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THE FUNDAMENTALIST DILEMMA: LESSONS FROM THE ISRAELI HAREDI CASE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2016

Netanel Fisher
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Abstract

This article explores the “fundamentalist dilemma,” or how fundamentalist movements participate in secular political systems, especially when they gain prominent political positions that allow them to impose their extreme ideology on the entire society. After analyzing prevailing responses to this dilemma, ranging from political integration to aggressive takeover, the article turns to the case of Israeli Haredim. It explores three models of political integration through which Haredim have applied religious practices in the public sphere: protest, consolidation, and takeover. The study's main finding is that, opposite to a commonly accepted assumption that fundamentalists’ integration into secular politics causes them to moderate, the more political power that fundamentalists accrue the stronger is their tendency to promote their religious agenda. Yet the Israeli Haredi case also reveals the limitations of this tendency: fundamentalists often restrain their expansionist instinct when having to take nonfundamentalist reactions into consideration.

Keywords

Arab SpringfundamentalismHaredimIsraelreligion and politics
Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , August 2016 , pp. 531 - 549
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

NOTES

Author's note: Research for this article was supported by The Open University of Israel's Research Fund (grant no. 102120). I thank Menachem Friedman and Benyamin Neuberger for their valuable insights. I am also grateful to the anonymous referees for their useful comments, which helped me to improve my analysis.

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