[News] ‘The Hitleryugend’ or ISIS Israel: The Two Kooks who Nationalized Judaism

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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‘The Hitleryugend’ or ISIS Israel: The Two Kooks who Nationalized Judaism
January 2, 2024
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(Image: Palestine Chronicle)

*By Ilan Pappe – The Palestine Chronicle
<https://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/ilan-pappe>*

The phenomenon of religious Zionism originates in the teaching of two of
the most respected Zionist rabbis, a father and son, belonging to the Kook
family.

Mainstream media and governments in the Global North insist that we should
equate between Hamas and ISIS. This position is modeled around Israel’s
insistence on such a reference.

Apart from the fact that this is a spurious comparison, it is particularly
important to note that there is a much better case study that demonstrates
the fusion of dogmatic messianism and violence. This comparison, however,
is not a Palestinian phenomenon but an Israeli one.

This phenomenon originates in the teaching of two of the most respected
Zionist rabbis, a father and son, belonging to the Kook family.

Let us first talk about the father, Avraham Itzhak Kook (1865-1935). He was
born in Latvia, in a region that used to be Russian, and eventually became
the father of religious Zionism.

This messianic, racist, and fundamentalist ideological stream is now
growing in terms of presence and influence among Israeli political elites,
who are trying to follow religiously the teachings and visions of Rabbi
Kook and his son, Zvi Yehuda Hacohen Kook (1891-1982).

*Kook, the Father*

But first, let’s talk about Kook, the father.

Avraham Kook arrived in Palestine in 1904 to become the most important
rabbinical authority who challenged the Orthodox Jewish view, which is
still being held today by many Orthodox Jews. This view maintains that
Zionism is a secular attempt to tamper with God’s will and, therefore,
should not be supported.

As a chief Rabbi of the Zionist community in Mandatory Palestine – British
colonialism in Palestine from 1918 to 1948 –  Kook gave the religious
blessing to the Zionist project.

>From this authoritative position, Kook preached that the right of the
Jewish people to Palestine is God’s will and that rabbis should do all they
can to persuade Jews around the world to come and colonize Palestine.

In the 1920s, Kook was very active in demanding the expansion of the area
around the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem through the eviction of its Muslim
inhabitants. He even suggested compensating them, a program that Israel
will, indeed, try to implement after the June 1967 war.

Kook’s main legacy was a place of learning called *Merkaz Harav*, “the
Rabbi’s Center”.

This institution became an important place in the history of religious
Zionism, because of the massive influence of Kook’s son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda
Hacohen Kook.

*Kook, the Son*

Now, let’s talk about Kook, the son.

Zvi Kook was the true ideological father of the messianic movement *Gush
Emunim*, which carried out the Judaization of the occupied West Bank and
the Gaza Strip after the war of 1967.

As the years went by, this movement moved from the margins of the Israeli
political system to the center. In fact, some of its members became
important ministers in various Israeli governments.

Until his death in 1982, Zvi Kook was far more committed than his father to
the colonization of historical Palestine as a religious imperative, and as
a necessary act needed to hasten the redemption of the Jewish people.

Kook’s voice was somewhat drowned when the Labour Party was in power
between 1967 and 1977. During these years, the government was directly
involved in the Judaization process of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip
through ethnic cleansing, and sometimes massacres; but on the basis of a
different ideology: that of secular socialist Zionism.

Once the Likud came to power in 1977, Zvi Kook rose to prominence as the
spiritual leader of settlers who were colonizing large parts of the
Palestinian West Bank, building their outposts at the heart of densely
populated Palestinian areas.

The idea was that such an aggressive colonization would accelerate the
de-Arabization of the West Bank. This process was meant to put Palestinians
under pressure by taking over all of their resources, such as land, water,
and even access to the labor market.

With the help of the army, this ruthless methodology became a daily
practice of abuse, harassment and, in some cases, of directly killing and
wounding Palestinians in the vicinity of these mushrooming illegal
settlements.

It was convenient for all Israeli governments to pretend that these
expansionist plans were being implemented without their blessing. But this
is a lie. In fact, most of the settlers’ actions in the West Bank were
directly coordinated with the military commanders on the ground to be later
approved by successive governments.

These groups of vigilantes and vandals, mostly educated at the *Merkaz
Harav*, were prodded by Zvi Kook’s religious rulings, edicts that directed
their actions against the Palestinians and preventing any government from
“giving up” even one square inch of so-called ‘Eretz Israel’.

It is important to note that, for Zvi Kook and his disciples, ‘Eretz
Israel’ includes Jordan as well.

Additionally, quite a few secular Jews in Israel were admirers of this
brutal form of colonization, seeing it as a continuation of the ‘glorious’
early colonization of Palestine during the mandatory period.

