If you're an American, to be a Religious Zionist (RZ) means roughly that you're frum and you think that living in Israel is a good thing. You might even think that the State of Israel is an important step towards the ultimate redemption. That's about it.

Unfortunately, if you're an Israeli, you're talking about something altogether different. Here, Religious Zionism is weighed down by a whole lot of 19th century ideological baggage, thanks in good part to the takeover of the RZ education system by students of Rav Kook, as well as unhealed scars left by long moribund battles with anti-Zionist Haredim.

In brief caricature it goes like this:
Every nation has an "essence" which is inevitably distilled by certain historical processes. In the case of the Jewish People, the State lies at the heart of just such a process and as such is imbued with sanctity. Consequently, the State is the sole proper vehicle for advancing the objectives of the Jewish People: social welfare, enlightenment, religious education, etc etc.

This is the sort of Bolshevik claptrap the danger of which is painfully obvious to anyone not in its ideological grip. Unfortunately, most Israeli RZs are exactly in its ideological grip, whether they are aware of it or not. Every time I sit down with Mizrachi makhers here, whether they be rabbanim or politicians or just plain folk, the conversation founders on this issue. They are all convinced that the State should be solely responsible for curing the ill and supporting the poor, the State should be building shuls and mikvaot, the State should be appointing rabbanim and dayanim, the State should be legislating religion, the State should decide who is a convert, who is married, what is kosher.

You can talk yourself blue in the face demonstrating how the result of all this is that an anti-religious oligarchy is bastardizing Judaism and holding financially dependent religious communities by the balls. Try and explain that impoverished Jewish communities everywhere in the world independently supported shuls and mikvaot for thousands of years and only in Israel do mikvaot close because the moetzah datit hasn't sent the check. Blank stares. It's like suggesting that toilets should be fastened to the ceiling instead of the floor. Does not compute. That Kookian ideology is like an operating system -- not visible but every thought in the Israeli RZ universe passes through it.

So now the RZ world here is suffering from a major case of cognitive dissonance. Everything we have seen here over the past few years highlights the clear advantages of limiting state control over vital institutions to which the oligarchy is hostile. But this thought can barely be entertained. The result is the politics of immaturity. Some suddenly wish to cut themselves off from the State entirely, as if such a thing were even remotely possible. Others insist that the State remains wholly sacred no matter what outrages it perpetrates. Hatzofe, Makor Rishon and a zillion rags for reading bein gavra legavra are full of adolescent huffing and puffing. Some vastly overestimate their own power and some vastly underestimate it. Some think that if a stuttering yeshiva bochur knocks on a random door shilling for votes, Joe Israeli will be so overwhelmed by the radiance of Pure Truth that, shazam!, he'll switch his allegiance to Ichud Leumi. Others think that if they don't vote -- so there! -- somebody somewhere will give a damn. And some think it urgent that they dance ma yafis before the oligarchy and announce their everlasting loyalty to Kadima (or some such) because otherwise we'll be "distancing ourselves from the nation" -- as if only decadent secular leftist Ashkenazim qualify as constituting the "nation".

So it will continue until the RZ world lightens up a bit and stops taking the State so damn seriously. The State isn't the solution to all our problems and it isn't the sitra achra. It's a political organization run mostly by jerks. What we should be shooting for in the political arena is what informed citizens in normal places usually shoot for: to get the State off our backs a little and from time to time to replace these jerks with slightly better ones.