625A.D. In Medina, the chief casualties of this Muslim success were the three Jewish tribes of Qaynuqah, Nadir and Qurayzah, who were determined to destroy Muhammad and who all independently formed alliances with Mecca. They had powerful armies, and obviously posed a threat to the Muslims, since their territory was so situated that they could easily join a besieging Meccan army or attack the ummah from the rear. When Qaynuqah staged an unsuccessful rebellion against Muhammad in 625, they were expelled from Medina, in accordance with Arab custom. Muhammad tried to reassure Nadir, and made a special treaty with them, but when he discovered that they had been plotting to assassinate him they too were sent into exile, where they joined the nearby Jewish settlement of Khaybar, and drummed up support for Abu Sufyan among the northern Arab tribes. Nadir proved to be even more of a danger outside Medina, so when the Jewish tribe of Qurayzah sided with Mecca during the Battle of the Trench, when for a time it seemed that the Muslims faced certain defeat, Muhammad showed no mercy. The seven hundred men of Qurayzah were killed, and their women and children sold as slaves.
The massacre of Qurayzah was a horrible incident, but it would be a mistake to judge it by the standards of our own time. This was a very primitive society: the Muslims themselves had just narrowly escaped extermination, and had Muhammad simply exiled Qurayzah they would have swelled the Jewish opposition in Khaybar and brought another war upon the ummah. In seventh-century Arabia an Arab chief was not expected to show mercy to traitors like Qurayzah. The executions sent a grim message to Khaybar and helped to quell the pagan opposition in Medina, since the pagan leaders had been the allies of the rebellious Jews. This was a fight to the death, and everybody had always known that the stakes were high. The struggle did not indicate any hostility towards Jews in general, but only towards the three rebel tribes. The Quran continued to revere Jewish prophets and to urge Muslims to respect the People of the Book. Smaller Jewish groups continued to live in Medina, and later Jews, like Christians, enjoyed full religious liberty in the Islamic empires. Anti-semitism is a Christian vice. Hatred of the Jews became marked in the Muslim world only after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent loss of Arab Palestine. It is significant that Muslims were compelled to import anti-Jewish myths from Europe, and translate into Arabic such virulently anti-semitic texts as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, because they had no such traditions of their own. Because of this new hostility towards the Jewish people, some Muslims now quote the passages in the Quran that refer to Muhammad's struggle with the three rebellious Jewish tribes to justify their prejudice. By taking these verses out of context, they have distorted both the message of the Quran and the attitude of the Prophet, who himself felt no such hatred of Judaism.
Karen Armstrong is described in glowing terms by the esteemed referees on the cover of her book, ‘The Battle for God' (see below). This honourable lady has what it takes to tell historical truths – her ‘state of knowledge’ is as near-perfect as it can be for an investigative scholar. Her main point regarding the Jews was that Zionism went against Judaism in definitive respects. Her background is reported as follows: ‘Karen Armstrong spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun. After leaving her order in 1969, she took a degree at Oxford University and taught modern literature. She is considered one of the foremost commentators on religious affairs in both Britain and the United States. She teaches at the Leo Baeck College for the Study of Judaism and the Training of Rabbis and Teachers and was awarded the 1999 Muslim Public Affairs Council Media Award.
‘Aloof and intelligent, Armstrong stands on the shore and gives a brilliantly lucid account of those capsizing, floundering and even drowning in the divine ocean. She has written a splendidly readable book ... Armstrong has a dazzling ability: she can take a long and complex subject and reduce it to the fundamentals, without oversimplifying.’ Sunday Times
‘This is the most fascinating and learned survey of the biggest wild goose chase in history – the quest for God. Karen Armstrong is a genius.’ A.N. WILSON
Highly readable and ought to be read ... Karen Armstrong has read widely, has missed nothing, and gives us as solid a purview of the God of the past as it would be possible to find in a book. ANTHONY BURGESS, Observer
‘Only those who think they know it all will fail to be fascinated by Armstrong's search for God.’ The Economist
‘Witty, informative and contemplative.’ New York Times Book Review
‘In her arresting account Armstrong shows a reverent curiosity and a generosity of spirit, refreshing the understanding of what one knows and providing a clear introduction to the familiar ... For anyone knowing little of Islam, and dismayed by recent outbreaks of fundamentalism in the Islamic world, Armstrong's celebration of the variety of Islamic debate about God and the nature of society will be of especial value.’ ROBERT RUNCIE Weekend Telegraph
It was former British Home Secretary, Jack Straw, who in his autobiography ‘Last Man Standing’, recommended Karen Armstrong's books on Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.
