A military defeat’s myth-debunking enabled the religious settlement project to go mainstream
Evidence
It is safe to assume that if the 1973 War had not undermined the myth of the secular soldier, the Gush could not have challenged the IDF in such an unprecedented manner. To a large extent, the settlement project, imbued with religious meaning, brought religious Zionism in from the margins of society and turned it into a central political and cultural stream. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 860
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- SEED: The claim that discrediting a secular-identity pillar (the secular warrior) directly empowered a religious alternative frame is testable against other cases of identity-myth collapse.
Related
- A legitimating myth’s collapse can shift political initiative to marginalized religious movements (similarity 0.91)
- Attempted reversal of IDF religionization institutionalized it rather than weakening it (similarity 0.81)
- Political denationalization can paradoxically strengthen religionization inside the military (similarity 0.78)