Ilan Pappé nails the core contradiction. Early Zionism was, in large part, a secular nationalist movement; yet it reached for scripture like a real-estate deed. In Pappé’s own framing, secular Jews set out to “secularize Jewish life” while using the Bible to justify colonizing Palestine – not out of piety, but as a legitimizing myth for a political project.

Let’s be blunt: Zionism is not a religion. It is a modern political ideology that instrumentalized religion – rhetorically, ceremonially, and diplomatically – to claim land and neutralize opposition. Pappé’s scholarship tears through the fog: the Bible was mobilized as a mythic title deed, while the core of the project remained secular state-building by European settlers in a colonized province of the dying Ottoman Empire.

If the theological register provided the halo, British imperial paperwork provided the hammer. The Balfour Declaration (1917) promised a “national home for the Jewish people” in a territory already peopled, and it did so in the vocabulary of........

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