Challenges to a sacralized claim increase rather than weaken reliance on the sacred text

Evidence

The stronger the challenge to the legitimacy of Israel’s territorial claims and to Jewish supremacy, both in Israel itself and in the West Bank, the more the biblical promise and religious history are needed as legitimation. While in the Uganda scenario, the settler-colonial nature of the hypothetical state would be evident and resistance would make it even more so, in Palestine this was and continues to be obfuscated by the belief in the biblical claim internally, and the sympathy and support to it internationally. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 531

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Directly evidences the reader’s core mechanism: threat to legitimacy intensifies sacral legitimation — the ‘sacralization under threat’ loop. This is the causal spine of the external-enemy/sacral-values project and would resist a one-line paraphrase; it deserves to sit for days.
• XREF: Connects to my reading on threat-hardened beliefs: moral/rational correction against a sacralized commitment backfires rather than weakening it — same feedback dynamic as here. — connects to: Polemical claims grow more cautious when examined against actual sources — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1314; Repeating a false claim to debunk it increases its plausibility — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice: How to Communicate…, 164
• SEED: Strong angle: legitimacy-challenge → intensifying sacred invocation as a general model of how any contested exclusivist claim (national, territorial) hardens rather than yields under pressure.

Broader Connections

• Polemical claims grow more cautious when examined against actual sources #corroborates (0.85) — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1314
• Repeating a false claim to debunk it increases its plausibility #corroborates (0.80) — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 164