Religious Zionism’s territorial claims were not a revival of old Jewish settlement ideology

Evidence

Unlike the Zionist “new” settlement, the Old Yishuv was not founded on a return to the Bible or on “negation of exile.” On the contrary: as a response to Zionist ideas, leaders of the Old Yishuv’s communities insisted on defining their present existence as “exile in the Holy Land” (Bartal 1984; Friedman 1977). Their messianic desire was not directed primarily toward political emancipation, but rather toward a spiritual process of tikkun, the Hebrew concept for repairing and transforming the broken world and achieving divine revelation through the practice of the mitzvot, the commandments, especially the commandments that can be observed only in the Land of Israel. They definitely desired the coming of the Messiah, but this belief did not mean necessarily, certainly not exclusively, political redemption in the form of a modern nation-state. Pre-Zionist settlement was not founded on an identification with the Christian West; consequently, its existence did not require the denial of the land. Certainly, this community emphasized, in its very existence, the crucial role of the land as the exclusive site of revelation. They believed in a coming redemption but did not reduce it to the idea of a national-colonial state. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 359

Categorization

• XREF: Contradicts the assumption that Zionism simply continued a religious connection to the land; connects to scholarly debates about invented tradition over primordial identity. — connects to: Secular Labor Zionism, not religious parties, initiated settlement and annexation — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 519; Israeli scholarship on religious politics omits settler colonialism as a frame — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 517
• SHARE: For someone studying religious nationalism, the point that the Old Yishuv actually framed its presence as exile — not redemption — complicates any claim of unbroken religious return ideology.