From its comparison of the periods before and after the region’s religionization, the article constructs a model for the analysis of religion’s impact on the formulation and implementation of national security policies. Then it explores how, after the 1970s, Israel’s conflict with its environment transformed from a secular, nationalist inter-state conflict into a conflict between two religions, and how this transformation influenced the role religion plays in formulating Israel’s national security strategy today. The article begins with an exploration of how young Israel understood the connection between religion and national security. Excluding the nonreligious aspects of Israel’s “Jewish” national security policy enables the development of a model of the relation between religion and national security that can be applied to polities where there is no overlap between religion and nationality. With the exception of assisting in the protection of synagogues abroad, as they are a favorite target of anti-Semitic and Islamic attacks, Israel does not fund or support the religious lives of Jews abroad, unlike many countries that support the religious lives of diasporas of their own religion ( Mandaville and Hamid 2018 Çitak 2010 Ahmed 2012). It therefore excludes, for example, the extension of the state’s protection to Jews everywhere-a basic principle of Israel’s security policy-because the relationship between Israel and the Jewish diasporas more closely resembles the relationships of other countries with their ethnic and national diasporas, rather than with their religious diasporas. To circumvent this problem, the analysis in this article includes only national security policies having a clear “religious” undertone: policies that were guided by assumptions on religious matters, that signified a serious attempt to utilize religion for security objectives, or that pushed decisionmakers towards perceiving religious actors differently than secular actors. On the other hand, the fact that the majority religion of Israel, Judaism, is both a nationality and a religion can be a potential problem when generalizing from the Israeli case to others. ![]() The process of theory development is also assisted by the greater than average number of connections existing in Israel between religion and national security-none of them so unique they are not found elsewhere, as the article’s last section shows. ![]() The time period of the Israeli case is also conveniently demarcated halfway through, in the late 1970s, by the religionization of the country’s environment, enabling the detection of patterns of continuity or change in the way a country in pursuit of national security approaches religion, when its environment shifts from mostly secular to mostly religious. Israel’s decisionmakers incorporated thinking about religion into its national security doctrine from the very inception of the state in 1948, unlike many other countries which did not do so prior to the 21st century. ![]() On the issue of religion and national security, Israel is an ideal case to generalize from because it provides the researcher with a longer than average period of time in which policymakers strategized over religious matters. At its conclusion, the article demonstrates that the model is applicable to other countries as well, using the case of France’s policies in the 21st century. The article proposes that religion’s effect on national security policymaking is comprised of three tiers that follow one another in the decision making sequence and, yet, are independent from one another: (1) operational beliefs embedded in the state’s security thinking on the relations between religion and security (2) opportunities and constraints on the state’s freedom of action, due to the role religion plays in global, regional and domestic politics as well as bilateral relations and (3) governmental utilization of religion to realize national security goals. To build this model, it analyses the influence of religion on Israel’s national security policymaking-before and after Israel’s security environment went through a process of religionization beginning in the 1970s. This article offers, for the first time, a theoretical model of religion’s influence on the formulation and execution of national security policies.
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