From page 149 in ‘The Battle for God':
‘The Orthodox [Jews] were appalled by the Zionist movement in all its forms. There had been two attempts to create a form of religious Zionism during the nineteenth century, but neither had received much support. In 1845, Yehuda Hai Alkalai (1798-1878), a Sephardic Jew of Sarajevo, had tried to make the old messianic myth of the return to Zion a program for practical action. The Messiah would not be a person but a process that “will begin with an effort of the Jews themselves; they must organize and unite, choose leaders, and leave the land of exile.” Twenty years later, Zvi Hirsch Kallischer (1795-1874), a Polish Jew, made exactly the same point in his Devishat Zion (“Seeking Zion," 1862). Alkalai and Kallischer were both attempting to rationalise the ancient mythology and, by bringing it down to earth, were secularising it. But to the vast majority of devout, observant Jews, any such idea was anathema. As the Zionist movement gained momentum during the last years of the nineteenth century, and achieved an international profile in the big Zionist conferences held in Basel, Switzerland, the Orthodox condemned it in the most extreme terms. In the premodern world, myth was not supposed to be a blueprint for practical action, which was strictly the preserve of logos. [The word logos means the word of God or principle of divine reason and creative order]. The function of myth had been to give such action meaning and ground it spiritually. ... Any human attempt to achieve redemption or “hasten the end" by taking practical steps to realise the Kingdom in the Holy Land, was abhorrent. Jews were even forbidden to recite too many prayers for the return to Zion. To take any kind of initiative amounted to a rebellion against God, who alone could bring redemption; anyone who took such action was going over to the “Other Side,” the demonic world. Jews must remain politically passive. This was a condition of the existential state of Exile. In rather the same way as Shia Muslims, Jews had outlawed political activism, knowing all too well from Jewish history how potentially lethal it could be to incarnate myth in history.
To this day, Zionism and the Jewish state which the movement would create have been more divisive in the Jewish world than modernity itself. A response to Zionism and the State of Israel, for or against, would become the motive power of every form of Jewish fundamentalism. It is largely through Zionism that secular modernity has entered Jewish life and changed it forever. This is because the first Zionists were brilliantly successful in turning the Land of Israel, one of the holiest symbols of Judaism, into a rational, mundane, practical reality. Instead of contemplating it mystically or halakhically, the Zionists settled the Land physically, strategically, and militarily. For the vast majority of the Orthodox, in these early years, this was to trample blasphemously upon a sacred reality. It was a deliberate act of profanation that defied centuries of religious tradition.
For the secular Zionists were quite blatant about their rejection of religion. Their movement was indeed a rebellion against Judaism. Many of them were atheists, socialists, Marxists. Very few of them observed the commandments of the Torah. Some of them positively hated religion, which they thought had failed the Jewish people by encouraging them to sit back passively and wait for the Messiah. Instead of helping them to struggle against persecution and oppression, religion had inspired Jews to retreat from the world in strange mystical exercises or the study of arcane texts. The spectacle of Jews weeping and clinging to the stones of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the last relic of the ancient Temple, filled many Zionists with dismay. This apparently craven dependence upon the supernatural was the obverse of everything that they were trying to achieve. The Zionists wanted to create a fresh Jewish identity, a New Jew, liberated from the unhealthy, confining life of the ghetto. The New Jew would be autonomous, the controller of his own destiny in his own land. But this quest for roots and self-respect amounted to a declaration of independence from Jewish religion.
