Israel’s Strange Rehabilitation of Meir Kahane: Once a “Racist,” Now a Hero to Many
ALLAN C. BROWNFEL
American-born rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, speaks in Rishon LeZion, near Tel Aviv, Israel on May 28, 1990, days before his assassination in New York City. He was known for his extreme views, such as expulsion of all Palestinians on the West Bank. (ESAIAS BAITEL/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES).
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August/September 2023, pp. 36-38
Judaism
By Allan C. Brownfeld
MEIR KAHANE’S MILITANT voice can be distinctly heard in Israel these days, notwithstanding his assassination more than three decades ago after being expelled from the Knesset as a racist. What was unacceptable in Israel in the 1980s, it seems, has now become part of the political mainstream, finding representation in the cabinet of Israel’s current far-right government.
Kahane, a native of Brooklyn, well known as the founder of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), immigrated to Israel in 1971, where he founded KACH, an ultranationalist and racist political party. It was eventually expelled from the Knesset, its racism found to be unacceptable in an earlier Israel.
Although Israel has always made clear distinctions between Jews and non-Jews, an example of how much Israel has moved to the far right can be seen in the fact that a disciple of Meir Kahane, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is now Israel’s National Security Minister. Until recently, Ben-Gvir had a portrait of Meir Kahane hanging on his living room wall.
Discussing the recent biography by Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical, his colleague at the Department of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth, Susannah Heschel, notes that “One of the great scholars of Judaism in our day presents one of the most despicable characters to emerge in postwar Jewish life.”
Kahane, born in 1932, grew up as a member of a youth group affiliated with the Revisionist Zionists, founded by Zeev Jabotinsky in 1925. The Revisionists were the more militant wing of the Zionist movement; they insisted that its rivals in the Labor movement were too passive in their efforts to establish a Jewish state in all of the land of biblical Israel.
In 1971, Kahane stood trial in New York after the JDL firebombed a Soviet attaché’s car. He was accused of violating the Federal Firearms Act of 1968, entered a guilty plea and was placed on five years federal probation. Two months later, he and his family moved to Israel.
Once in Israel, Kahane founded a political party, KACH (“Thus”). In 1984, KACH received nearly 26,000 votes, or 1.2 percent—enough for a seat in the Knesset. Then, in June 1984, Israel’s Central Elections Commission voted to ban KACH from participating in the election. It noted KACH’s call for the deportation of Arab and Druze citizens and Kahane’s characterization of Israel’s Declaration of Independence as a “schizophrenic document.” It is the first time in Israel’s history that a Jewish political faction was banned from an election.
KACH then appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that a political faction can be barred only if it poses a danger to the existence of Israel. The Court ruled that KACH could participate in the election. Its platform was essentially that Israeli citizenship was for Jews only and Arabs should be expelled from the country and the occupied territories. KACH and Kahane also demanded sovereignty over the Temple Mount. And they proposed an Israeli version of the Nazi Nuremburg laws, banning marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews.
In July 1988 Kahane was suspended from the Knesset for threatening an Arab member with a noose. A few months later, KACH was banned from competing in the elections that year. In 1985, the Knesset passed an amendment to the Basic Law, Israel’s not-quite constitution, barring “parties engaged in incitement to racism.” In October 1988, Kahane appealed to the Supreme Court. His appeal was rejected. The ban stands.
KAHANE’S RACIST DISCIPLES
Followers of Kahane have had a major impact upon Israel. In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a U.S.-born JDL and KACH member, gunned down 29 worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in the occupied West Bank. He became a hero to Israel’s right-wing, and prominent rabbis presided at his funeral.
Kahane’s racism, critics pointed out, was eerily similar to that promoted by Nazism, particularly when it came to sex and marriage between Jews and non-Jews. In May 1981, Kahane took a full page ad in the Israeli daily Maariv, entitled “She is a daughter of Israel, perhaps Your Sister, Your Daughter or Granddaughter.” He called for a law forbidding “the abomination of assimilation and communion with goyim” (in this case, Arabs). The ad called for a mandatory prison sentence for any Arab who had sexual relations with a Jewish girl or woman. It also called for a law restricting United Nations forces from engaging in any type of relations with the Jewish population. Kahane later declared that, if elected, he would strip all Israeli Arabs of their citizenship and work toward expelling any who refused to relinquish it. Kahane actually submitted such a bill—called “the three tolls bill”—to the Knesset in late 1985.
Faced with legislation similar to Nazi Germany, Israeli legislators took the drastic step of amending the country’s Basic Law to bar “racist parties and candidates,” known as Article 7a of the Basic Law. The amendment rendered KACH illegal and Kahane and his party were removed from the Knesset in late 1985.
In 1986, Kahane wrote an essay with the title “I Hate Racism.” According to Magid, “Kahane claims his positions are wholly in line with Jewish law. A ‘religious Jew,’ he notes, believes that Jewish distinction is one thing only: divine election. There is nothing inherently distinct, certainly not unique, about the Jews other than the fact that God chose them. And divine election assumes, after him, a belief in a transcendent deity who communicated its will to the Jews at Sinai.”
He addresses Jews he describes as “non-religious,” naming a number of Reform rabbis and neoconservatives: “Let us pity them, those who call me racist, but who are the real Jewish racists, the ones who deep in their hearts—know that their ‘Jewishness,’ their ‘Zionism,’ their ‘cultural tradition,’ their insistence about being part of a separate group, is sterile and barren tribalism at best, noxious and obnoxious racism at worst.”
