“A State Founded by a Book”: Zionism’s Sacralized Politics and the Road to the Gaza Genocide

This paper examines how Zionism’s sacralized politics – the framing and legitimation of Israel’s policies toward Palestine and the Palestinians through appeal to religious texts – helped lay the groundwork for Israel’s publicly supported and often eagerly enacted genocide in Gaza. It explores how sacralized politics became a key site of convergence between mainstream secular Zionism and national-religious Zionism, ultimately culminating in a shared genocidal policy. The paper first considers why secular Zionism increasingly harnessed and incorporated sacralized politics, particularly in relation to the systematic extension of the Zionist settler-colonial enterprise into the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, with its attendant land dispossession, massive and ongoing structural and direct violence, and systematic disregard for international law. It argues that choosing Palestine as the site for the Zionist project entrapped Zionism in sacralized politics to justify its settler colonial policies while at the same time conversing with significant Western currents and undercurrents. It then analyzes how mainstream secular and national-religious Zionism complemented one another in the violent project of overtaking Palestine and how this complementarity sanctioned the strategies that enabled Zionism’s shift from a century-long eliminatory campaign with genocidal features, but short of genocide, to its actual implementation. The paper argues that the convergence of strategic goals and ideological visions between secular and religious Zionism helps explain the widespread support – and, at times, open enthusiasm – within Israeli society for the live-streamed genocide. While the primary focus is on intra-Zionist dynamics, the paper also briefly addresses the interaction with additional enabling factors: official Western complicity, the vast power asymmetry between Israel and the Palestinians, and the persistence of Palestinian resistance to elimination.