Religious Zionism has emerged as an increasingly influential force within Israel’s political and military institutions, challenging decades of secular Zionist dominance over the state’s governing structures. Its growing presence in government, the army and public life reflects the political ascent of a movement whose ideological foundations were laid by rabbis who transformed religious interpretations into a programme of territorial expansion and political power.
Within religious Zionism, expansionist currents interpret the struggle against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims through a theological framework. Their ideological ambitions include the occupation of all Palestine, the displacement of its inhabitants, expansion into neighbouring Arab territories and, among their most extreme proponents, the destruction of Al-Aqsa Mosque in pursuit of a state founded on their interpretation of biblical promises.
Understanding the intellectual foundations of this movement has become increasingly important as its representatives gain access to influential positions within Israeli institutions.
The first instalment of this series examined one of the early intellectual influences on religious Zionism: the teachings of the Vilna Gaon. This second instalment explores the theological ideas of Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaKohen Kook, one of the most influential religious thinkers in the development of modern religious Zionism.
Who Was Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook?
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook was born in Latvia, Eastern Europe, in 1865, into a Jewish family traditionally opposed to the Hasidic movement.
Despite his family’s religious background, Kook developed an affinity for the Chabad movement, which had faced opposition from prominent rabbis within European Jewish communities.
These opponents believed that Hasidic movements were departing from the traditional emphasis on studying religious texts and observing biblical commandments, instead becoming increasingly immersed in mystical practices influenced by interpretations of the Zohar, the principal text associated with Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism.
Kook served as a rabbi in Latvia and Lithuania before emigrating to Palestine in 1904, where he became the rabbi of Jaffa and the surrounding Jewish settlements.
During the First World War, he spent a period in Britain, where he also served as a rabbi.
Following the British occupation of Palestine, Kook returned and was appointed Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Jerusalem in 1919. In 1921, the British authorities appointed him Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Palestine.
One of his most consequential contributions to religious Zionism came in 1924, when he established the Merkaz HaRav religious seminary in Jerusalem.
The institution subsequently became a major centre for developing and disseminating religious Zionist thought, particularly interpretations linking Jewish religious identity to territorial settlement and the struggle over Palestine.
Its ideological influence extended into the Israeli military and political establishment. Among those associated with the institution were Israeli army officers, Knesset members, government ministers and leaders of settlement organisations.
The seminary also became associated with ideological currents that framed hostility towards Arabs and Muslims, settlement expansion and, in their most extreme expressions, violence against Palestinians through biblical and religious justifications.
History as a Process of Divine Redemption
Kook’s theological philosophy can be understood through what is commonly described as a deterministic or redemptive interpretation of history.
He viewed history as a process unfolding according to what he believed to be divine will, ultimately leading towards the redemption extensively discussed in Jewish religious literature.
However, Kook departed from other rabbinical interpretations by assigning human action a meaningful role in bringing about this redemption.
Rather than regarding redemption as an exclusively supernatural event, he believed that human activity within the material world could contribute to fulfilling a divinely ordained historical process.
At the same time, he identified what he considered a deficiency in the appreciation of Israel’s sanctity from the perspective of the Torah and religious commandments.
This theological framework became central to his interpretation of Zionism, allowing him to reconcile secular political activity with religious expectations of messianic redemption.
How Kook Reconciled Secular Zionism with Religious Theology
Kook’s position towards the Zionist movement represented a substantial departure from the prevailing attitudes among many traditional Jewish religious authorities.
These authorities opposed Zionism primarily because they regarded it as a secular movement that involved Jewish communities in worldly political activity.
According to their theological understanding, the redemption promised in Jewish religious literature, including the return to what they called the “Land of Israel”, could not be achieved through deliberate human action.
Instead, redemption would occur through divine intervention at an appointed time, following the Jewish people’s fulfilment of the commandments of the Torah and their commitment to religious observance.
Kook challenged this understanding.
He argued that secular Zionists, despite their lack of religious motivation, were unknowingly carrying out God’s will.
In his interpretation, the secular Zionist movement represented the beginning of the unfolding process of redemption.
This provided religious Zionism with a theological framework in which political activity, territorial settlement and other actions undertaken in the material world could be interpreted as necessary stages in a divinely guided historical process.
