**1. Introduction**

The belief in a close connection between national security and religion is quickly becoming the new gospel of the International Relations discipline. However, so far, the growing body of literature on religion and national security has not ye<sup>t</sup> provided us with any theory on how religion influences the formulation and implementation of national security strategy (Sieple et al. 2013; Shaw 2011; Lucius 2013; Seiple and Hoover 2004; Farr 2008; Thomas 2010; Hassner 2009, 2013, 2016; Rubin 2014; Bar-Maoz 2018). To advance the process of theorization, this article offers a model of how religion influences the formulation and execution of national security policies, using the case of Israel's national security policies throughout its history.

On the issue of religion and national security, Israel is an ideal case to generalize from because it provides the researcher with a longer than average period of time in which policymakers strategized over religious matters. Israel's decisionmakers incorporated thinking about religion into its national security doctrine from the very inception of the state in 1948, unlike many other countries which did not do so prior to the 21st century. The time period of the Israeli case is also conveniently demarcated halfway through, in the late 1970s, by the religionization of the country's environment, enabling the detection of patterns of continuity or change in the way a country in pursuit of national security approaches religion, when its environment shifts from mostly secular to mostly religious. The process of theory development is also assisted by the greater than average number of connections existing in Israel between religion and national security—none of them so unique they are not found elsewhere, as the article's last section shows.

On the other hand, the fact that the majority religion of Israel, Judaism, is both a nationality and a religion can be a potential problem when generalizing from the Israeli case to others. To circumvent this

problem, the analysis in this article includes only national security policies having a clear "religious" undertone: policies that were guided by assumptions on religious matters, that signified a serious attempt to utilize religion for security objectives, or that pushed decisionmakers towards perceiving religious actors di fferently than secular actors. It therefore excludes, for example, the extension of the state's protection to Jews everywhere—a basic principle of Israel's security policy—because the relationship between Israel and the Jewish diasporas more closely resembles the relationships of other countries with their ethnic and national diasporas, rather than with their religious diasporas. With the exception of assisting in the protection of synagogues abroad, as they are a favorite target of anti-Semitic and Islamic attacks, Israel does not fund or support the religious lives of Jews abroad, unlike many countries that support the religious lives of diasporas of their own religion (Mandaville and Hamid 2018; Çitak 2010; Ahmed 2012). Excluding the nonreligious aspects of Israel's "Jewish" national security policy enables the development of a model of the relation between religion and national security that can be applied to polities where there is no overlap between religion and nationality.

The article begins with an exploration of how young Israel understood the connection between religion and national security. Then it explores how, after the 1970s, Israel's conflict with its environment transformed from a secular, nationalist inter-state conflict into a conflict between two religions, and how this transformation influenced the role religion plays in formulating Israel's national security strategy today. From its comparison of the periods before and after the region's religionization, the article constructs a model for the analysis of religion's impact on the formulation and implementation of national security policies. The model proposes that religion's e ffect on national security policymaking is comprised of three tiers: (1) operational beliefs embedded in the state's security thinking on the relations between religion and security; (2) opportunities and constraints on the state's freedom of action due the role religion plays in global regional and domestic politics, as well as bilateral relations, and (3) how the state utilizes religious actors, organizations, symbols and rhetoric in the instruments of national power, in order to achieve policy goals. At its conclusion, the article demonstrates that this model is applicable to other countries as well, using the case of France's policies in the 21st century.

