, unprecedented in its
severity, against the peace process. The murder led to elections during 1996. During the interim period
before the elections Hamas executed four suicide attacks killing 59 Israelis, shifting the public opinion
and causing a political turnover in Israel, and the first term of Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister
began in May 1996. The terrorists, the radical religious-nationalists and the opposition to the peace
process had achieved their goal. Hamas did not run in the elections that took place that year in the PA,
but when it did, a decade later after the death of Arafat, it won a majority in parliament and a year later
took the Gaza Strip by a violent coup. Thus, ten years later, the two most outspoken opponents of the
peace process were in power. This sequence of events demonstrates how these inter/intra dynamics
around holy sites can influence political processes.
On February 8 1996, faced with the Oslo Process that threatened the integrity of the land of Israel,
the committee of (religious-Zionist) Rabbis from Judea, Samaria and Gaza (vaad rabaney yesha),
published a revolutionary decision in Orthodox Judaism: they issued a religious decree calling on Jews
to go and visit the Temple Mount (Inbari 2009: introduction). A week later, February 16, was the last
Friday prayer of Ramadan and over 250 thousand Muslim worshipers attended prayers on the Holy
Esplanade, demonstrating the importance of the Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem (Klein 1999: 195-210).
The striking proximity in time and space of these two national-religious demonstrations of allegiance
to the holy site seems to have been overlooked in the literature so far.
Netanyahu was an outspoken opponent of the Oslo Accord. His policy in Jerusalem generated crises
that provided him with a way out of the process by exploiting existing loopholes in the Oslo Accord
– especially the fact that the PA was banned from Jerusalem during the interim period without any
Israeli guarantees to restraint from unilateral steps (Klein 1999: 24). On September 24 1996 the Israeli
government carved 17 meters of the Western Wall tunnel, an ancient draining system used for tourism,
to enable visitors to exit the tunnel in the Via Dolorosa in the Muslim Quarter. Netanyahu justified the act
by saying that “we are touching the rock of our existence,” adding that it was a question of sovereignty
(Klein 1999: 211). Netanyahu knew the long and violent history as well as the sensitivity of the Waqf
authorities to every dig and excavation around the Holy Esplanade (Klein 1999: 211). The Waqf responded
in a letter clarifying its reservations (Klein 1999: 212), yet Israel opened the tunnel unilaterally two days
3. April 6, in the town of Afula, killing 8 Israeli citizens.

