 This nation-building vision would have necessitated a halakhic revolution, utilizing innovative and creative techniques of Jewish legal interpretation and application. But instead, in Leibowitz’s eyes the religious parties prostituted themselves to the state to protect their own brand of religious sectarianism, subordinating religion to the machinery of the secular government. Leibowitz’s initial radicalism thus came up against the halakhic conservatism of his fellow religious Zionists, which, together with what he saw as the moral corruption of its rabbinic leadership, led to his disillusionment with religious Zionism, disillusion that was further exacerbated by the Kibiyeh affair (see Hellinger 2008, 275ff), which served to reinforce his view regarding the pernicious consequences of “applying the religious category of holiness to social, national, and political values” (Judaism, 189). Thus, by 1959, in recognition of this reality, Leibowitz changed his tune, presenting a call for the separation of religion and state as the only program “that would be in the religious interest in the existing situation” (Judaism, 175).