The proposed model relies upon the literature on national security formulation and implementation, such as the writings of Luttwak (1976), Gray (1982, 2016), Redd and Mintz (2013), Snow (2011), Drew and Snow (2006). It also relies upon the theories of foreign policy decision-making of Brecher et al. (1969), and of McGowan and Shapiro (1973). Because the article focuses on decisionmakers' perceptions, in the section analyzing the Israeli approach, the terms used for places and events are the Israeli terms rather than the Arab or Palestinian terms (i.e., "Temple Mount" rather than "Haram al-Sharif", the "Second Intifada" rather than the "Al-Aqsa Intifada", the "territories" rather than the "occupied territories", etc.) An exception is made when the perceptions of non-Israelis are discussed; there, the article uses their own terms. As for the term "religionization", it is used in this article not in the narrow sense associated with it today in Israel, but, rather, in the broad academic meaning that denotes either "a broad range of phenomena in which the religious element expands in private and public lives" (Fischer 2015, p. 12 note 2), or any consistent expansion of the religious element—both meanings not naming the cause behind this expansion. In current Israeli discourse, on the other hand, "religionization" (in Hebrew, *hadata*) is synonymous with only one type of such expansion, that is, one caused by a deliberate attempt by religious groups to convert a secular lifestyle into a religious one, due to a series of reports in Israeli media in 2010 which popularized this little-known academic term to describe an eminent danger to Israel's secular public space from intentional and organized pressures by domestic religious Jewish groups. Attempts by religious groups to enhance public piety are only one of three types of contributors to religionization, in Israel and in the world (Maniv and Benziman 2020, pp. 119–20); the other two are the organized use of religious symbols, tradition and heritage by religious or nonreligious actors to promote national interests, and "passive" contributors to greater personal or collective religiosity, such as faultline security events, like the 1967 War, that, as will be discussed later, had an extensive impact on the religiosity of Jews, Muslims

and Christians around the world. Singling out one type of contributor to the exclusion of others is ill-advised, because in most cases of significant religionization of societies, states and regions, all three types come into play, as has been the case in the religionization of Israel's security environment during the last four decades—which is used here to answer the article's main question: What is the role of religion in the making of national security strategy, and does it change with the shifts in religion's place in a country's security environment?

### **2. Religion in Israel's National Security Policy: The Early Years**

Israeli decisionmakers have always been painfully aware that Israel's security challenges are shaped, first and foremost, by the religious, ideological hostility characterizing its external environment. How much young Israel took into account religious factors, such as other countries' religious a ffiliations and religious policies, can be seen in an analysis presented by Israel's founding father and first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, to the Supreme Command of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on 2 July 1955:

Our situation in the world is this: there is one world bloc which seeks to destroy us, and that is the bloc of Arab nations. There is a second bloc that is not prepared to destroy us, but is prepared to assist the Arab nations in their war against us, and that is most of the Islamic nations. And there is a third bloc which has nothing against us, but for various reasons, does not want to recognize our existence. A nation like India ... And there is a fourth bloc that acknowledges the State of Israel, but does not acknowledge the existence of the Jewish people—and this is the Communist bloc [due to its anti-religion policy]. And there is a fifth bloc that acknowledges the State of Israel, does not negate the existence of the Jewish people, although it does not care whether it exists or not, and that is all the rest. (Bialer 1987, p. 148)

At the same time, as this analysis shows, neither religious actors nor religious dogmas were considered threats to Israel's security as much as the secular Arab nation-states were. As Ben-Gurion noted, "most of the Islamic nations" were not prepared to destroy Israel, and some were not even willing to help the Arab world to do so—a strategic di fference between the Arab world and the Muslim world which young Israel concluded it would be expedient to exploit. This is the first of three operational beliefs on the link between religion and security held by early Israel's leadership, which shaped the national security strategy Ben-Gurion formulated in the late 1940s and early 1950s to defeat Arab nationalism.

### *2.1. The First Operational Belief: Young Israel Assessed Religion as a Secondary Source for Both the Arab States and the Non-Arab Actors in the Middle East*

Ben-Gurion and his contemporaries viewed the existence of a religious di fference between Jewish Israelis and Muslim and Christian Arabs as *one* source of the Arab ideological hostility to Israel, but not as the *main* source (see, for example, the Israeli strategist, Yigal Allon 1990, p. 284). While the Arab resistance to the Jewish *Yeshuv* in the 1920s and early 1930s had a pronounced religious idiom, the religious component in the Arab resistance to the idea of a Jewish state diminished as Arab nationalism was cemented into secular Arab nation-states during the late 1930s and the 1940s. The Israeli leadership was aware that religion was not at the center of the self-definition of Arab nationalism, which sought to unite the Arabs—Christian and Muslims, secular and religious—under the motto "*Religion is for God and the homeland is for all of us*" (Cohen 2003, p. 349; Litvak 1998, pp. 148–49). When the Arab states went to war with the soon-to-be-established Israeli state in late 1947, almost no Islamic movements chose to join them (Milton-Edwards 2006, p. 76). In the first two decades of Israel's existence, the Arab world defined its conflict with Israel as a secular struggle between Pan-Arab nationalism and Zionism, using the terminology of leftist ideologies to portray Israel as "a bridgehead of western imperialism, designed to splinter Arab territorial integrity and prevent Arab unity" (Litvak 1998, p. 148).