For Kook, history was moving towards what he regarded as a blessed messianic conclusion, even when its participants did not recognise the religious significance of their actions.
He developed this position partly through interpretations drawn from Kabbalah and the Zohar.
Within this understanding, redemption would not arrive as an entirely external supernatural intervention that suddenly interrupted history. Rather, it would emerge through a historical process taking place within the ordinary, material world.
Activities traditionally regarded as secular could therefore acquire religious significance if they contributed to the anticipated process of redemption.
This interpretation became one of Kook’s most influential contributions to the intellectual foundations of religious Zionism.
From Religious Redemption to Territorial Settlement
The ideas of Abraham Isaac Kook, and later those of his son Rabbi Tzvi Kook, exercised considerable influence over the development of religious Zionist settlement movements.
Following his father’s death, Tzvi Kook assumed leadership of the Merkaz HaRav seminary and played a central role in developing its ideological direction.
His interpretation of religious Zionism closely connected Jewish immigration, settlement construction and military expansion with the fulfilment of a divine redemptive process.
He expressed this worldview in a statement that became emblematic of the movement’s ideology:
“Every Jew who comes to the Land of Israel, every tree planted in the soil of Israel, and every soldier added to the army of Israel constitutes another spiritual stage, literally, and another stage in the process of redemption.”
This conception transformed otherwise political and material activities into religious acts.
Immigration was not simply a demographic development. Planting trees was not merely agricultural work. Military recruitment was not only a matter of state security.
Within this theological framework, each activity represented another step towards the fulfilment of a religious destiny.
These ideas profoundly influenced settlement organisations such as Gush Emunim, which became a leading force behind Israeli settlement expansion in territories occupied following the 1967 war.
Several settlement movements and organisations subsequently emerged from this ideological environment, contributing to the seizure of Palestinian and Arab land through claims of religious and biblical entitlement.
Merkaz HaRav in occupied Jerusalem became an important intellectual centre for the dissemination of these doctrines.
The Israeli Army as an Instrument of Redemption
Both Abraham Isaac Kook and his son regarded the Israeli military as more than an institution exercising physical force.
In their theological interpretation, the army represented the return of the Jewish nation to active participation in the process of redemption.
Their writings praised warriors described in Jewish historical and biblical traditions, presenting military action through a religious framework.
They used the expression “Army of God” in reference to the Jewish army.
Abraham Isaac Kook also described the Jewish Legion, which participated in the First World War, as “holy armies, like ministering angels”.
For Kook, warfare could serve as an instrument through which messianic redemption would advance, ultimately leading to the anticipated appearance of the Messiah, known in Jewish religious literature as the Mashiach.
This represented a substantial transformation in the relationship between religious observance and political activity.
Traditional expressions of religious commitment, including prayer, worship and adherence to biblical commandments, were no longer the only means through which believers could participate in the divine process.
Military service, warfare, political engagement and the exercise of national power could also become expressions of religious obligation.
Kook’s intellectual contribution was therefore not limited to providing religious approval for an existing political movement.
His theology helped incorporate military and political action into a broader conception of religious life, in which worldly activity could become an instrument of messianic redemption.
“Blot Out the Memory of Amalek”: The Theological Foundations of Extermination
The relationship between Kook’s original teachings and the later violence associated with elements of the religious Zionist settlement movement remains a subject of scholarly disagreement.
Some researchers argue that Rabbi Tzvi Kook and graduates of Merkaz HaRav pushed Abraham Isaac Kook’s ideas beyond what he originally intended, particularly through violent actions against Palestinians and Arabs designed to force them from their land and facilitate territorial seizure.
Other researchers maintain that there is a deeper ideological continuity between the elder Kook’s writings and the religious justifications subsequently employed by extremist Jewish settlers.
Understanding this disagreement is important, but so is examining the doctrines that contributed to the intellectual and psychological worldview of religious Zionist movements.
War as a Claimed Moral Necessity
Abraham Isaac Kook regarded warfare as what he considered a “moral necessity”.
His writings contained extensive praise for the wars described in the Torah, particularly those fought by the ancient Israelites against the Canaanite peoples in Palestine.
