The Israeli Right Is Marching Under a New Flag

That flag has come to signify something that extends far beyond the Temple Mount itself. It has become a shared symbol for a broad political camp, stretching from committed Orthodox activists to national-religious communities, conservative traditionalists, and many secular or non-observant members of the Israeli right. Its growing visibility at the Flag March, on cars, along roadsides, and at settlement outposts reflects the emergence of a common political language that cuts across older religious and social boundaries.

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Yet the Temple flag does not carry the same meaning for everyone who waves it. For many, it expresses a vague attachment to Jewish sovereignty, religious identity, and national revival. For a more radical current, however, it signals the belief that the State of Israel, in its current form, has exhausted its historical mission. This current emerged with particular force after the 2005 disengagement from Gaza, when many religious-nationalist activists concluded that the state had betrayed its sacred purpose.

In their view, Israel can no longer be redeemed from within; it must be replaced by a different political order. Their ambition extends beyond securing Jewish prayer rights on the Temple Mount. It envisions a comprehensive transformation of the state itself: the construction of the Third Temple and the emergence of a Jewish theocratic order centered around it.

This is why the Temple icon cannot be understood merely as an expression of religious devotion. It is a declaration of political intent — a statement about the future that significant sectors of Israeli society now imagine and seek to build.

Over the years, the Flag March has served as a barometer of a broader radicalization whose assumptions have moved steadily into the mainstream. The growing prominence of the Temple flag marks another stage in this dangerous process.

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The summit’s failure, followed by Ariel Sharon’s highly provocative visit to the compound in September 2000, helped trigger the outbreak of the Second Intifada. Sharon became prime minister in January 2001 and went on to lead the military campaign that, by 2002, had dismantled much of the Palestinian Authority’s governing and security infrastructure.

Since the collapse of the peace process, the Israeli right in general — and the national-religious camp in particular — has increasingly placed the Temple Mount at the center of its political project. The goal has been to alter the status quo established in June 1967, one of whose central principles is the prohibition on Jewish prayer at the site, and ultimately to divide the compound into separate Muslim and Jewish areas of worship, following the model Israel imposes at Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs/Ibrahimi Mosque.

On the Temple Mount, partition would mean overturning an arrangement that has endured for roughly 1,300 years, in which the compound has functioned as an exclusively Muslim place of worship. For Palestinians, the fear is that such a move would become a step toward erasing Al-Aqsa Mosque as a Muslim place of worship and replacing it with a Third Temple.

The growing prominence of the Flag March, then, and the rising violence against Palestinians that accompanies it, cannot be separated from the political ascent of Israel’s religious-nationalist right, the growing influence of the Temple Mount movement, and the intensification of the struggle over sovereignty in Jerusalem.

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Marching in uniform

Over the past two decades, in which the Flag March became what it is today, a significant sociological shift has taken place within the Israeli army. Growing numbers of conservative and national-religious youths have passed through pre-military academies and yeshivot that combine military preparation with intensive ideological education. Many arrive in elite combat units with an explicit sense of mission, encouraged by rabbis, educators, and ideological institutions to reshape the army from within and place religious-nationalist values at the center of Israeli state power.

Today, many of those who take part in the Flag March each year go on to become combat soldiers. Indeed, the genocidal war the Israeli military is waging in the Gaza Strip has been carried out in part by soldiers who, only a few years earlier, had been participants in the march. The chant “May your village burn,” for years a favorite among the marchers, is now also commonly heard among soldiers in Gaza, while its message is regularly put into practice in the West Bank.

Nor has this shift been limited to the army’s lower ranks. While the religious-nationalist sector now constitutes the dominant social force in Israel’s ground forces, its influence is increasingly evident in the air force, navy, intelligence services, and security establishment as a whole.