As to the non-Arab Muslim countries of the region, young Israel judged their religious hostility as genuine but secondary to their strategic interests. In light of Ben-Gurion's understanding that some non-Arab Muslim nations and religious minorities in the Middle East perceived Arab nationalism as a far more threatening phenomenon to their security than a Jewish state, he concluded that his enemy's enemy could still be his ad hoc ally, despite its religious animosity. This conclusion evolved into the *periphery doctrine*, a major pillar of young Israel's counter-campaign against the Arab threat. Under the doctrine, Israel fostered security cooperation with every non-Arab state and religious minority willing to cooperate with Israel: the secular Shah regime of Persian Iran, the anti-Islam Kemalist regime of Turkey, the Christian regime of Ethiopia, the Kurdish minority in Iraq and the Christians in Sudan (Freilich 2018, p. 257; Inbar 2008, p. 158). The only attempts by a religious minority to tie itself to the young Israel that the latter rejected were those of the Lebanese Maronite Christians—but not because of any ideological opposition. Israel evaluated them as too divided from within to be an e ffective ally, and was expecting Israel to do the work for them of expelling the Muslims from Lebanon. Furthermore, should Israel fail to do so, they would be the first to turn against it (Bialer 2006, p. 257).

### *2.2. The Second Operational Belief: Young Israel Saw Securing the Existence of a Jewish-Majority State a "Survival Interest" which Trampled Religious Linkage to Sacred Sites*

Just as the leaders of young Israel considered the other side's religiosity as secondary to the latter's national interests, so did they consider the religion of their own country as secondary to *their own* national security considerations. Notably, they prioritized ensuring the survival of a Jewish-majority state over linkage to the sites in the Land of Israel that were sacred to Jews. In 1937, Ben-Gurion pressured the Zionist leadership to announce its agreemen<sup>t</sup> to the partition plan proposed by the British Peel Commission, even though it excluded from the Jewish part portions of the historical land of Israel, such as Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria (not to mention the Transjordanian part of the land). This was because Ben-Gurion prioritized the immediate establishment of a sovereign Jewish state, which would provide shelter to European Jews already prosecuted by the Nazis. In his calculation, Israeli control over Jerusalem was improbable to begin with, due to the firm opposition of the Christian world, like the Islamic world, to the idea of Jewish control over sites sacred to other religions, which abound in Jerusalem (Sandler 2007, p. 353; Bialer 2006, pp. 34–38).

Similarly, in the later stages of the 1948 war, it was militarily possible to conquer Judea, Samaria and the Old City of Jerusalem; however, the Israeli governmen<sup>t</sup> voted against it—on the grounds that the security cost of controlling territories heavy populated by Arabs would damage the ability of the young state to defend itself and absorb immigration. Furthermore, the Jewish conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem with its holy sites would generate international pressure on Israel to withdraw from all of Jerusalem, including western Jerusalem, where Israel had established the seat of its governmen<sup>t</sup> (Sandler 2007, p. 353). These assessments continued to inform the negative value subsequent Israeli governments placed on the option of conquering Judea, Samaria and the Old City of Jerusalem until May 1967 (Bar-On 2018, p. 12).

