the majority of the Hassidim and the Mitnagdim refuse to recognize the State of Israel. The secular nationalists, who continue to be the major force in Israel, are beyond the pale, but so are the "armed prophets." Indeed, in theory and even, most often, in political practice, the older fundamentalists find it easier to deal with the secular Zionists than with the "armed prophets." Not all of the secular Zionists insist that the State of Israel is the ultimate realization of Judaism, or of the meaning of Jewish history. Some (such as the late Gershom Scholem) hold the view that the creation of Israel was a necessary, rational solution to the needs of Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but that this political effort was no substitute for the messianic, redemptive drama. Some of the older fundamentalists can, de facto, come to terms with such Zionists, but the "armed prophets" were, and are, essentially more troublesome. They have asserted that they know what time it was on the clock of redemption. Even worse, they insisted that the Zionist effort, at least in their version, is realizing the redemption, soon.
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The battle between the fundamentalists and the "religious Zionists"the spiritual descendants of Alkalai and Kalisher, was waged in various forms for very nearly a century. At first, the ideological issue was of secondary importance, for neither group of fundamentalistsnot even the "religious Zionists"believed that the redemption was imminent. Never mind that Theodore Herzl had confided to his diary in 1897, at the opening of the first World Zionist Congress, the prediction that there would be a Jewish state in fifty years. Most Zionists were not that boldly visionary. Therefore many secularists waited for the gradual conquest of the Land, "one cow and one dunam" at a time; others thought that historic cataclysms such as the First World War provided opportunities for revolutionary and transforming political acts. The "religious Zionists" were thus free to believe that at some unspecified moment, as men and women built settlements, God would intervenebut not just yet.
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A new, transformingand ultimately threateningmotif was introduced in the first two decades of the twentieth century by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. He would become, in 1921, the first chief rabbi of the Jewish community in Palestine as it was formally constituted by the Zionists under the British Mandate. Kook was a religious
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