In the years after the second intifada and the collapse of the Oslo process, what remained of Israel’s battered and disillusioned Zionist left exchanged the cause of peace for a new animating concern. While the struggle against “religious coercion,” against clericalism and fundamentalism, had been part of the left-wing agenda since the 1980s, it increasingly became the left’s central cause, as hope for a resolution to the conflict faded.