In one passage, he wrote:
“We look to the earliest generations, whose stories are told by the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings, those who fought wars, and see them as great men to whom we are bound with affection and whom we regard as holy. We understand that the spark within the soul is the foundation … and that those mighty souls come alive among us again, as they did in the past.”
Through this interpretation, Kook sought to invest biblical warfare with spiritual significance.
He presented war as an expression of the “full power of the souls that founded the nation and fought God’s war”.
In his theological framework, the warriors of biblical history were not simply figures belonging to a distant past. Their spiritual qualities could reappear in subsequent generations, providing a religious basis for renewed military action.
This interpretation became particularly consequential when applied to biblical narratives involving the destruction of entire peoples.
The Concept of Amalek and the Justification of Violence
Kook addressed these questions in correspondence with Dr Benjamin Menashe Levin, who had expressed discomfort with the moral implications of biblical accounts of conquest and Jewish religious literature concerning warfare against the people identified in the Torah as Amalek.
These texts include injunctions to pursue the destruction of Amalek until its memory is erased.
In responding to these ethical concerns, Kook argued that Jewish conduct in both the past and present reflected a natural aspiration towards the “realisation of the divine identity of the self”.
Within this interpretation, other peoples could be depicted as embodiments of evil whose existence threatened or contaminated holiness.
War could consequently be presented not merely as permissible, but as morally necessary.
Kook justified this understanding through the argument that “duty requires the triumph of morality and the liberation of the wretched world from the grip of evil”.
The implications of this theological reasoning extend beyond a conventional justification of military conflict.
When opposing peoples are categorised as inherently evil or as obstacles to divine holiness, violence against them can be recast as a religious obligation rather than a moral transgression.
Critics of this ideological tradition argue that such reasoning furnished later settlement extremists with religious justifications for killing or expelling other populations.
From Biblical Amalek to Modern Palestinians
The concept of Amalek occupies a particularly consequential position within this ideological framework.
In biblical tradition, the Amalekites are portrayed as enemies of the Israelites, who confronted them following their departure from Egypt.
The religious language associated with Amalek includes the command to “blot out the memory of Amalek”.
Within the theological interpretation discussed here, the descendants of Amalek are presented as possessing an absolute and irredeemable hostility towards Israel.
Their opposition is treated not as a political position capable of negotiation or transformation, but as an inherent characteristic that cannot be corrected.
The prescribed response is therefore not reconciliation, but the eradication of their memory.
This conceptual framework has acquired renewed political significance through the invocation of Amalek in Israeli rhetoric concerning Palestinians.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and figures within his government, including Bezalel Smotrich, have been associated in this analysis with references to Amalek in the context of the Palestinian struggle.
Such rhetoric draws upon biblical imagery in which Amalek represents an enemy whose destruction is framed as a religious commandment.
The concern is that applying this theological category to a modern population transforms a political and territorial struggle into an existential religious confrontation.
Within extremist settlement ideology, Palestinians and Arabs can consequently be portrayed as modern embodiments of Amalek, rather than as a people possessing political and national rights.
The Religious Duty of Eradication
Kook’s theological reasoning also involved the formulation of particular rules concerning warfare against those identified as Amalek.
Within this interpretation, Amalek was described as “the very essence of impurity”, whose “mere existence defiles everything” and displaces holiness.
The conclusion drawn from this religious categorisation was that “its eradication is a religious duty”.
In later extremist settlement thought, the identification of Palestinians and Arabs with the biblical category of Amalek provided a means of applying these doctrines to contemporary territorial and political struggles.
The implications are particularly severe because the theological argument does not depend on the actions of individual members of the population being targeted.
Instead, the population itself is characterised as an inherently corrupting presence.
The resulting logic can remove the distinction between combatants and civilians by presenting an entire people as an obstacle to a religiously ordained destiny.
This is the ideological connection through which interpretations of sacred history, religious redemption, territorial settlement and military violence have become intertwined within radical currents of religious Zionism.
The influence of Abraham Isaac Kook and his son therefore extends beyond the religious institutions in which their ideas were taught. Their theological legacy became part of the intellectual foundation through which later settlement movements interpreted the occupation of Palestinian land, the role of the Israeli military and the use of force in pursuit of what they believed to be divine redemption.