The Zionists were, above all else, pragmatists, and this made them men of the modern era. Yet they were all profoundly aware of the explosive “charge" of the symbol of the Land. In the mythical world of Judaism, the Land was inseparable from the two most sacred realities, God and the Torah. In the mystical journey of the Kabbalah, the land was linked symbolically to the last stage of the interior descent into the self, and was identical with the divine Presence the Kabbalist discovered in the ground of his being. The Land was thus fundamental to Jewish identity. However practical their approach, Zionists recognised that no other land could really “save" the Jews and bring them psychic healing. Peretz Smolenskin (1842-95), who was bitterly opposed to the rabbinic establishment, was convinced that Palestine was the only possible location for a Jewish state. Leo Pinkster (1821-91) was only converted to this idea slowly, and against his better judgment, but he finally had to admit that the Jewish state had to be in Palestine. Theodore Herzl had nearly lost the leadership of the Zionist movement at the Second Unionist Conference in Basel (1898) when he had suggested a state in Uganda. He was forced to stand before the delegates, raise his hand, and quote the words of the Psalmist: “Jerusalem, if I forget you, may my right hand wither!” Zionists were ready to exploit the power of this mythos to make their wholly secular and even Godless campaign a viable reality in the real world. That they succeeded was their triumph. But their endorsement of this mythical, sacred geography would be as problematic as ever when they tried to translate it into hard fact. The first Zionists had very little understanding of the terrestrial history of Palestine during the previous two thousand years; their slogan: “A land without a people for a people without a land!” showed a complete disregard for the fact that the land was inhabited by Palestinian Arabs who had their own aspirations for the country. If Zionism succeeded in its limited, pragmatic, and modern objective of establishing a secular Jewish state, it also embroiled the people of Israel in a conflict which, at this writing, shows little sign of abating’.
From page 201 in ‘The Battle for God':
‘Some Jews had begun to see the modern world as demonic long before the Holocaust. Indeed, the Nazi atrocity only confirmed them in their conviction that not only was the gentile world irredeemably evil, but most modern Jews were horribly culpable too. Until the 1930’s, most Orthodox Jews who wanted nothing to do with modern culture could immerse themselves in the life of the yeshiva or the Hasidic court. They had neither the desire nor the need to migrate to the United States or Palestine. But the convulsions of the 1930s and 1940s meant that survivors had no choice but to flee from Europe and the Soviet Union. Some of the Haredim went to Palestine and came face-to-face with the Zionists, who were now engaged in a desperate struggle to create a state that would save Jews from the coming catastrophe.
The Edah Haredis, the ultra-Orthodox Community in Jerusalem, had been vehemently opposed to Zionism long before the Balfour Declaration. It was a small group, which had attracted only 9000 out of the 175,000 Jewish residents of Palestine by the 1920s. Immersed in their sacred texts, the community had no idea how to organise themselves politically, but they would soon be joined by members of Agudat Israel, who had learned to play the modern political game. Agudat was still ideologically opposed to Zionism, but members had tried to balance the influence of the secularists by founding their own religious settlements in the Holy Land, where young people studied modern subjects along with Torah and Talmud. This concession appalled the more rigorous of the ultra-Orthodox, who believed that Agudat had gone over to the “Other Side.” From this intra-Orthodox conflict, a fundamentalist movement was born, inspired in the first instance, as so often, by quarrels between co-religionists.
The chief spokesman of this rejectionist Orthodoxy was Rabbi Hayyim Eleaser Shapira of Munkacs (1872- 1937), one of the most eminent Hasidic leaders of Hungarian Jewry, who began a vehement campaign against Agudat in 1922. In his view, Agudat members were collaborating with the Zionists and infecting the minds of innocent schoolchildren with the “poisonweed and wormwood" of the goyische Enlightenment, as well as “songs that speak of the settlement of the Land, and the fields and the vineyards of Eretz Israel – just like the Zionist poets". They were defiling the Holy Land, which was intended only for prayer and private study, by tilling its sacred soil. At a meeting in Slovakia, the most radical of the Haredim agreed with the Munkaczer rebbe, and signed a ban on any association with Agudat. Their view of Agudat, which had come into existence precisely to oppose Zionism, was inaccurate; the group was also aware that they were at odds with the vast majority of the Orthodox in eastern and western Europe, who disapproved of Zionism but regarded Shapira's ban on Agudat as too extreme. Nevertheless, they felt justified in this separatist policy by their instinctive horror of Zionism. One of the first of the Haredim to sign the ban was the young Rabbi Joel Moshe Teitelbaum (1888-1979), who would later become leader of the Hasidim of Satmar, Hungary, and the most vigorous of all the Haredi opponents of Zionism and the State of Israel.