*‘Youth of the Hills’*

The most extreme manifestation of Kookism is the *Noar Ha-Gevaot*, the
‘Youth of the Hills’.

This group, constituted of hundreds of youths, was encouraged by late
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 1998 to “occupy every free hill in
the West Bank and settle there”. This strategy was aimed at establishing
irreversible ‘facts on the ground’, a path towards a full Judaization of
the West Bank.

The main modus operandi of the *Noar Ha-Gevaot* is known as *Tag Mehir*, or
Price Tag. These are particularly unprovoked vicious attacks on Palestinian
farms, cars, businesses and fields.

Occasionally, the members of the group would burn a mosque or a church in
these assaults. Sometimes, it is more than that. They try, and sometimes
succeed, in burning people alive
<https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN22U0L2/> in their houses or killing
them during these pogroms.

During these violent episodes, the Israeli army would stand by and allow
the extremists to carry out their attacks unhindered.

In recent years, this messianic group has entered in a systematic way into
the Palestinian neighborhoods of mixed towns inside Israel such as Akka,
Haifa, Jaffa, Al-Lid and Al-Ramleh.

They built “learning centers” in the midst of the Palestinian areas and are
constantly harassing the population. These settlers played an important
role in instigating the riots against Palestinian communities, the ‘48
Arabs, in May 2021.

The Youth of the Hills added yet another component to their violent
repertoire in recent years, the raiding of Al-Haram Al-Sharif, the most
sacred Palestinian Muslim holy site. Their aim is to instigate a regional
reaction, which, in their minds, would facilitate the building of the
so-called third temple on the ruins of Al-Aqsa Mosque, with the ultimate
hope of precipitating the coming of the Jewish messiah.

*Jewish Power, Religious Zionism*

The Youth of the Hills became even more of a menace after the November 2022
elections as the two political parties that fully support them, *Ozma
Yehudit* (Jewish Power) and *Haziyonut Hadatit* (Religious Zionism)
significantly increased their representation in the Knesset. This new-found
power allowed right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to
establish his government.

The representatives of these extremist parties are now ministers in the
current cabinet, with Bezalel Smotrich becoming the finance minister and
Itamar Ben Gvir – who used to be the defense lawyer of these vigilantes –
becoming the national security minister.

Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, along with other ministers of their parties, are not
part of the small war cabinet created after the events of October 7.
Consequently, they have little impact on the ongoing genocidal policies
carried out by the Israeli army in Gaza.

However, they will be crucial in determining Israel’s next move, which aims
at bringing Jewish settlers back to the Strip.

Moreover, these extremist politicians are already playing a part in the
intensification of the horrific assaults on the Palestinian community of
the occupied West Bank. Additionally, they are the leaders of the new
campaign of terror and racism targeting the ‘48 Palestinian Arabs.

These extremists have already succeeded once, namely, in their relentless
attacks on the villages in Masafer Yatta, in the southern Hebron Hills.
They have done so with the tacit help of the Israeli army, leading to the
eviction of thousands of Palestinians. Successive Israeli governments have
been wanting to de-Arabize that area  for years, in order for Israel to
create territorial integrity for Jews from the Negev (the Naqab) to the
Jordan River.

Quite a few of these religious Zionist representatives are now making their
way into the upper echelons of the Israeli security services and army.

Their final goal is to close a circle, which began with a rabbi who decided
to nationalize Judaism as a settler colonial project in the early 20th
century, and ultimately build a theocracy that would try and finish what
secular Zionism failed to do: the very destruction of the Palestinian
people.

Moshe Zimmerman, Israel’s leading historian of modern Germany, had, as
early as 1995, compared Kook’s disciples to another group, which terrorized
Jews during the dark days of Nazism. This is what he said in an interview
with the Israeli newspaper *Yedioth Ahronot:*

“There is a whole sector in Israeli society that I contend without
hesitation that it is a copycat of the Nazis. Look at the children of (the
Jewish settlers in) Hebron, they are exactly like the *Hitleryugend*…They
are indoctrinated from the cradle about the bad Arabs, antisemitism, how
everyone is against us. They become the paranoid supremacists, precisely
like the *Hitleryugend.”*

Enough said.

___________________________

*– Ilan Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a
senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the
author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A
History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Ten Myths about
Israel. He is the co-editor, with Ramzy Baroud of ‘Our Vision
<https://www.amazon.com/Our-Vision-Liberation-Palestinian-Intellectuals/dp/1949762440>
for Liberation.’ Pappé is described as one of Israel’s ‘New Historians’
who, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government
documents in the early 1980s, have been rewriting the history of Israel’s
creation in 1948. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle. *
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