Yedidia Stern, a renowned law professor at Bar-Ilan University, skullcap on his head, recalls how as a child, he walked the streets of Tel Aviv with his father on their way to the synagogue. He was dressed in a white shirt, just like his father, and the two of them were marching solemnly to welcome the Sabbath. He still remembers, as if the years had not passed, what it felt like to be a religious Jew in those early years of the state. It was tantamount to living on the edge of society. The then-young Israeli state was celebrating its secularism and Israeli experience, and viewed religion and skullcap-wearing religious Jews as characteristic of Jewish life in the Diaspora. For years, religious Jews were considered a minor sector, trailing behind secular Zionism.

“As a child, I believed that it was bound to be like that — that I and my religious friends were destined to it,” Stern reminisced in his office at the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem, where he serves as vice president of research. “At the time, I thought that since I belonged to a small, inconsequential sector, I could not hope for a great future. We had no big dreams. We regarded the secular (sector) as the lords of the land, and this was true in particular in Tel Aviv, the most secular of Israeli cities.”

Then, a military-political earthquake shook the land, at the height of which the settlers became the spearhead of Israeli national policy, both in the domestic arena and on the international front. The 400,000 national-religious activists who settled in the territories occupied after 1967 changed the secular world's perception of the religious Jews, and even more so, the way the latter perceived themselves. All of a sudden, they had been brought to the fore and socially elevated, and secular Israeli society was demoted, even lagged behind them. It is no secret that the settlers have been a top priority on the Israeli foreign and defense-policy agenda.

“I must say that the national-religious community has long since broken through all sectarian boundaries,” Stern explains. “In the community I belong to, we feel that it is our turn now in the relay race of Zionism.