This paper will explore how religious writers in Egypt re-configured Islamist discourse following Cairo’s cataclysmic defeat in the June War of 1967. While Israel’s military victory is usually thought to have triggered an Islamist ‘revival’ in Egypt, the dynamics informing this ‘resurgence’ in the immediate aftermath of the war have received relatively little attention within the vast literature on Islamism. A fairly prevalent explanation claims that many Egyptian Muslims ‘returned’ to their faith at a time of acute crisis because they viewed religion as a reassuring reservoir of spiritual solace and cultural authenticity. The determining cultural essentialism of such arguments, however, is deeply Orientalist. By contrast, Islamist ideologues in the period acknowledged that, despite its transcendent spiritual truth, ‘Islam’ offered no ‘ready-made solutions’ to their nation’s predicament. Thus, they were conscious of articulating novel doctrines to help Egypt overcome her defeat. This paper will trace the emergence of a body of Islamist resistance ideology through a close reading of two tracts from the period, Muhammad Jalal Kishk’s Al-Naksa wa al-Ghazw al-Fikri, and Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s Dars al-Nakba al-Thaniya. It will argue that interpretations of Zionist ideology proved crucial to the constitution of Islamist subjectivities in post-war Egypt. According to Islamists, the defeat revealed the extent to which secular nationalism had divided the Arab nation. By contrast, Israeli society had evinced unity of purpose and esprit de corps. Islamists argued that the Arab media’s emphasis on linguistic and socio-economic cleavages in Israeli society before the war had blinded the Egyptian public to the ways in which a shared faith actually lent the Zionist polity genuine cohesion. For Islamists, there were no common national or linguistic ties that bound a motley group of settlers from different countries to one another— apart from the Jewish faith. If Jewish settlers ‘returned’ to Palestine, this was because the land held religious significance for them. For Islamists, the execution of the Zionist project thus demonstrated that a successful ‘recovery’ of territory presupposed ‘religious’ consciousness. Therefore, they recommended ‘confessionalizing’ Arab identity by endorsing a ‘pan-Islamic’ nationalism. Aware that Zionists stressed martial aspects in the Jewish heritage, Islamists proposed emulating Zionism’s conversion of ‘the Jew’ into a ‘fighting Sabra’. Calls for jihad to liberate Palestine need to be seen in this context. The Islamists’ insistence on a ’return’ to particular Islamic tradition(s) needs to be understood, in part, as a derivative discourse and a mimetic practice.