### *2.3. The Third Operational Belief: The IDF Was Tasked with Infusing Israeli Youth with a Fighting Spirit by Educating Them in Jewish Heritage, including the Bible*

The third religion-security belief of Ben-Gurion was that Jewish tradition could serve his strategy to counter the quantitative advantage of the Arab states by cultivating the qualitative advantages of Israel's soldiers—their morale and fighting spirit. Ben-Gurion perceived that the IDF's strong fighting spirit—the reason why Israel had emerged victorious from the War for Independence—was in decline because of another Israeli strategy of contending with the Arab states' numerical advantage—bringing in masses of Jewish immigrants. "The new immigrants, who are a majority in the army and the nation, do not have the education and knowledge and understanding and enrooting and love for the Land" (Ben-Gurion 1981, p. 9). His solution was to entrust the IDF with the task of educating Israeli youth and immigrant soldiers in Zionist ideology, utilizing the Hebrew Bible to achieve this

goal. Immigrant soldiers studied forty chapters of the Old Testament, which establish the connection between the Jews and the Land of Israel, and recount the heroic military deeds of Jewish Biblical figures (Ben-Gurion 1981, p. 10). At their induction ceremony, every recruit, immigrant or not, received a copy of the Hebrew Bible, along with a weapon (Cohen 2013, p. 114–15).

Together with the more substantial "secular" elements in his security doctrine, these three "religious" elements in Ben-Gurion's security doctrine informed Israel's security doctrine in the following decades. By the 1970s, they achieved far more than the goal Ben-Gurion had set, opening a new chapter in Israeli national security history, and in the involvement of religion in Israel's security environment, as the next section demonstrates.

### **3. The Change: Israel's Security Environment Began to Religionize after 1967**

If, for young Israel, the adversary was a secular actor for whom the religious component in its resistance to Israel was secondary to the national component, the same cannot be said for Israel at the end of the 20th century. Since the late 1970s, Israel's map of threats has turned decisively religious, with the Islamic faith becoming the main motivating factor of those waging an armed struggle against Israel.

This process has been a gradual one. It began in the 1980s, when Islamic actors joined the struggle against Israel for the first time since the War of Independence. Some of these actors were newly established, like Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad in Palestine; some were newly Islamized, like Iran. In the 1990s, these Islamic actors surpassed the secular actors in the threat they posed to Israel's security. Iran was developing weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles with Israel's name on them and, in April 1993, the armed Islamic movements in Gaza imported the Iranian-Lebanese Shiite practice of suicide attacks to the Palestinian theater (Peri 1999, pp. 229–30; Iserovich 2005, pp. 282–89; Inbar 2008, p. 168). In the early 2000s, the religionization of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian political system was complete, and the Palestinian National Authority (PA) joined the Palestinian Islamic movements in cooperating with Iran, Syria and Hezbollah. Israel now saw itself contending with a security alliance which all Israel's enemies had joined and which enclosed Israel from all sides. After twenty years in which Israel had no longer feared a coordinated Arab attack on all its borders, the fear of a coordinated multifront attack returned—this time by a mostly Islamic enemy. This newly united enemy was dubbed by Israel in the early 2000s the "Radical Front", rather than the "Islamic Front", due to the inclusion in the front of Syria, Israel's only enemy that did not then, and still does not now, self-identify as Islamic.

Religion, however, *does* play a part in Syria's alliance with revolutionary Islamic actors in the Middle East. The religious a ffiliation between Shiite Iran and the Syrian Alawite (Shiite) regime which rules an otherwise predominantly Sunni population was one of the main reasons Syria formed a political alliance with Iran after the Islamic Revolution (Rabinovitch and Brun 2017, p. 25).

Israel's new fear of an Islamic coordinated attack reached a peak during 2011–2013, the first years of the Arab Spring, and has decreased somewhat since then (Magen 2015, pp. 119–20). During the Arab Spring, the Islamic encirclement of Israel was seen as almost complete, as new Islamic actors joined old ones in launching attacks from Israel's borders. New Jihadist groups joined Hezbollah on the Syrian border; in Egypt, a Muslim Brotherhood governmen<sup>t</sup> came to power and Salafi-Jihadist groups were established in the Sinai. The IDF's 2013 assessment of how a future confrontation might begin envisioned a multifront confrontation: Islamist organizations, trying to penetrate the Golan Heights, Hezbollah firing rockets on all of Israel, jihadists in Sinai firing rockets on Eilat, and Hamas activists storming an Israeli checkpoint on the Gaza border (Freilich 2018, pp. 57, 68). In August 2013, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood governmen<sup>t</sup> was toppled by a military coup, and the new regime was as anxious as Israel to keep their peace agreemen<sup>t</sup> and eradicate the jihadists in Sinai. However, the preoccupation of Israel's security system with religion's role in shaping the environment in the Middle East remained, as is evident in the 2016 assessment of the chief of Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate, Herzi Halevi: "We are moving from a conflict of borders to a conflict of religions, especially inside Islam, between Sunna and Shia, but also between Radical Islam against Western culture" (Ofer 2016).

