David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, wasn't a practicing Jew and ate ham sandwiches. Theodor Herzl, who founded the movement, wrote in his diary: "I am completely irreligious." The entire ideological foundation was built by secular and often atheist Jews, not religious ones. This matters because the modern framing of Israel as a religious or theistic project is historically backwards. It was always a political and nationalist project wearing borrowed religious language.