Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 17. The Israeli Hard Right. the Kahanist Model

Send us Fan MailThere are extremist group in Israel, even in the Knesset,  that trace their origins to Rabbi Meir Kahane.  Kahane was born in Brooklyn but moved to Israel and was elected to the Knesset.  He was later assassinated.  At the time, his views were considered shockingly extreme.  He was widely renounced by American Jews and by Israelis.  I heard Kahane speak twice in the Detroit area in the early 1980s.  I also read two of his books, Time to Go Home and They Must Go!  They were chilling  I also read quite a few essays by him.    As far as I can tell, those who embrace his name and his ideas are not fundamentally different from what I heard in the 1980s.   Kahane believed that anything is justified to bring the new age and to save the Jews.  I thought of the accusations by radical Iraqi Jews that the 1952 bombings of synagogues were done by Zionist commandos in an effort to panic them into fleeing to Israel.  I have no way to know if those accusations are correct but such a thing would surely be justified by Kahane.  He was filled with hatred of Arabs, Americans and secular Jews.  He believed in his cause and would do anything to achieve it.  He had a definite support base in the American Jewish community, although certainly not nearly as the vast proportion who were hostile to him.  I don’t want to be inflammatory but I wrote in my notes back in the 1980s that I felt I was in a Munich beer hall in 1924 listening to Hitler polish up a speech.  I have never heard anyone quite like him. Note that in the Knesset, there are religious parties connected to the rabbis.  Two are United Torah Judaism (Ashkenazi) and Shas (Sephardic).  There are NOT Kahanist. If you are interested in how  a similar logic works out in American culture you might listen to my podcast on the Replacement Wars.