Secular Zionism in the face of religious coup

Written by: Lawyer Ziyad Abu Ziyad

Judaism was born in the Holy Land, the cradle of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. While the Christian religion is linked to the Old Testament (the Torah) and considers it an extension of it, Islam requires every Muslim to believe in God, His books, and His messengers, meaning that Islam recognizes the previous religions, unlike Judaism, which does not recognize the other two religions, Christianity and Islam. In any case, Judaism for us is one of the monotheistic religions, and it is incomprehensible to view it as a race or nationality.

Although the Zionist movement was based on the merger between the Jewish religion and the concept that the Jews are a nationality, and presented itself as a national liberation movement for the Jews, the Zionist movement was not born from the cradle of religions and did not succeed in gaining the support of the Jews in all parts of the world, as evidenced by the fact that the vast majority Some of the Jews of the world did not engage in the Zionist movement and did not adopt the ideology of returning to the Promised Land, and contented themselves in a large part with emotional or financial support for Israel. And there are religious Jewish groups such as Neturei Karta that do not recognize the state of Israel and consider its establishment an attack on the will of God because it is not permissible to say to the Jews a state until after the coming of Christ and the establishment of the Jewish state at his hand.

In any case, the Zionist movement was not born, as I said, in the Holy Land, but rather in Central and Eastern Europe, the regions in which the anti-Semitic movement arose and flourished. There is no doubt that anti-Semitism played a major role in the birth of the Zionist movement, which was born with the motive of getting rid of anti-Semitism on the one hand, and its idea was inspired by the successes achieved by the European colonial movement in the countries of the world and was a source of inspiration for the fathers of the Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century.

Zionism is alien to the cradle of the three religions
The fact that everyone must realize is that the Jews of Eastern and Central Europe have no ethnic connection with the Jews of the Levant, but rather they are mostly from the Kingdom of the Khazars, whose people were a mixture of Turks, Finns, and Mongols (semi-Mongols). At the end of the eighth century AD, the king of the Khazars, his nobles, and a large number of From his people from paganism to Judaism, and with time, until about the ninth century, all the inhabitants of the Khazar kingdom became Jews. Many historians believe that no less than 92% of all Jews in the world descend from the Khazar dynasty historically and have no connection with the Jews of the East.

What I would like to say is that the Jews of Eastern and Central Europe, who produced the Zionist movement, have no ethnic connection with the Jews of the Holy Land. Land. There is no doubt that the Eastern Europeans, with anti-Semitic and racist motives, welcomed the birth of this movement and supported it in order to get rid of the Jews and expel them from their countries to the next Jewish state on the way. Here, the interest of the Jews to escape from the oppression of anti-Semitism met with the interest of the anti-Semites who wanted to get rid of the Jews.

There is no doubt that the fathers of the Zionist movement have succeeded with great success in mobilizing large numbers of Jews, creating a collective spirit among them, and linking them to the concept that Judaism is nationalism, that not every Jew has to be religious, and that one can be a secular Jew or even an atheist as long as he Born of a Jewish mother.

Although the Zionist movement rode the wave of religion to justify the claim to the "Promised Land" and claimed for itself the name of a national liberation movement, the key remained in the hands of the religious, as the conversion to Judaism cannot take place through civil or secular institutions, but rather through conversion to Judaism at the hands of A religious reference, and the entry of a strict Judaization process in which whoever wants to convert to Judaism is subjected to a religious brainwashing process that ends up purifying him from the "abomination of Gentiles" - non-Jews - and branding him with the Jewish religion. The funny thing is that after the process of Judaization is completed at the hands of the strict religious rabbinic, one can, after acquiring the characteristic of a Jew, become secular or an atheist and still carry a Jewish title and become one of God’s chosen people and have the right to the Promised Land regardless of where he came from in the world. Or from any ethnic or religious background.
The Zionist movement succeeded in achieving its colonial settlement program in part of the land of Palestine in 1948, and then was able to complete its conquest of all of Mandatory Palestine from the river to the sea.

Religious coup against secular Zionism
Although the Zionist movement was established as a secular movement that seeks to establish a secular, democratic Jewish state, it was unable to impose this pattern of thinking on all the Jews who joined under its banner, especially after the European Jews coming from Europe began to attract Jews from the Arab world, North Africa and other regions from the world to benefit from the labor force despite the different cultures, concepts and social customs, which created a state of alienation and a sense of social injustice and oppression against the Jews of the East.

However, the 1967 war and the influx of Arabs from the occupied lands into the labor market in Israel relieved the pressure on the Oriental Jews and even raised them a degree above the Arabs, and they began to reflect the racism and class discrimination that they suffered from at the hands of the Ashkenazim in the past, on the Arabs who became the lowest in degree.

This social transformation, which the occupation of 1967 contributed to creating within Israeli society, soon had political results on the Israeli scene represented in the increase in the influence of Oriental Jews in political life, and this culminated in the right-wing coup that took place in 1977 under the leadership of Polish Menachem Begin, who inflamed the feelings of Eastern Jews He embraced them in the bloc of right-wing parties, which was later known as the Likud, and Israel became for the first time a right-wing government led by Menachem Begin, in which some eastern Jewish leaders were allowed to emerge, such as David Levy.

In addition to this political transformation in Israel and the dominance of the national right in government since the late seventies, there has been a steady growth in the influence of religious parties and a gradual disengagement between them and the "liberal" Jews. The nationalist right and the religious right had an increasing influence in school and yeshiva programs. Most of the education ministers were from the Likud extremists, and the budgets allocated to the religious frameworks known as the "Yishfa" increased, and thus Israel entered a period of religiosity and religious extremism. There is no doubt that the failure of the political process with the Palestinians in 2000/2001 and the outbreak of the second intifada and the accompanying armed operations and bombings, and the promotion of the saying that there is no Palestinian partner, also contributed greatly to strengthening right-wing and religious Israeli extremism and racism against Arabs.

Successive coups in the Israeli arena
Over the past 75 years, since its establishment in 1948, Israel has witnessed a series of transformations, the most prominent of which was the right-wing political coup in 1977. Then another less dramatic transformation followed, in 2006 when Benjamin Netanyahu led a more right-wing coup against Arik Sharon and forced him to leave his Likud house. And the formation of a new party that did not live long, which is the Kadima party.

Today, in the year 2023, Israel is witnessing the most dangerous coup in its history and in the history of the Zionist movement. After the early Zionists thought that they could ride the horse of religion and use it to claim what they called the historical right of the Jews in the Promised Land, we find today that the religious Jews are leading a coup against the secular Jews who established Israel as a secular democratic state. The battle that we are witnessing today through the so-called legal reform is only the beginning of laying the foundations for a religious Presbyterian state that does not believe in man-made laws and does not recognize what is called democracy and considers that the supreme legal jurisdiction is the laws of the Torah.

There is no doubt that the success of these so-called "reforms" will mark the beginning of the end of secular Zionism and the institutionalization of the state of Jewish law. Such a state, like all theocratic regimes that appeared and quickly disappeared, and some of them recently in our Arab world, does not recognize pluralism, does not believe in participation, and is based on the principles of exclusion and appropriation of power. The strange thing is that the hypocritical Western world, which fought and is fighting Islamic movements with their various names and describes them as terrorism and obscurantism, does not say a word against their Jewish counterparts.

The success of this new phenomenon in Israel will mean that secular Jews and those who believe in democracy, even if it is for Jews only, will find themselves sooner or later either forced to flee from extremist Jewish religious persecution or to stand side by side with the Arabs and fight against this coming madness, with The fragility of this assumption, however, deserves consideration by both parties.

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