Promised Land or Permitted Land: A Consideration of Jewish Fundamentalism in the Light of Levinasian Ethics

Jewish fundamentalism has many sources and variants, including extreme religious Zionism, ultra-orthodox Ashkenazi Zionist rejectionism, Sephardi political fundamentalism, and various modes of Hassidism and non- or anti-Hassidic ‘mitnagdim’. Generically, these groups are nowadays referred to by the sobriquet ‘haredi’, or ‘tremblers’ (before God) and many of them are enclave communities with their own inward-looking structures and strong community ties, and a suspicious, largely arms-length attitude to the rest of the ‘modern’ world. The fundamentalist elements of Judaism are by no means restricted to Israel (in the UK, they can be found concentrated in parts of north London and Manchester), and indeed their social and political significance in some areas should not be underestimated (for example, around 25% of the children in one London district are haredi children [Holman & Holman 2002]). However, it is the belligerent religious Zionists in Israel who have the most political significance in the contemporary world, because their strident attitude towards the inviolability of the Land of Israel and their consequent support for the settler movement in the Occupied Territories is a major source of tension and one of the most powerful blocks to the peace process there. Ironically, most orthodox Jews were originally opposed to secular Zionism, however much their prayerful yearnings were directed towards a ‘return’ to Zion; but after the Shoah and then again after the Six-Day War, the messianic component of orthodoxy has largely been combined with a vision of Israel as potentially the precursor of a full salvation; and in any case, they argue that Torah law prohibits Jews from giving up any of the ‘Holy Land’, as this