Even historians are prone to speaking in soundbites and rhetoric from time-to-time.
This widely disseminated statement is important to correct. Because it feeds into the comfortable and safe, but false narrative, that radicalised interpretations of religious scriptures is not an influential motivating factor within overall Zionism.
If one cannot / refuses to diagnose the problem correctly – then one can never find the cure. It’ll be a merry-go-round for another 75 years!
Firs of all, we need to understand that Zionists are not exclusive to Israel or Jews – there are many more religious Christian Zionists even in the US alone. The US has a population of circa 333million, of which there are about 20-116million Evangelical Christians.
The vast majority of Evangelical Christians are Zionists.
Overall globally, a good majority of those who identify as Zionists, are believed to be religious.
Now let’s look at Israel. it has a population of around 10million, with around 2million of those being Muslim, Palestinian, Druze, Christian Israelis.
For ease, we will assume that the 2million Palestinian Israelis are non-Zionists, so we can leave them aside.
Out of the remaining 8million Israelis, most are religious and Zionists. They believe in a god, and are Zionists too.
23 + 10 + 8 = 41% but this figure is greater when we account for the percentage of Hiloni (secular Jews) who believe in god. Secularity for many Hiloni Jews, as with people in other religions too, often means to have a separation between religion and the governance of the state – being secular doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t believe in god.
What percentage of Hiloni Jews believe in god?
Which means around 60% of overall Hiloni Jews believe in god and practice Judaism at least to a relatively small degree. And that means 67% of Israeli Jews believe in god (43% + 24%) The 24% is of overall Israeli Jews, which is 60% from the overall 40% of Hiloni Jews.
It is also important to understand what percentage of Israelis identify as Zionists – Zionism, in its traditional meaning is the right for Jews to have a state and then the support of that state.
To summarise the above: If we take Israel’s population as being roughly 10million. Let’s minus the 20% (2million) Palestinian Israelis who for arguments sake we will say are not Zionists (though realistically speaking á percentage of them will also be Zionists), that leaves 8million Israelis of which 70-80% are Zionists. Let’s take the middle variant and say 75% are Zionists, that’s 6million Zionists from a population of 10million. Which means 6million Zionists and 4million non-Zionists.
Overall, whichever way one dissects this – whether we look at Zionists only in Israel, or only in the US, or overall globally – there is no doubt that a substantial majority of Zionists believe in god and practice religion to at least some degree, if not to a high degree.
