ABSTRACT
On 27 October 1995 an article titled ‘Forget the Kahanists’ was published in the Jerusalem Post. The author of the piece, Professor Efraim Inbar, a well-respected political scientist at Bar-Iian University, focused upon the growing dissent among Israelis over the perceived policy of territorial retrenchment followed by the government of Yitzhak Rabin. The article concluded:
Constitutionally, Rabin can do whatever he desires as long as he has enough votes in the Knesset. But he should understand that a majority of the public is unimpressed by his negotiation position and his tactics. And many reasonable Israelis are very uncomfortable with the borders Rabin is fashioning for the future, unspecified, and without formal backing. It is not just the lunatics of the far right who question Rabin and are prepared to boo him. 1
Eight days later, Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, an act motivated according to the assassin ‘for the glory of God’. While Inbar may well have been correct regarding the general climate of public dismay over the peace process, active resistance to Israeli concessions in the West Bank, and eventual withdrawal from it, had since September 1993 become synonymous with Israel's religious-nationalists. To that extent, this essay is not concerned with the history or structure of groups and organizations associated with religious-nationalism in Israel such as Gush Emunim. 2 Rather, it concentrates upon how particular interpretations of Judaic texts have come to fashion an environment that regards the universalist interpretations associated with classical Zionism as apostasy. For the most part anti-government demonstrations remained within the boundaries of non-violence; rallies, petitions, the closure of main highways, the occupation of hilltops on the West Bank outside the jurisdiction of official settlements were some of the more ostentatious features of this campaign. 3 Nonetheless, there remained a capacity for violence, acapacity that was discernible in the language used by a political community whose ideological agenda was mortgaged to a particularist interpretation of theological texts regarding the divinity of Eretz Israel (The Land of Israel).