Brit HaKanaim
Covenant of the Zealots) was a radical Jewish underground organisation which operated in Israel between 1950 and 1953, in opposition to the widespread trend of secularisation in the country.
[citation needed] On the evening of May 14, 1948, "the sovereignty of the State of Israel was solemnly proclaimed during a ceremony at the Tel Aviv museum – a true crowning achievement of the Zionist movement half a century after its founding congress".
[3] Zionism was historically constituted as "a national movement led by Jews that rebelled to the Orthodox leadership and followed by the modernisation of Jewish life that began in the 18th century".
[4] "European" Jews who aspired to receive a comprehensive and up-to-date education and to exercise modern and worldly professions gradually came out of their closed communities to integrate into surrounding societies.
[4] On the relationship between religious orthodoxy and Zionism and his political conjugation, Theodor Herzl wrote in his programmatic book A Jewish State: Should We Become a Theocracy?
The community of scholars of the sacred texts of Judaism, which populated it, according to which every subject considered "worldly" was kept out of the course of study, could only be an ideal forge of figures among the students in open contrast to the secularisation that the Israeli government was intent on imposing.
Among the Orthodox communities, the Israeli government's policy of insisting that the children of Jewish immigrants, mostly religious or traditionalist, who arrived after the advent of the State of Israel should study in the secular national education system soon became unpopular.
The members of Brit HaKanaim perceived this "as the initial phase of a cultural war intended to put an end to the Orthodox world and therefore felt an obligation to fight it".
[7] Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu himself recalled how his concerns and subsequent intention to establish Brit HaKanaim stemmed from the issue of education: When I was at the Porat Yosef Yeshiva, I learned for the first time what was happening regarding the educational situation of immigrant children in the camps for newcomers...I could not tolerate this catastrophe...I thought that we could use the underground movement to establish a Torah-based way of life in the nation....In addition to the 'educational conflict', there was also the issue of the Sabbath to increase tensions between secular and religious.
[6] With these two acts of violence, the terrorist organisation Brit HaKanaim made its debut on the scene of the newly founded State of Israel.
The plan, devised by Brit HaKanaim, was that once a homemade smoke bomb had been thrown into the building, another activist, named Noah Wermesser, was to cut off the electricity to the Knesset.
[9] After an early closure of the Knesset meeting, and before they had time to implement their plan, the members of the group were arrested by the Shin Bet, which had managed to infiltrate two agents into the underground network.
[9] This was one of the first obvious cases in which a religious elite, educated according to the principles and teachings imparted at the Porat Yosef Yeshiva, decided to set up a terrorist organisation on an ideological-religious basis.
These rabbis did not conceive religion and politics as two separate and distinct tracks, but as necessarily intertwined, since there could be no people of Israel without the observance of the sacred texts and precepts contained therein.
