A Word from the Guest Editor: Politics and Religion in Israel

With all its efforts to present itself as a "revolution" against traditional Jewish life in the Diaspora, including its religiosity, Zionism could never really divorce itself from Judaism, for two obvious reasons: the only cultural marker shared by all members of the Jewish nation that Zionism claimed to represent was Jewish religion, and the connection between that nation and its "homeland" was a religious connection.These realities secured Judaism and the religiously Orthodox political parties that represent it a privileged status in the Zionist movement and in the State of Israel, far beyond their weight in the Jewish population.Theodore Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, wrote in his diary in 1895, "Our nation is not a nation except in its faith" (cited in Inbari 2008, 43).This dictated, firstly, the choice of the movement's target territory (in dispute until Herzl's death in 1904, see Vital 1982) and then the use of a whole array of religious Jewish symbols and other cultural constructs.From the dubbing of immigration to Palestine aliyah (pilgrimage) and the use of the sacred Jewish language, Hebrew, as the lingua franca of the yishuv (pre-statehood Jewish community in Palestine), through the choice of the Star of David and the seven-branch candelabrum (menorah) as the official emblems of the state, to the celebration of Jewish religious holidays as national holidays, traditional Jewish themes abound in Zionist lore.In the words of the prominent Zionist historian, Anita Shapira: "The founders of the Palestine labor movement [which led