In the Name of History and Heaven: A Semiotic Genealogy of Israeli Military Operation Names

• In Event: New Approaches to Measuring Religion and Its Effects

Abstract

How do states symbolically legitimate military violence across time? Drawing on an original database of 130 Israeli Defense Forces operations (1948-2025), this article identifies a shift from secular-nationalist to sacral-theological naming conventions. The proportion of operations invoking divine mandate, biblical prophecy, or religious calendars increased from 8 percent in Israel’s founding period (1948-1967) to 22 percent in the post-Oslo era (2000-2025). We conceptualize this trajectory as the sacralization of state violence: the strategic embedding of theological signifiers into official military discourse. Combining semiotic analysis with historical genealogy, we trace its institutional origins to the political realignment following the 1977 electoral victory of Likud, which enabled religious parties to expand influence over education policy, settlement expansion, and civil-military networks. Over time, graduates of religious-Zionist academies entered senior command positions, producing a cohort of officers whose theological worldviews reshaped the operational planning culture. We substantiate this mechanism through process tracing that integrates statistical evidence, meso-level institutional analysis of socialization and credentialing institutions, and micro-level documentation of commanders and political executives exercising discursive authority. The findings demonstrate that sacral naming is a form of elite strategic calculation amid institutional turnover. More broadly, the Israeli case illuminates a pathway of discursive capture observable in polities such as India, Turkey, and Russia, where governments fusing religious and nationalist ideologies deploy theological language to legitimate military force.

Authors

• Vural Kaptan, University of Heidelberg (Germany)

• Gad Yair, Hebrew University of Jerusalem