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from being educated in any culture other than Jewish religious culture.

What deserves mention and reflection is that neither on this occasion nor any other did any opposition or anti-Agudat Israel slogans arise in Israel. No one called it reactionary, and no Jew accused any of their religious leaders of reaction, even though their religious fanaticism reached the point of attacking the car of the Turkish ambassador because he was riding in it on the Sabbath. They stoned it, smashed its windows, and wounded the ambassador and some of his family. They did the same to some other foreign ambassadors.

Jewish religious fanaticism reached the point that, even regarding the United States, their protector and benefactor, they protested to the American government for issuing, some time earlier, a postage stamp for Christmas the previous year depicting Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. They even brought a case against the state in the Supreme Court because it taught Christianity in public schools.

One sign of Jewish religious fanaticism was that when some Jewish armed forces occupied Sinai in 1956, the army vehicles were led by a jeep carrying a Jewish rabbi, with a large copy of the Torah placed on its front. When their feet touched Sinai, they dismounted, kissed the soil, and performed their prayers.

When the Jewish army occupied Jerusalem in June 1967, the first thing the Jewish commanders and officers did was go to the Noble Buraq site, the Western Wall, led by Rabbi Goren, an army officer. He blew the shofar according to their religious rites, and they then prayed there.

The Palestine question and the Jews’ seizure of it is also a religious question for the colonialists implicated with them, foremost among them the British and Americans.

Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader and first president of the State of Israel, explained this aspect of the question when he wrote in his book Trial and Error that the main reason for the Jews’ success in obtaining the Balfour Declaration establishing a national home for the Jews in Palestine was the feeling of the British people, influenced by the “Old Testament,” meaning the Torah. This means that the Protestant doctrine embraced by most Britons and Americans rests on the Old Testament, in which there are prophecies that the Jews interpreted in their favor and exploited to induce the British and Americans to return them to Palestine.