When Shapira and Teitelbaum contemplated the Zionist kibbutzim in Palestine, they felt the same outrage and dread as, later, people felt when they heard about the Nazi death camps. This is not an exaggeration. Teitelbaum, who narrowly escaped extermination by migrating with his people to America, put the entire blame for the Holocaust on the great sin of the Zionists, who had “lured the majority of the Jewish people into awful heresy, the like of which has not been seen since the world was created .... And so it is no wonder that the Lord lashed out in anger.” These rejectionists could see nothing positive in the agricultural achievements of the Zionists, who were making the desert bloom, or the political acumen of their leaders, who were striving to save Jewish lives. This was an “outrage," a “defilement,” and the final eruption of the forces of evil. The Zionists were atheists and unbelievers; even if they had been the most strictly observant of Jews, their enterprise would still be evil because it was a rebellion against God, who had decreed that Jews must endure the punishment of the Exile and must take no initiative to save themselves.
For Shapira, the Land was too holy to be settled by any ordinary Jew, let alone by self-confessed Zionist rebels. Only the religious zealot who devoted his entire life to study and prayer could live there safely. Wherever there is a holy object, like Eretz Israel (the land of Israel), evil forces gather to attack it. The Zionists, Shapira explained, were simply the external manifestation of these demonic influences. The Holy Land itself, therefore, was teeming with wicked forces “which excite God's anger and fury.” Instead of God, it was Satan that now dwelt in Jerusalem. The Zionists who “pretend to ‘ascend’ to the Land, are in fact, descending to the depths of hell.” The Holy Land was empty of God and had become an inferno. Eretz Israel was not a homeland, as the Zionists maintained, but a battlefield. The only people who could safely dwell there in these terrible times were not householders and farmers, but holy warriors, “zealous fearers of God,” “valiant men of war" who set out “to fight the just war for the residue of God's heritage in the holy mountain of Jerusalem.” The whole Zionist enterprise imbued Shapira with existential terror. Teitelbaum saw the Zionists as the latest manifestation of the evil hubris that had consistently brought disasters upon the Jewish people: the Tower of Babel, the idolatry of the Golden Calf, the Bar Kochba rebellion in the second century CE which had cost thousand of Jewish lives, and the Shabbetai Zevi fiasco. But Zionism was the heresy par excellence; this was brazen arrogance which shook the very foundations of the world. It was no wonder that God had sent the Holocaust!
Hence the faithful must seperate themselves absolutely from this evil. Rabbi Yeshayahu Margolis, one of the most zealous of the Hasidim in Jerusalem, who wrote during the 1920s and 1930s, was a great admirer of both Shapira and Teitelbaum, and wanted Teitelbaum to become the leader of Edah Haredis. Margolis created a counterhistory of Israel which stressed the existence of an embattled minority that had consistently over the centuries felt obliged to rise up and fight other Jews in the name of God. The Levites had killed three thousand of the Israelites who had worshipped the Golden Calf while Moses was receiving the Torah on Mount Sinai; that was the reason that God had honoured them above the other tribes, not because of their service in the Temple. Moses had been a great zealot who had fought other Jews all his life. Phineas, the grandson of Aaron, had risen up against Zimri, even though he was a prince of Israel, because he had committed fornication. Elijah had stood up to Ahab and slaughtered the 450 prophets of Baal. These zealots, whose passion for God was often expressed in uncontrollable rage, were the true Jews, the faithful remnant. Sometimes they had to fight gentiles, sometimes their fellow Jews, but the battle was always the same. Faithful Jews must cut themselves off, root and branch, from such Jews as the members of Agudat who had left God and gone over to the Evil One. By collaborating with the Zionists, Agudat had done Jews “more harm than all the wicked of the earth.” To consort with them was sinful and to make a pact with Satan.
Hence the duty of segregation. Just as the Torah separates sacred from profane, light from darkness, milk from meat, and Sabbath from the rest of the week, so the righteous must keep themselves apart. The renegades would never return to the fold; by living and praying separately from these wicked Jews, the true Haredim were simply expressing physically the ontological gulf that existed between them at a metaphysical level. But this fearful vision meant that, living as they were in the midst of satanic evil, every detail of the lives of the faithful had cosmic importance. Matters of dress, methods of study, even the cut of the beard, must be absolutely correct. ... Where Protestant fundamentalists had sought to fill the void by seeking absolute certainty in stringent doctrinal correctness, these anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox sought certainty in a minute observance of divine law and customary observance. It is a spirituality that reveals almost ungovernable fear which can only be assuaged by the meticulous preservation of old boundaries, the election of new barriers, a rigid segregation, and a passionate adherence to the values of tradition.