after the government renewed contacts with Arafat for the first time since the elections. The proximity
between the meeting and the opening of the tunnel embarrassed Arafat since it made it seem like he
had agreed to it. King Hussein of Jordan, who according to the peace agreement has a special status as
guardian of al-Aqsa, was put in a similarly awkward position (Klein 1999: 213). Both leaders reacted with
anger and personal insult. The Palestinian responded harshly and a general strike was announced in
East Jerusalem. Hawkish announcements were made and Palestinian factions swore to protect al-Aqsa
against the Jewish plot to dig under the mosque and destroy it (Klein 1999: 213-214). The Arab league
condemned Israel for planning to build the Third Temple over al-Aqsa. Palestinians took to the streets all
throughout the OPT and confronted the Israeli soldiers, only this time between the people and the army
stood the Palestinian police. When the soldiers opened fire, the Palestinian police fired back. After four
days of riots 74 Palestinians and 16 Israeli soldiers were killed, 58 Israelis and over a thousand Palestinians
were injured. This event marked the end of the peace process. One of the major reasons for its failure is
strong religious-nationalism prevailing on both sides and the inter-dynamics around contested holy-sites.
In order to calm the atmosphere Netanyahu was forced to complete the Hebron agreement
in January 1997, transferring most of the city from Israeli military control onto the PA controlled
by Arafat. In reaction to the opening of the tunnel, the Islamic Waqf, backed by the PA and Jordan,
unilaterally renovated the underground halls below the southern area of the Holy Esplanade, without
permission from or supervision by the Israeli Antiquity Authorities – signalling the collapse of the tacit
understandings that had existed for decades. Following the events the Islamic Movement in Israel,
the Israeli branch of the Muslim Brothers, showed increased interest in Jerusalem and the al-Aqsa
mosque (Klein 1999: 215; Reiter 2005: 91-95). Sheikh Raed Salah, the leader of the northern and more
radical wing of the movement rallied the first mass rally under the banner “al-Aqsa is in Danger,” a
tradition that continues annually ever since, attended by tens of thousands of Palestinians citizens of
Israel. Netanyahu’s use of national-religious symbolism eventually forced him to an unwanted political
move (withdrawal from Hebron), and radicalized the entire system – playing into the hands of national-
religious zealots of the other side. The next example further demonstrates this pattern.
In July 2000 Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Arafat met for a peace conference in Camp
David hosted by US President Bill Clinton. According to some of the participants, when Barak offered
Arafat shared sovereignty over the Holy Esplanade the latter refused, denying the Jewish affiliation to
Jerusalem and the existence of the Jewish Temple in the city (Reiter 2005: 31). On both sides a trend of
negation evolved, undermining the religious connection of the other side to Jerusalem, as a consequence
undermining its authenticity as a nation. This kind of polemics is not meant to convince the other side
but rather to ratify one’s own national-religious ethos and myths. This is what Anthony Smith called “the
cult of authenticity,” standing at the centre of the nationalist belief-system: “At the heart of this cult is
the quest for true self. Authenticity functions as the nationalist equivalent of the idea of the holiness in
so many religions; the distinction between the authentic and the false or inauthentic carries much the
same emotional freight as the sacred and the profane” (Smith 2003: 37-38). In the Israeli-Palestinian
case where strong religious-nationalism is at play, there is no distinction between the sacred and the
authentic, nor between the inauthentic and the profane. The negation of one side’s spiritual, religious
and historical connection to Jerusalem goes hand in hand with the negation of its nationhood altogether
(Tzidkiyhau 2014: 83-87).
The very day that the Camp David II summit failed, on July 22 2000, an official PA fatwā was issued
by the Chief Muftī of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Territories, Sheikh ʿIkrima Ṣabrī, asserting that
all of Palestine is Holy Muslim Waqf land and that it is therefore forbidden (harām) to give up any
part of it.4 This, together with Arafat’s refusal to acknowledge Jewish connection to Jerusalem (i.e.
the Temple Mount) was the Palestinian response to the proposal of shared sovereignty over the Holy
Esplanade. Ṣabrī’s fatwā actually ratified the Hamas’ covenant from 1988, in which article 11 asserts:
[…] the land of Palestine is an Islamic waqf for the benefit of Muslims throughout the generations and
4. This fatwā is extensively dealt with, partly translated and interpreted in Reiter 2006: 173-198.

