1 Introduction Michael Walzer’s Paradox of Liberation argues convincingly that the very success of national liberation is often the cause of its radical undoing. He compares three cases of successful struggles for liberation—Israel and India in 1948 and Algeria in 1962—all by secular liberation movements committed to Western values. And yet, in the states that they created a politics rooted in what we can loosely call fundamentalist religion is today very powerful. In three different countries, with three different religions, the timetable was remarkably similar: roughly twenty to thirty years after independence, the secular state was challenged by a militant religious movement. 1 What the liberators failed to properly appreciate, he argues, is the dif- ference between liberating their people from external rule and achieving independence, on one hand, and rendering them fellow democrats, on the other. Paradoxically, the very success of their efforts—the liberation of all three was enormously successful—blinded them to the need to liberate their people from an ingrained mindset of authoritarianism, submission, accommodation, and false consciousness. I accept the basic schema of Walzer’s argument but insist that what political Zionism found itself up against after 1967 had less to do with “fatalistic resignation” bred of centuries of exilic oppression than with the Pandora’s box of traditional 1. Michael Walzer, The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2015), p. xii. Menachem Fisch The Tragic Paradox of Political Zionism