In 2023, Israeli politics were rocked by two major upheavals. The first was the growing popular struggle against Benjamin Netanyahu and his “judicial reforms” (what the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz called a judicial coup). The second, of course, was the beginning of the genocide against Gaza. These were the before and after of the 7 October attacks by Hamas: a popular, ostensibly prodemocratic movement demanding government accountability and the end of Netanyahu’s lengthy regime, versus the unleashing of the worst kind of state violence against a colonized, caged, and mostly civilian population. Israelis who had previously taken to the streets in protest by the tens and hundreds of thousands returned to military uniform as they were called up for reserve duty in the eliminationist war effort against the Gaza Strip and its 2.2 million residents. At first blush, these may appear to be two radically divergent moments, but the numbers betray something far more complicated, with both the protest movement against Netanyahu and the genocide he spearheaded garnering overwhelming popular support and participation from Jewish Israelis.
Published prior to that historical watershed and based on prepandemic research, Stacey Gutkowski’s Religion, War and Israel’s Secular Millennials is a thorough text with much to offer scholars of Jewish Israeli society and others who wish to understand the lead-up to the genocide. Gutkowski’s deep dive into the millennial cohort of secular Israelis (hilonim) provides a window into the workings of one of the fundamental political divisions in Jewish Israeli society, the much touted rift between religious and secular Jews. Rather than focusing on the more disruptive issues of this divide, such as the public observance of the rules of the Sabbath or the draft of ultra-Orthodox Jews, Gutkowski considers the self-conceptions and lifeworlds of millennial hilonim as they have developed in relation to political and social events in the post-Oslo era, and how they understand their personal experience with these debates. In particular, she argues that millennial hilonim position themselves as what she calls “fulcrum citizens,” taking what they understand as a balanced or “reasonable” view in a political field dominated by religious and political extremists.
It is this central organizing principle of reasonableness that may help to bridge the two seemingly disparate political moments above. The connection to the first of those moments—the popular movement against Netanyahu and his attack on the judiciary—is literal; one of the major points of contention was the reasonableness doctrine used by the courts to maintain oversight over administrative government decisions that would be otherwise unaccountable to either the judiciary or the electorate. The enshrinement of reasonableness in legal practice speaks to a cultural currency that extends well beyond the millennial hilonim who are the subject of Gutkowski’s book.
It may be tempting to think that the genocide marks the fundamental departure of reasonableness. For example, if you compare it to what Eyal Weizman has called the lesser evil approach to destruction deployed by the Israeli military in previous wars on Gaza, it is clear that this approach has been abandoned in favor of total destruction. But, for Gutkowski, reasonableness is neither naturally occurring nor a fully stable standard from which the unreasonable may deviate. Rather, she considers reasonableness the sentiment at the core of millennial hiloni experience.
Following Talal Asad’s work on secular formations, Gutkowski argues that millennial reasonableness has been shaped by a rise of “neo-Romanticism” in that generation that bears some resemblance to 19th-century Romanticism, which privileged personal experience and expression while also supporting the collective formation of the nation. As a dialectical relationship between personal or individual and ethnonational, she writes that neo-Romanticism lends structure to millennial hiloni deliberation and self-conceptions vis-à-vis reasonableness, while producing a range of positions on political issues.
Religion, War and Israel’s Secular Millennials comprises six data-heavy chapters that will be of interest to experts and scholars, although less so to undergraduate students who may not appreciate quite so much detail. The book explores the dynamics of “hiloniness” (secularity) in Israel and its particular neo-Romantic inflection among millennials, who the author argues position themselves as fulcrum citizens. But Gutkowski’s most interesting work may be found less in the conceptual vocabulary she develops than in how she unpacks data on Israeli militarism and the specificity of Israel as “homeland” in relation to religion.
At a time when many hilonim have softened their views toward certain aspects of Jewish religious (or traditional) practice, Gutkowski attends to how historical and political changes since the 1993 Oslo Accords have shaped a hiloni habitus in relation to both Jewish and Palestinian religious Others. She takes her cue from her informants, whose neo-Romantic politics privilege personal experience, to consider the distinct ways that millennial hilonim have come into conversation—agonistic or otherwise—with Jewish religion. For instance, the book tracks how millennial conscripts experienced policy changes within the military, which in the first ten years of the century shifted to prioritize the strengthening of Jewish consciousness. Many hilonim found themselves for the first time unable to opt out of keeping kosher or attending lectures on Jewish identity that privileged religious practice. As a result, many of them began to understand themselves as an embattled minority within Jewish Israeli society, while at the same time fighting actual battles (wars) that led them to believe that “the most ‘reasonable’ thing is to park your differences with other Jews at the door” (p. 125).
Gutkowski’s account provides a window into how such reasonableness may stretch and bend to accommodate both the before and the after of 7 October 2023—both the popular movement against Netanyahu’s attempts to consolidate power and the overwhelming willingness to execute a genocide under his leadership. Gutkowski emphasizes the importance of the state policy of separation of Palestinians and Israeli Jews, in light of the neo-Romantic privileging of personal experience. The vanishing of everyday social connection to non-Jews strengthened Jewish solidarity and the identification of Jewishness with the state. Following this argument, we may see how the millennial hiloni habitus would be vulnerable to the 7 October attacks, which can be said to have touched or warped the personal experience of every Israeli. If millennial hilonim already felt themselves to be a reasonable, if embattled, minority, we may see how attacks on secular institutions such as kibbutzim or a music festival might stretch the boundaries of that reasonableness to include the incalculable violence of the last two years.
It is no small feat that even after the rapid and horrific events of the last two years, Religion, War and Israel’s Secular Millennials continues to offer so much to our understanding of the present. Moreover, as we watch the increasing unreason of ascendant fascism in the United States, Gutkowski’s text serves as an important reminder of the limits of the discourse of reasonableness, and its inadequacy as a response to state violence.
