Ofira Gruweis-Kovalsky Religious Radicalism, the Zionist Right, and the Establishment of the State of Israel Introduction On May 16 1951, newspapers throughout the State of Israel ran headlines pro- claiming: “Extremist thugs plot Knesset bombing to sabotage debate on drafting women.” The plot was reportedly headed off by the Israeli security services, thereby “thwarting an attack on the Knesset.”¹ The perpetrators were identified as members of Brit Qanaim (“Covenant of Zealots”), a militant faction of the Charedi youth movement, Tze’iray Agudat Yisrael. Throughout the years, this dramatic episode has remained etched in Israeli collective consciousness and scholarship as the act of religious extremists who embraced terror in their battle to determine the country’s Jewish character.² Theoretically, the battle should have ended in 1948: here was a state whose very existence defined what it meant to be Jewish, as Jews poured into the coun- try en masse, assumed full political responsibility, and instated Jewish hegemo- ny in the public space. However, the Jewish identity of citizens in a Jewish na- tion-state had been debated in political, cultural, and literary circles since the rise of the Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century. During the pre- state period, when the Jews lived under foreign rule, the question of self- identity rumbled beneath the surface, but erupted from time to time, culminating in po- litical infighting and public expressions of discontent, such as demonstrations against Shabbat desecration in places like Jerusalem where the Jews constituted a majority. Nevertheless, the power of the Yishuv leadership, headed by the Zion- ist Socialists, was not diminished, and it was able to exercise its authority over  The security services thwarted the attempt to sabotage the Knesset, Aʼl HaMishmar, Davar , Ma’ariv , May 16 1951.  Avraham Deskal, “Non Parliamentary Oppositional Behavior in the 1950s: Brit-Kanaim and Malchut- Israel” (MA thesis, Bar-Ilan University, 1990); Shely Levin and Jonatan Erlich, Back- ground Document: Jewish Political Violence in Israel,( Jerusalem: The Knesset research and infor- mation center, 2005); Ami Pedahzur, The Triumph of Israel’s Radical Right (PlaceOxford UK: Ox- ford University Press, 2012); Ehud Shprinzak, Brothers Against Brothers: Violence and Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination (New York, USA: New York Free Press, 1999); Ehud Shprinzak, “The Emergence of the Israeli Radical Right” Comperative Politics 21, no. 2 (1989): 92 – 171. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110545753-011