Letters To The Editor Zionism Points

Posted: January 29, 1986

In his Jan. 19 review of Franklin Ford's book Political Murder Thomas Slaughter makes remarks that are either poorly phrased or grossly misinformed.

To name only one, it is patently false that there is an "absence of clear distinction between religion and politics . . . within Zionism." For the most part, Zionist thinkers and statesmen have striven to separate religion from politics. Such was the legacy of Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, and he bequeathed that legacy to the two mainsteam ideologies of Zionism, socialist and revisionist.

Religious Zionism and religious Zionist political parties have always existed, of course, but they represent the views of a small minority of the inhabitants of Israel. (True, in the last decade, thanks largely to unrelenting hostility from the Arab world, some Israelis attempting to make sense out of their troubled lives have embraced a militant orthodoxy that does not tolerate the church-state dualism with which we in the West live so comfortably.)

Derek Jonathan Penslar

Philadelphia.

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