Israel’s incoming government is its most right-wing and religious government ever. And for many of the kippa-wearing, Bible-believing lawmakers making up its ranks, the timing was critical.

“We have come to drive out the darkness,” sang MK Avi Maoz of the Noam party as he took the Knesset podium on Wednesday, citing a popular Hanukkah song that commemorates the religious Jews of the Maccabean Revolt expelling the Greeks and their influence from the Land of Israel.

During the upcoming Hanukkah holiday “we celebrate the victory granted by the Creator of the world against the Greeks and their (Jewish) collaborators, the Hellenists,” Maoz reminded his fellow lawmakers.

Comparing the necessity of the Hasmoneans (Maccabees) to rise up in revolt to the present situation, Maoz went on the lambast the “foreign agendas being introduced to the children of Israel by deliberate concealment and without the knowledge of their parents.”

He was referring to the promotion of the LGBT agenda in Israel’s public education system.

Maoz also took aim at the claims of left-wing politicians that he and others in the new government will try to impose Jewish religious law (Halacha) on the nation:

“They (the Maccabees) fought for the study of Torah, for observance of the Sabbath and for worship in the Temple. The spirit that the Greeks and the Hellenists tried to instill in the people of Israel is the real darkness. Whoever tries to harm true Judaism is the darkness. Whoever tries to create a new, seemingly liberal religion is the darkness. Whoever, with deliberate concealment and obfuscation, introduces agendas to brainwash the children of Israel without the knowledge of the parents – is the darkness.”

Needless to say it was a raucous session in the plenum, with left-wing lawmakers repeatedly interrupting Maoz and accusing the new government of taking the Jewish state backward by centuries.

On Monday, MK Boaz Toporovsky of outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party similarly said of Maoz and other incoming right-wing religious ministers: “We oppose the appointment of people whose views were correct two thousand years ago.”

Lapid has publicly called for disobedience against any part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government headed by the likes of Maoz. Legal experts warn that Israel is on the brink of civil unrest that is unbecoming to a liberal democracy.