Politics & Power Quote by Arthur Hertzberg

Hertzberg is deliberately lighting a match under a comfortable myth: that religious extremism is something other people do, with other vocabularies, in other parts of the world. By calling Jewish fundamentalist militancy a "call to jihad", he commits a calculated act of rhetorical trespass, grabbing a term widely coded in Western discourse as Muslim and menacing, then forcing it back through a Jewish political crisis. The provocation is the point. He wants the listener to feel the moral vertigo of recognizing a familiar pattern wearing an unfamiliar label.

The intent is diagnostic, not merely accusatory. Hertzberg is naming a shift from theological certainty to insurgent politics: the sacralization of land, the elevation of settlement and sovereignty into divine command, the willingness to treat state authority as optional when it conflicts with a higher, absolutist mandate. His list is concrete - guns, civil war, disobedience - because he is arguing about action, not belief. Fundamentalism here is not private piety; it is a blueprint for coercion.

The subtext is also a warning about corrosion from within. In the West Bank context - relocation, evacuation orders, the possibility of dismantling settlements - the state becomes the adversary and democracy becomes the obstacle. By pairing "civil war" with "orders of their government", Hertzberg frames the crisis as a fight over legitimacy: who gets to speak for "the Jews", the elected government or the self-appointed guardians of redemption.

The line lands with extra force because Hertzberg, a theologian and public intellectual, is accusing his own community of borrowing the emotional logic of holy war: purity, destiny, exemption from ordinary rules. He is arguing that the danger is not just violence, but the religious justification that makes compromise feel like betrayal.