“Religious-Zionism”: Signifier without Signified? Or—Is Religious-Zionism Still Alive?

In the public discourse and the research literature, the signifier “religious-Zionism” is usually viewed as denoting a specific group located midway between secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews. This location does not turn religious-Zionism into a residual category including whoever is not part of the two others. Quite the contrary. Religious-Zionism used to be a group with unique characteristics, including values and a normative fullness of its own. I argue in this article that, at present, the category “religious-Zionism” no longer signifies a specific group due to a series of centrifugal processes affecting it. Its ethos, myth, textual web, and authority principle have collapsed and the signifier reflects no more than a political and rabbinic discourse attempting to control the breakdown.