until the Day of Resurrection. It is forbidden to abandon it or part of it or to renounce it or part of it
[…]” (Al-Mithāq 1988). Arafat’s attempt to deal with the Islamic opposition by competing with it on
Islamic grounds actually ratified their position, proving that they were right and that Fatah was wrong
all along. As a consequence any attempt to compromise was restrained by this religious prohibition and
Hamas’ positions won legitimacy from the PLO’s top religious cleric. Hamas moved from the margins
to the centre of the national-religious discourse, demonstrating that the use of religious symbols by
mainstream politician can only strengthen the national-religious groups.
On the Israeli side Barak’s proposal to divide the sovereignty on the Holy Esplanade was perceived
as undermining the sanctity of Jerusalem for the Jews and of Zion for Zionism. In response, Ariel Sharon,
then the head of the Israeli opposition, decided to demonstrate the Israeli sovereignty on the Holy
Esplanade by conducting an official visit to the site. Sharon, who was well-known as a completely secular
man, understood the potential in mobilizing fundamental national-religious symbols. Sharon’s visit
was perceived by the Palestinians as a provocation which provided the trigger for the eruption of the
second Intifada. The actual forces behind this eruption may very well have been deeper, driven from the
frustration and despair from the political deadlock, but it was Sharon’s visit to al-Aqsa that set off the
actual clashes (Tzidkiyahu 2012: 126). The second intifada that erupted following Sharon’s visit, called by
both Palestinians and Israelis Intifāḍat al-ʾAqṣā, caused thousands of casualties on both sides between
October 2000 and October 2005, and changed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the geopolitical reality
in Israel and Palestine. Five months after the intifada started, Sharon won the elections and became the
Prime Minister. During the 1990s Sharon was considered to be a political lame duck approaching the end
of his carrier in the hawkish right-wing margins of the Likud party, but following Netanyahu’s temporary
retirement from politics and Barak’s failure to prevent the intifada, all of a sudden Sharon re-emerged
as a leader. Sharon’s al-Aqsa maneuver is a textbook example of how national-religious feelings and holy
sites can be manipulated for political ends.
On the Palestinian side, the Hamas military wing, the Brigades of the Martir Izz ad-Din al-Qassam
(Katāʾib al-shahīd ʿizz al-dīn al-qassām), gained prestige for terrorizing Israel through suicide attacks.
Some elements in the Fatah felt they had to stand up to these standards and formed their own military
wing called al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades (Katāʾib Shuhadāʾ al-ʾAqṣā), imitating Hamas’ religious language,
symbols and tactics.5 This was yet another step in the religionization of the conflict and the nationalization
of religion. In the January 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections that took place shortly after the end of
the intifada and two years after the death of Arafat, Hamas won a majority.6 For the first time since 1969,
the legitimacy of the PLO and of Fatah as “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”
was put to serious doubt. The following year Hamas led a violent coup in Gaza, establishing the first
political entity controlled by the Muslim Brothers, four years previous to the events of the “Arab Spring.”
The comparative approach
The inter/intra dynamics around the Holy Esplanade continue, and have been enhanced since
2003, when tens of thousands of observant Jews started to regularly visit the Holy Esplanade, creating
real pressure to change the status quo in the contested holy site. This was answered by a similar
awakening on the Muslim-Palestinian side, crowning al-Aqsa as the ultimate national-religious symbol.
Both discourses conduct a continuous dialogue around the Holy Esplanade, which goes beyond the
boundaries of the site itself, also penetrating national and international politics. It is impossible to
fully understand these processes without placing them under comparative scrutiny – examining the
dialogue that the Jewish-Zionist and Muslim-Palestinian movements conduct. Such a research requires
5. This dynamic of religionization and radicalization throughout the second intifada stands in the center of Zelkovitz’s
book (2012).
6. For analysis of these elections, the policies that led to them and their results see: Rubin (2006: 138-152).

