Reconstituting Israel: The Impact of the Six-Day War on Political Thought in the Land of Israel Movement (Hatenuah Lemaan Eretz Yisrael Hashlemah)
Creators: name: Gurevich, Eva
Publisher: name: Brandeis University
Year: 2023
Subjects: Jerusalem
Land of Israel Movement
Nathan Alterman
occupied territories
Settlements
Six-Day War
History

description: Nathan Alterman and Moshe Shamir founded the Land of Israel Movement (Hatenuah Lemaan Eretz Yisrael Hashlemah, hereafter LIM) in the summer after the Six-Day War of 1967. LIM was the first prominent movement calling on Israel to claim the recently conquered territories and build Jewish settlements there, paving the way for a powerful settlement movement and a new right-wing ideology. Among the original fifty-eight signatories were Rivka Katznelson, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Haim Hazaz, Uri Tsvi Greenberg, and other public figures, academics, and military brass from every Zionist political background. Hatenuah’s appearance staged a remarkable intervention by known cultural figures in the public political sphere. The political thought of the Land of Israel Movement was decisively prescient of the current political terms of debate on the place of the settlements and the conquered territories. This dissertation is set to answer two central questions: first, what was the nature of the political transformation that led prominent figures in Labor Zionism to dedicate their lives to the principle of the integrity of the Land of Israel, especially if this principle was not previously a significant aspect of their political thought? Second, what was the ideological legacy of the Land of Israel Movement—what new ideas did its members introduce to Israel's political discourse following 1967? The study examines the effects of the Six-Day War on the political thought of Nathan Alterman, Rivka Katznelson, and Moshe Shamir: In particular, the way that they perceived the impending catastrophe prior to the war and the results of the remarkable victory at its conclusion. Although these three writers were only a small selection among the many noteworthy signatories and leaders of the movement that came from Labor Zionist background, their writings serve as case studies of the many surprising intellectual and political paths that were taken through the decisive moments of the Six-Day War and its aftermath. The close study of the three writers shows that their trajectories of transformations took different conceptual paths. Their writings shed light on the larger shifts in political concepts that were brought about by the Six-Day War. These were structural changes to political concepts they formulated in the aftermath of the victory, reforming foundational concepts of Zionism.
description: The present study is the first monograph on the Land of Israel Movement that focuses on its significant contributions to the shaping of the post-’67 political landscape to 1973. It examines the way that the Land of Israel Movement helped to assimilate territories that had been outside of the country’s borders to become central though contested to the state’s identity. Although Hatenuah has been largely overlooked and forgotten in historical scholarship, it played a doubly significant role: While it concretely enabled the rise of the settlement movement and the radical right-wing, it also restructured the constitutive frameworks of statehood: it formulated the claim over the conquered territories that laid the groundwork for the inexorable recentering of the boundaries that affected the essential characteristics and purpose of the state itself. In other words, the LIM foreshadowed the country’s predominant political shift from the left to the right. This study of Hatenuah illuminates the profound ways in which the 1967 moment changed the political imagination and infrastructure of the state of Israel, significantly impacting the direction of Jewish and Israeli intellectual, cultural, and political history.