estruction of Jerusalem, Jewish cultural life in the various diasporas (Ashkenazi as well as Sephardi), and Jewish religion of the postbiblical eras (rabbinic Judaism, exemplified in the Talmud) were rejected or ignored.
For many reasons, the statist focus of Israeli civil religion did not continue after the June 1967 War. These reasons ranged from the greater traditionalism and piety of the Oriental immigrants, who were never satisfactorily engaged by the more limited scope of statism; to the exhaustion of the Labor Alignment, which, after the October 1973 War, had sought to embody socialist Zionism and Israeli modern statism as a manifestation of its own identity and agenda; to the rise of Begin's Likud Bloc with its populist appeals to ethnic traditionalism and an irredentist territorial program as a challenge to Labor Zionism's fading hegemony. Begin and his Likud championed a new civil religion to embody its identity and agenda. This new right-wing civil religion affirmed traditional Judaism and denigrated modernistic secularism - the reverse of the earlier civil religion. Unlike the statist version of Ben-Gurion's time, which focused on the Bible and pre-exilic Jewish history, the new civil religion was permeated by symbols from the whole of Jewish history. It gave special emphasis, however, to the Holocaust as a sign of the ultimate isolation of the Jewish people and the enduring hostility of the gentile world.
The new civil religion (which in its more political guise some have called the New Zionism) has brought traditional Judaism back to a position in the Jewish state very different from that which it occupied twenty, forty, or eighty years ago. After the June 1967 War, the New Zionists linked up with the revitalized and transformed neo-Orthodox - young, self-assured religious Jews who have self-consciously connected retention and Jewish settlement of the West Bank, the biblical Judea and Samaria, with the Messiah's advent. The rise of messianic right-wing politics gave birth in the mid-1970s to the irrendentist, extraparliamentary movement Gush Emunim, which in turn led to the Jewish terrorist underground of the 1980s. When the underground was uncovered and broken by Israeli security in April 1984, it had already carried out several attacks on Arabs, including, it was thought, Arab mayors, in the West Bank and was planning to destroy the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem. Even before the June 1967 War, however, Orthodox Judaism had been able to exert influence on Israeli society simply because its religious institutions were so historically entrenched in the society.
Data as of December 1988-->