This rejectionist vision is utterly incomprehensible to Jews who regard the Zionist achievement as wondrous and salvific. This is the dilemma that Jews, Christians, and Muslims have all had to face in the twentieth century: between the fundamentalists and those who adopt a more positive attitude to the modern secular world there is an impassable gulf. The different groups simply cannot see things from the same point of view. Rational arguments are of no avail, because the divergence springs from a deeper and more instinctual level of the mind. When Shapira, Teitelbaum, and Margolis contemplated the purposeful, pragmatic, and rationally inspired activities of the secular Zionists, they could only see them as godless and, hence, as demonic. When later they and their followers heard about the rationalised, practical, and ruthlessly directed activities of the Nazis in the death camps, they experienced them as similar to the Zionist enterprise. Both revealed the absence of God, and were, therefore, satanic and nihilistic, destructively trampling upon every sacred value that these Haredim held dear. To this day, the placards and graffiti on the walls of an anti-Zionist district in Jerusalem equate the political leaders of the State of Israel with Hitler. To an outsider such an equation is shocking, false, and perverse, but it gives us some idea of the profound horror that secularism can inspire in the heart of a fundamentalist.
The very idea of Jewish apostates setting up a secular state in Eretz Israel violated a taboo. Over the centuries, the lost land had acquired a symbolic and mystical value that linked it with God and the Torah in a sort of holy trinity. To watch its profanation by men who made no secret of the fact that they had cast religion aside inspired the same kind of mingled fury and dread as the violation of a sacred shrine, which, especially in the Jewish world, has often been experienced as a rape. The closer the Zionists came to achieving their objective, the more desperate some of the more radical Haredim became, until in 1938, Amram Blau and Aharon Katzenellenbogen, who had both defected from Agudat because of its alleged “collaboration" with the Zionists, seceded from the Edah Haredis. The Jewish community had recently levied a special tax to cover the cost of an organised defence against Arab attacks, and these rejectionists refused to pay it. To justify their refusal, Blau and Katzenellenbogen quoted a Talmudic story. In the third century, when armed guards were organizing the defence of one of the Jewish urban communities in Roman Palestine, two Jewish sages told them: “You are not the city's guardians but its destroyers. The scholars who study the Torah are the true guardians of the city.” The new group formed by Blau and Katzenellenbogen gave itself the Aramaic title Neturei Karta (“The Guardians of the City"): Jews would not be protected by the militant activities of the Zionists but by the devout and punctilious religious observance of the Orthodox. They challenged the perspective of the Zionists. In their view, when Jews had been given the Torah, they had entered a different realm from other nations. They were not supposed to get involved with politics or armed struggle, but to devote themselves to the affairs of the spirit. By summoning Jews back to the world of history, Zionists had in fact abandoned the Kingdom of God and entered a state which, for Jews, could make no existential sense. They had denied their very nature and set the Jewish people on a doomed course.
The more successful the Zionists became, the more the Neturei Karta were baffled. Why had the wicked prospered? When the State of Israel was established in 1948, so soon after the Holocaust, Teitelbaum and Blau could only conclude that Satan had intervened directly in history to lead Jews into a realm of meaningless evil and sacrilege. Most of the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox were able to accommodate the new state. They declared that it had no religious value and that Jews who lived in Israel were still in exile, just as they had been in the Diaspora. Nothing had changed. Agudat Israel was prepared to engage in shtadnalut – dialogue and negotiations – with the Israeli government to safeguard the religious interests of Jews, just as they had with the gentile governments in Europe. But Neturei Karta would have none of this. Immediately after the proclamation of statehood on May 14, 1948 they imposed a ban on any participation in the elections, refused to accept government funding for their yeshivot, and vowed never to set foot in government institutions. They also redoubled their attacks on Agudat, whose pragmatic acceptance of the state they regarded as the thin end of the wedge. “If [we] let up even to the slightest degree, God forbid, from our hatred of evil, of seducers and corrupters,” Blau insisted, “[if we breach] the separateness to which our holy Torah obliges us ... then the way is open to every forbidden thing, for we will have left the straight and narrow path for a crooked one.” The Zionist venture, which had enticed almost the entire Jewish people away from God, was plunging into a nihilistic denial of all decent and sacred values.
