The religious movements rejecting Zionism inside Israel

This book revolves around studying the relationship between religion and politics, the emergence and development of that relationship in any human society, and then extracting the dominant and framing intellectual patterns for it, as well as what can result from their interaction—religious and political—of new patterns that tend toward moderation or extremism depending on the circumstances of this relationship. It also considers what variables can be observed regarding religion when it enters the arena of politics. Some attempt to employ religion to give false legitimacy to political stances by twisting religious visions to align with pre-existing political positions, while conversely, political decisions conform to the desires and visions of religious figures. All of this impacts society, and on the other hand, affects religious thought itself in its approach or distancing from the purpose for which it was revealed. In this book, Israel is used as a case study; it exemplifies almost ideally all the crises, issues, and constraints of the relationship between religion and politics, and consequently, the reflection of the outputs of that relationship on Israeli society as well as on the course of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The importance of this book lies in its attempt to understand the dialectic relationship between Judaism and Zionism, not only from a historical perspective but also by focusing on the activities of this relationship in the current moment, which has expressed itself strongly through the relations between religious movements and the Israeli state. This is a relationship that is both old and new.