Bennett and the Religious Zionist elite
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Bennett and the Religious Zionist elite
The Religious Zionist leadership’s decision to avoid a showdown in Evyatar guarantees that the next showdown will be far worse.
(July 4, 2021 / JNS) The biggest media story in Israel last week was the fall of the town of Evyatar in Samaria.
Evyatar is located between three Palestinian villages and two Israeli villages. It was originally settled in 2013, following the murder nearby of Evyatar Borovsky, only to be destroyed by the Israel Defense Forces. It was settled again in May by 50 families in response to the murder of Yehuda Guetta.
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July 1, 2021
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In his “History of the Jews,” the historian Paul Johnson coined the phrase “Non-Jewish Jew” for any Jew who, in his words, “denied there was such a thing as a Jew at all.”
But it took Naftali Bennett and the Religious Zionist movement to trump the notion of the “Non-Jewish Jew” with that of racism posing as religion what I dub: non-Jewish Judaism.
By historical coincidence, the year Johnson published his book was also the first full year of the Palestinian Intifada and many of Israel’s Religious Zionists were in a violent frenzy. One of them, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, set the tone of much of what was to follow. Levinger was the “spiritual leader” of a gang of Israeli “settlers” in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron. In September 1988, Levinger fired at a group of Palestinians killing one and seriously wounding another as they stood outside a shoe store.
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Religious Zionism party leader Bezalel Smotrich, left, and Itamar Ben Gvir of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party at an election campaign tour at the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem on March 19, 2021, four days before the general election. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
There was a time, not too long ago, when the names Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir would elicit shudders from Leftists and mainstream right-wingers alike. Only two years ago, Smotrich was considered too radical to serve as Benyamin Netanyahu’s Justice Minister and Ben-Gvir too extreme to even be mentioned, much less step foot into the annual AIPAC conference. Today, a much different reality exists, Smotrich is consi
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