It has also reached the ranks of commanders and senior officers — including major generals, the second-highest rank in the Israeli army. David Zini, appointed head of the Shin Bet in 2025, is one such figure: His formative years were shaped by institutions associated with Rabbi Zvi Yisrael Thau, the spiritual leader of the far-right, anti-LGBTQ Noam party, before he went on to study at Yeshivat Shavei Hebron in the Kiryat Arba settlement, an institution that places strong emphasis on assuming leadership roles in the army.

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The Temple Mount movement, too, is no longer confined to activist organizations and religious institutions. Recent reporting from Haaretz showed that Israel Police has begun actively recruiting religious-nationalist Temple activists to serve in the Temple Mount Unit, the force responsible for policing the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound. One unit commander circulated recruitment messages in right-wing and settler social media and WhatsApp groups advertising favorable employment conditions, inviting applicants to participate in what he described as “implementing sovereignty” on the Mount.

This is not just the work of activists entering state institutions from below. Another recent report revealed that Netanyahu has empowered National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir to oversee arrangements at the Temple Mount — a sign that the ongoing erosion of the status quo is sanctioned from the highest levels of government.

This institutional shift is accompanied by a broader ideological one. Across the media, politics, and the military, biblical language has been repeatedly deployed to justify the dehumanization, killing, and displacement of Palestinians. Soldiers on the ground, meanwhile, have openly described the rebuilding of the Temple as a motivation behind their actions.

The violence that has become emblematic of the Flag March — fueled in part by Temple-centered ideology — has thus expanded far beyond the streets of Jerusalem. It now extends into Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon; through Israeli air power, it reaches Beirut and Iran as well.

A flag for a new political order

None of this is coincidental. The war that began on October 7 is not merely an enraged response to Hamas’ war crimes; it reflects deeper political dynamics whose effects are visible on multiple fronts.

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The escalating violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and the forced displacement of rural communities, are not the crimes of a marginal extremist fringe, as right-wing politicians often claim. They are state-backed policies of directed expulsion, carried out by agents of the state. Among those implementing them are religious nationalists whose Temple flag flies at outposts alongside — and increasingly in place of — the national flag.

That flag has come to signify something that extends far beyond the Temple Mount itself. It has become a shared symbol for a broad political camp, stretching from committed Orthodox activists to national-religious communities, conservative traditionalists, and many secular or non-observant members of the Israeli right. Its growing visibility at the Flag March, on cars, along roadsides, and at settlement outposts reflects the emergence of a common political language that cuts across older religious and social boundaries.

Anyone following Jewish-Israeli activity on the Temple Mount — including Ben Gvir’s highly publicized visits — can see the breadth of this coalition. Those ascending the compound increasingly include ultra-Orthodox Jews praying alongside religious nationalists, despite opposition from their own rabbinic authorities. The trend also encompasses Chabad Hasidim, whose yellow Messiah-and-crown flag has become a popular patch on the uniforms of soldiers with no direct connection to the movement itself.

In the broader Jewish-Israeli public sphere, the practice of wearing four long tzitzit visibly outside one’s trousers has undergone a similar transformation: from a signal of religious observance into an identity marker associated with a wider political and cultural camp — the camp represented by the Flag March and the Temple icon.

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Yet the Temple flag does not carry the same meaning for everyone who waves it. For many, it expresses a vague attachment to Jewish sovereignty, religious identity, and national revival. For a more radical current, however, it signals the belief that the State of Israel, in its current form, has exhausted its historical mission. This current emerged with particular force after the 2005 disengagement from Gaza, when many religious-nationalist activists concluded that the state had betrayed its sacred purpose.

In their view, Israel can no longer be redeemed from within; it must be replaced by a different political order. Their ambition extends beyond securing Jewish prayer rights on the Temple Mount. It envisions a comprehensive transformation of the state itself: the construction of the Third Temple and the emergence of a Jewish theocratic order centered around it.

This is why the Temple icon cannot be understood merely as an expression of religious devotion. It is a declaration of political intent — a statement about the future that significant sectors of Israeli society now imagine and seek to build.