an understanding of the theoretical discourse on religious nationalism, but also a close acquaintance
with the particularity of our case study: Jewish-Israeli and Muslim-Palestinian societies. This requires
an interdisciplinary approach, combining social and political science and comparative politics, with
historical research methods, textual analysis, comparative religion, Jewish and Islamic thought and
conflict studies. The interdisciplinary approach will enable us to better deal with the tension between
the universal theories and the particular case study, by building a solid theoretical foundation as we go
along, onto which we shall “pour” the comparative historical development.
Comparing Judaism and Islam as two religions of law that encompass all aspects of life is common
in the literature, yet only few works deal with the systematic similarities and differences between Sharia
and Halacha in regard to the modern state. In that regard we can mention the articles of Kozlowsky
(1986) and of Aharon Layish (2005). Despite their quality, the comparative debate in these studies is but
partial (Miller 2009: 4). On the political aspects, both Zionism and the Palestinian national movement
are considered to be anomalies and are not frequently referred to in the general study of nationalism or
in comparative research. Khalidi argues that the case of the Palestinians – and this argument applies to
the Israeli example as well – does contain a certain universal applicability for issues of national identity.
This is true regarding a number of ways in which Palestinians and Israelis mirror other national groups,
“including in the manner in which preexisting elements of identity are reconfigured and history is used
to give shape to a certain vision […]” (Khalidi 1997: xi),7 but especially to the ways in which Israelis and
Palestinians mirror each other.
Since the works of Zachary Lockman on relations between Arab and Jewish workers and labor
movements in Palestine during the British mandate period (Lockman 1993, 1996), little effort has been
done to place Israelis and Palestinians under an equal scientific scrutiny, as if each movement evolved
separately. Some works compare Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism, but the emphasis in these works
is in many cases on the supra-nationalist ultra-orthodox (haredi) Judaism and on radical Islam in the
Arab world, notably in Egypt (Ali 2013; Klein 1993; Almond, Appleby and Sivan 2003). These works
examine each case study separately, comparing it to a general model of fundamentalism. In this regard
even if religious Zionist currents or Palestinian religious nationalism are considered, it is in relation to
the Jewish or Arab-Islamic fundamentalism and not to one another. The existing works also relate to
Zionist or Palestinian fundamentalists as anomalies, neglecting the national-religious background in
which these fundamentalists are rooted, stemming from the mainstream of their respective national
movements. Reiter’s work is an exception to this rule, since it compares directly between the Israeli
and Palestinian religious nationalism and their role in the conflict, while examining religion as a barrier
to compromise in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Reiter 2010: 228-263). Another recent exception in
the Israeli academia is the work of Hillel Cohen in his book 1929: Year Zero of the Jewish-Arab Conflict
(Cohen 2013), which emphasizes the deep religious element of the conflict through a systematic
comparison between Jews and Muslim in Palestine/the land of Israel. Reiter, Cohen and to some extent
Klein and Nohad Ali represent a new emerging trend of treating both sides of this national-religious
conflict as equal objects of research and scrutiny through a comparative analysis, which is crucial for a
better understanding of the conflict.
The two opposing national-religious trends in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict represent two
competing expressions of religious-nationalisms in the same space. While rooted in their own
particular context, both trends constantly evolve facing one another. On the surface these two
approaches completely negate each other, but they actually co-exist in great proximity and relate to
the same territory, and to the same holy sites. It would thus be unreasonable to assume that they are
not mutually influenced and that they do not conduct some sort of an indirect dialogue (among other
forms of dialogue). These two competing ideologies reside in great proximity, sometimes literally
in the same street. On the theoretical level we can examine the different case studies according to
Bourdieu’s field theory, viewing religion and politics as interacting fields, and examining the relations
7. In his argument Khalidi refers to the Palestinians only, we expand his argument on to the Israeli case as well.

between distinct religious, national and political actors (Bourdieu 1993). Institutionalized religious
nationalism can be examined in light of new theories of institutionalization as a major factor in
contemporary politics (March and Olsen 1984). Examining the role of religion in the conflict will also
enable us to determine the influence religion has on the intensity and level of the conflicts involving
strong religious-nationalism (Pearce 2005). Such a research may somewhat erode the barriers between
the Jewish state of Israel and its Arab-Muslim environment, first and foremost with its immediate
neighbours – the Palestinian people – through the study of the relations of the two religions of law to
the modern nation state, which in both cases lead to a similar political reaction. This field possesses,
in my opinion, rich grounds for more comparative study to come.

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Research Questions

“God Cannot Keep Silent”

Centre d’études et de recherches internationales

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 2

Religion and Nationalism...................................................................................... 4

The Sacred and the Profane.................................................................................. 5

Strong Religious-Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict................. 16

Indirect Dialogue at the Turn of the Millennium ............................................17

The comparative approach.................................................................................. 21

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 3

Religion and Nationalism

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 4

In order to overcome this methodological difficulty concomitant to the study of religious-

The Sacred and the Profane

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 5

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 6

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 7

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 8

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 9

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 10

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 11

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 12

In some cases, as in the catholic-protestant conflict in Ireland or the Catholic-Orthodox-Muslim

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 13

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 14

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 15

On risque de ne rien comprendre au conflit du Proche-Orient si l’on refuse d’envisager, à

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 16

Indirect Dialogue at the Turn of the Millennium

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 17

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 18

3. April 6, in the town of Afula, killing 8 Israeli citizens.

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 19

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 20

The comparative approach

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 21

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 22

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 23

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 24

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 25

Questions de recherche / Research Question – n° 47 – October 2015 26

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