At the start of the 2020s, as the Syrian regime no longer poses a military threat to Israel due to nine years of civil war, *all* the actors working against Israel are religious. For 21st century Israeli decisionmakers, the strategic reference point is no longer the secular Arab countries, as it was until the 1970s. It is no longer a Palestinian nationalist movement, guided by a secular ideology and having no religious goals, as it was between the 1970s and the 2000s. It is revolutionary, radical Islamic actors, most of them nonstate.

This religionization of Israel's map of threats is closely tied to the remarkable success of Ben-Gurion security doctrine—with its three "religious" key-points—in achieving its goals. Under the doctrine, Israel defeated every coordinated attack by the Arab countries *and* removed the historical part of Jerusalem, lslam's third most sacred place, from Muslim custodianship in the 1967 War. The 1967 loss of Arab control over the parts of Jerusalem historically important to Muslims, especially the Al-Sharif compound, was a seminal event for modern Islam and Middle Eastern politics. In Muslim discourse, it is called the "Naksa"—the "failure" or the "disaster" in Arabic (Milton-Edwards 2006, p. 78). This humiliation of the Arab-Muslim world, together with dire social and economic conditions in the Arab states, constituted a catalyst of "disenchantment" of the Arab world from the secular ideologies of Pan-Arabism and Marxism during the 1970s (Hatina 1994, p. 14; Steinberg 2002, p. 128). Mati Steinberg's description of the Islamization that followed in the Gaza Strip during the 1970s is true of the Islamization that took place in the entire Middle East: "While the generation of the 1950s found its way to nationalism after it despaired of Islam, some of the new generation of the 1970s paved a way for itself through a return to Islam, after it lost its taste for nationalism" (Steinberg 2002, p. 128).

The close connection between security events and individual religiosity was also evident on the Jewish side of the Israel-Arab conflict. The conquest, during the 1967 Six Day War, of the Old City of Jerusalem and biblical areas of Israel, including the Cave of the Patriarchs, Rachel's Tomb and Joseph's Tomb, brought about a national and religious revival for Jews in Israel and the world over (Sandler 2007, p. 354). The 1973 Yom Kippur War reinforced this religionization process. A crisis of faith in the secular ideology of socialist Zionism, which had dominated the state since its inception, was sparked by the failure of Israeli intelligence to ge<sup>t</sup> wind of the coming attack of the Egyptians and Syrians, the helplessness of the political and military leaderships during the first days of the war, and the high number of casualties at the end of the war. Many young Israelis began to search for meaning in alternative, spiritual ideologies, including those of Judaism and the Jewish settlement enterprise in the liberated territories, spearheaded by Israel's national-religious community (Baumgart-Ochse 2014, p. 416).

The Jewish settlement enterprise in the territories was as much a result of the Yom Kippur War as of the Six Day War. It began in 1974, when the religious-national movement sought to strengthen the weakened national morale in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War and to prevent future withdrawals from Judea, Samaria and Gaza, like the withdrawals from parts of Sinai and the Golan Heights which Israel had agreed to under the 1973 ceasefire agreements (Peri 1999, p. 90; Baumgart-Ochse 2014, p. 416). The settlement enterprise has mostly attracted religious Jews and is guided by an ideology that is clearly religious and messianic in nature. This has provided additional vindication for the Arab world's reinterpretation of its conflict with Israel as a conflict between religions, rather than nations.

How did the religionization of the Arabs and the Jews influence the manner in which Israeli national-security policymakers related to religion? This is what the next section will explore.