Kahane had contempt for the idea of democracy in Israel. Magid notes that “Kahane’s focus was on Zionism’s alleged veneration of democracy above the value of Jewish exclusivity, dominance and power. By promoting the equality of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, he considered, Israeli democracy could undermine the survival of a true Jewish state. He believed in democracy everywhere but in Israel. Israel had a different calling…The core of Kahane’s Zionism was that Israel’s right to the land should be viewed as a divine mandate and conquering it a religious obligation.”
Following his assassination on Nov. 5, 1990 in New York City, Kahane received what seemed to be something of an official funeral in Israel. Despite his status as a “racist” expelled from the Knesset, his funeral was one of the largest in the country’s history, attended by almost 150,000 people. He was eulogized by many respected figures such as Rabbi Moshe Tendler of Yeshiva University, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu and popular singer Shlomo Carlebach.
Israel has a history of glorifying right-wing terrorists like Kahane and Goldstein but until now, advocates of terrorism were not leading members of the government. The mindset of these right-wing extremists can be seen in the beliefs of Yigal Amir, the assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. In their book Murder In The Name Of God: The Plot To Kill Yitzhak Rabin (1998), Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman describe the thinking of Amir: “There is only one guideline for fixing the borders of the land of Israel: the Divine Promise made to the Patriarch Abraham: ‘To your descendants, I give this land, from the River of Egypt, to the great river, the River Euphrates.” (Genesis 15:17) Today these borders embrace most of the Middle East, from Egypt to Iraq…Zealots read this passage as God’s will, and God’s will must be obeyed, whatever the cost. No mortal has the right to settle for borders any narrower than those. Thus negotiating a peace settlement with Israel’s neighbors is unthinkable.”
Few Americans understand the extreme views that characterize Israel’s now dominant right-wing. At the funeral of the Kahane-follower and Hebron killer Baruch Goldstein, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin stated that, “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” Shmuel Hacohen, a teacher in a Jerusalem college, said: “Baruch Goldstein was the greatest Jew then alive, not in one way, but in every way. There are no innocent Arabs here.” Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, who wrote a chapter in a book in praise of Goldstein and what he did, declared: “every simple cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, is a part of God…Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA—and if a Jew needs a liver can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value.” Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who headed the Chabad movement, declared: “The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of (members) of all nations of the world…A non-Jew’s entire reality is only vanity…The entire creation of a non-Jew exists only for the sake of the Jews.”
The pro-Israel Jewish community has yet to confront this level of intolerance. While it launches vigorous campaigns against the intolerance of others, it has largely ignored the bigotry which has come to the forefront in Israel.
State Department spokesman Ned Price in November 2022 used the word “abhorrent” to describe Israeli cabinet member Itamar Ben-Gvir’s praise for Meir Kahane at a memorial event celebrating the legacy of a terrorist organization: “There is no other word for it—it is abhorrent. And we remain concerned about the legacy of Kahane Chai and the continued use of rhetoric among violent right-wing extremists.” Kahane Chai remains on the Treasury Department’s list of “specially designated global terrorists.” Israeli media outlets reported that Ben-Gvir lauded Kahane, saying on Nov. 10, 2022 that the late rabbi was about “love for Israel without compromise.”
On May 9, 2023, the European Union (EU) canceled an event in Israel at which Ben-Gvir planned to speak. Ben-Gvir had not been invited but volunteered to speak at the event celebrating Europe Day. Rather than permit him to speak, the EU canceled the event. EU officials asked him not to attend because, an embassy spokesman said, “Many of his previous statements and views contradict the values the EU stands for.” The embassy still held an event for the Israeli public. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, on May 6, 2023, reported that “Nearly all ambassadors reputedly opted to cancel the event, save for those from Hungary and Poland with right-wing governments.”
Times have certainly changed. In the 1980s, Rabbi Kahane’s violent anti-Arab ideology was considered so repugnant that Israel banned him from parliament and the U.S. listed his party as a terrorist group. Today, his disciples march through the streets by the thousands, chanting “Death to Arabs” and assaulting any they come across.
To Arab citizens, who make up 20 percent of Israel’s population, the heirs of Kahane are a natural outgrowth of a discriminatory system that has now been normalized by mainstream leaders who largely embrace their views.
Bezalel Smotrich, the head of the Religious Zionism Party and now Israel’s finance minister, seemed undisturbed that a recording of him admitting to being a fascist became public: “I may be a far-right person, a homophobe, a racist, a fascist, but my word is my bond.”
Kahane, in his 1980 book They Must Go, said that Palestinians are “a cancer” in the body of “the Jewish state” that must be removed by whatever means necessary. Kahane said that those who refuse to give Arabs equal rights “but tell him he is equal, think he is a fool. He is not.” His present day disciples like Ben-Gvir believe Israel is safer without Palestinian citizens but if Palestinians must stay, they can only be second or third class citizens.
Ironically, as the American Jewish community has launched a campaign against anti-Semitism, which many are attempting to redefine to include criticism of Israel and its treatment of Palestinians, and in which the Biden administration has joined, there is virtual silence about the emergence of Meir Kahane as a hero in contemporary Israel, particularly among the leading members of the right-wing government in power. The indefensible double standards of the organized Jewish community in the U.S. (with some honorable exceptions)—which demands the world combat anti-Semitism as it defines the term even while it remains noticeably silent about the racists within Israeli Jewish society—could not be more obvious.
Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.
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