ABSTRACT
Israel is standing today in a fateful junction in front of the strategic move of the new Religious Zionism. In Israel, as in many other countries, religiosity is very strongly correlated with right-wing nationalist political positions. This correlation affects particularly three significant issue areas — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where religiosity correlates with intransigent political positions; attitudes toward democracy, including the rights of non-Jewish citizens and residents of the country; and gender relations. In the words of Ehud Luz, a scholar of Jewish national-religious thought: A way of thinking which attributes sanctity to political reality itself and gives a-priori religious-moral approbation to everything that is being done for that reality, leads necessarily to the swallowing-up of politics by religion — or of religion by politics. This is a conception that refuses to recognize not only the limitations of reality but also the moral limitations of politics.