The more rooted Zionism became in the Jewish world and the more successful the new state, the deeper and more principled was Neturei Karta's repudiation of both. There could be no possibility of reconciliation, because the State of Israel was the creation of Satan. As Teitelbaum explained, it was not possible for a Jew “to adhere to both faith in the state and faith in our holy Torah, for they are complete opposites.” Even if the politicians and cabinet ministers were Talmudic sages and devout observers of the commandments, the state would still be a demonic profanity because it had rebelled against God and tried to snatch salvation and to advance the End of Days. Neturei Karta had no time for Agudat's efforts to get religious legislation passed in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. It was not a pious act to try to limit public transport on the Sabbath by law or to ensure that yeshiva students were exempt from the draft. This was simply converting a divine law into a human law; it amounted to an annulment of the Torah and a desecration of the Halakhah. As Rabbi Shimon Israel Posen, a leading scholar of the community of Satmar Hasidim in New York, said of the Agudat members of the Knesset: Woe unto them for the shame of it, that people who put on phylacteries [a phylactery is the small leather box containing Hebrew texts on vellum, worn by Jewish men at morning prayer as a reminder to keep the law] every day sit in that assembly of the wicked called the “Knesset" and, signing their names to falsehoods, forge the signature of the Holy One, blessed be He, heaven forfend. For they think they can decide by majority vote whether the Torah of truth will be trampled upon even further or whether God's Torah will be granted authority.
Yet even the Neturei Karta felt the attraction of Zionism. Blau's description of the Zionists as “seducers" is significant. A Jewish state in Jewish land is a temptation that tugs hard at the Jewish soul. This is part of the fundamentalists’ dilemma. They often feel fascinated and drawn toward the very modern achievements from which they recoil in horror. The Protestant fundamentalists' portrayal of Anti-Christ, the charming, plausible deceiver, shows something of the same conflict. There is a tension in the fundamentalist vision of modernity that can be explosive. As Blau indicated, the piety of the anti-Zionists is one of principled “hatred" and hatred often goes hand-in-hand with unacknowledged love. Haredim feel rage when they contemplate the State of Israel. They do not kill, but to this day they throw stones at cars in Israel whose drivers break the law by travelling on the Sabbath. Sometimes they will attack the house of a fellow Haredi who has failed to live up to the expected standard by, say, owning a television set or permitting his wife to dress immodestly. Such acts of violence are seen as kiddush hashem, “sanctification of God's name,” and a blow against the forces of evil that surround the Haredim on all sides and threaten to devour them. But it is not impossible that these violent assaults are an attempt to kill a buried yearning and attraction in their own hearts.
These anti-Zionist Haredim constitute a small minority: there are only about ten thousand of them in Israel, and several tens of thousands in the United States. But their influence is considerable. Even though most of the ultra-Orthodox are a-Zionist rather than anti-Zionist, the Neturei Karta and other radicals, such as the Satmar Hasidim, confront them with the dangers of cooperating too closely with the state. Their determined withdrawal from the State of Israel reminds the less zealous Haredim, who often feel a lack of integrity and authenticity in their cooperation with the Jewish state, that no matter how powerful and successful Israel has become in worldly terms, Jews are still in a state of existential exile and can take no legitimate part in the political and cultural life of the modern world.
This Haredi refusal to accept Israel as anything but a Satanic creation amounts to an act of constant rebellion against the state in which many of them live. When they stone cars on the Sabbath or tear down posters of scantily clad women advertising swimwear, they are rebelling against the secularist ethos of the Jewish state in which the only criterion for a course of action is its rational, practical utility. Fundamentalists in all three of the monotheistic faiths are in revolt against the pragmatic logos that dominates modern society to the exclusion of the spiritual, and which refuses the restraints imposed by the sacred. But because the secular establishment is so powerful, most have to confine their revolt to small symbolic acts. Their sense of weakness and tacit acknowledgment of their dependence upon the state in times of war, for example, can only increase the fundamentalists' rage. The vast majority of Haredim confine their protest to a determined retreat from the secular state and to the establishment of a counterculture which challenges its values at every turn’.