Israel’s religious right is changing the state from within

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Palestinian political analyst and researcher from inside Israel. xwhatsapp-strokecopylinkgoogleAdd Al Jazeera on GoogleinfoIsraeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir attends a Sukkoth gathering calling for resettling Gaza with Jewish communities near the border with the Gaza Strip on October 21, 2024 in Southern Border, Israel [Amir Levy/Getty Images]In Israel, ultra-Orthodox and religious-nationalist forces are wielding growing political influence over questions that reach far beyond their traditional constituencies: gender segregation, religious education, rabbinical authority, the relationship between religious and civil law, and the meaning attached to settlement and territorial control. Their growing influence raises a broader question about religious fundamentalism and democratic power: what happens when fundamentalist forces do not need to overthrow the state because they can use its existing institutions to reshape it from within? The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan by force. But what does religious fundamentalism look like when it operates through elections, coalition politics and the institutions of the state? What, in that sense, would the rise to power of a “Jewish Taliban” look like in Israel? Picture Tel Aviv a few years from now. The cafes are still open. Women still walk the streets. Elections continue. The Knesset still meets. The Supreme Court has not shut its doors. No religious militia has seized power in a coup. Something deeper has changed, though. Sex-segregated spaces keep expanding, justified as respect for the religious public. Religious schools receive more public money while remaining free of any real obligation to teach science, maths or English. Religious demands carry greater weight in public life, while the limits of individual freedom are increasingly drawn around a religious-national vision of what the state should be. This shift is not taking place in a secular state or an equal political order. Israel was established as a Jewish state, while Palestinians have never enjoyed equality within the political system it created. Religion, meanwhile, has long shaped marriage and divorce, conversion, the Sabbath and the recognition of Jewish identity. What is changing is the growing power of religious and religious-nationalist forces to define the state’s Jewish character in more explicitly religious terms, both in public life and in claims to land and sovereignty. The outlines of that future are already visible. Today’s Knesset contains several Haredi and religious-nationalist parties: Shas, United Torah Judaism, Religious Zionism, Otzma Yehudit and Noam. They are not a single bloc, and they do not agree on everything. The Haredim mostly focus on the independence of religious education, military exemptions, budgets and religious institutions. Religious Zionism and the Kahanist right fuse religion with nationalism, settlement, war and control of the land. Despite those differences, their growing weight in coalition politics has brought a much wider range of religious demands into the centre of state policy. For Palestinians, the religious turn does not create the inequality they face. It brings religious entitlement into an existing ethnonational order. As national claims to land and sovereignty merge with the belief that Jewish control of the land fulfils a divine promise, Palestinians are treated not only as a demographic or security problem, but increasingly as obstacles to a religious-national vision of sovereignty. The underlying inequality is already visible in the Negev, in the demolition of villages and homes, the forced displacement of Bedouin communities and a planning system that denies Arab towns the same room to grow as Jewish ones. In the occupied West Bank, the convergence between that existing inequality and religious-nationalist power is even more explicit. Settlement policy, settler power and religious doctrine increasingly reinforce one another. Occupation as security policy and settlement as redemptive doctrine blur into one project. That religious framing can also make territorial compromise harder to legitimise. When control of land is presented as the fulfilment of a divine promise, withdrawal can be cast not simply as a political or strategic choice, but as the surrender of something no government had the right to give away. Religious power is also reshaping the terms of public life within Jewish Israeli society. Gender segregation is one example. Its expansion is often presented not as a restriction on individual freedom, but as an accommodation of religious freedom. Separating men and women becomes “cultural accommodation”. Restricting women in certain spaces becomes “protecting the freedom of the religious”. That framing shifts the question. When women are asked to sit at the back, or their participation is restricted at a ceremony, in an institution or on an academic programme, the debate tends to focus on how far the state should go to accommodate the needs of the religious public. The issue remains contested in the courts and in society. Gender segregation has not become the general rule. But the fact that these demands have moved from the margins into legislation, universities, the army and public institutions shows that the balance of power has already shifted. In July 2026, the Knesset passed legislation expanding gender-separated study in higher education to advanced degree programmes, showing how far such demands have moved into mainstream institutions. Education raises a similar question about the balance between religious autonomy and common civic obligations. The state funds a large Haredi education sector while the debate over whether those schools teach basic subjects drags on. Public money continues to support parts of the Haredi school system that are not required to teach the full core curriculum. The issue is therefore not simply whether Haredi communities should be free to educate their children according to their beliefs, but what the state can reasonably require in return for funding that education. The convergence of religious-nationalist ideology, territorial control and state power is also increasingly visible within the Israeli military. Religious Zionist influence has grown within combat and command ranks. For years, there has been debate over the use of religious language to motivate soldiers and over the tension between military orders and rabbinical authority, especially when the issue is evacuating settlements or holding land. The problem is not whether individual religious soldiers obey rabbis rather than their commanders. It is the growing overlap between military power, territorial control and a religious-nationalist ideology that treats control of the land as more than a political or strategic objective. When war is framed as a stage in religious redemption or the recovery of land promised by God, compromise starts to look like weakness, withdrawal like sin and political solutions like surrendering something sacred that politicians never owned in the first place. At its most consequential, fundamentalism can push political goals beyond the realm of ordinary negotiation by locating their authority not only in the will of citizens or governments, but in a divine will that one side claims the right to interpret. The existence of religious parties is of course not enough to say Israel has become a theocracy. Courts, a free press, an opposition, civil society and a large secular public remain. Religious demands continue to face resistance in the courts and within Israeli society itself. But democracies do not always collapse in a single day. Sometimes the elections keep running while the rules quietly change: rules about who counts as a full citizen, where freedom ends and who gets to define the common good. Israel does not need to abolish elections, close its courts or suddenly resemble Afghanistan under the Taliban for religious fundamentalism to reshape the state. Tel Aviv’s cafes can stay open. Elections can continue. Strong secular and liberal constituencies can remain. The formal institutions of democracy can survive while the meaning of citizenship, equality and individual freedom changes underneath them, and while an already unequal and oppressive order for Palestinians is further hardened as religious claims to land and sovereignty gain greater political force. The question is not simply whether democratic institutions survive, but what kind of political order they are being used to sustain. Democracy for whom, and on whose terms? The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance. 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