The human rights crimes of the Israeli state keep accumulating. As an independent American Jewish observer, I have watched with horror. What is the worst? Is it the murder of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians who happened to live in Gaza? Is it the calculated starvation of a generation of Palestinian children? Is it the laying waste to the entire civilizational infrastructure of that region to make it uninhabitable?
Then there is the deliberate targeting and killing of journalists who are trying to get the story out. Is it that? Or is it the fanatical actions of West Bank settlers who use violence and thievery to murder and steal land that doesn’t belong to them while the Israeli authorities look the other way? It is hard to keep up.
The depraved actions of the Netanyahu government have entirely squandered the sympathy Israel received (and deserved) after the October 7 attacks.
But today I am not interested in categorizing whether Israel’s actions should be classified as genocide or ethnic cleansing. More interesting is how and why Israel transformed from a country in the 1960s and 1970s with a mildly left, Labor Party-led government to a country ruled by a coalition of far right extremists and ultra-nationalists.
The leaders of major American Jewish organizations want to uncritically defend Israel and pretend everything is the same as it was 50 years ago but it clearly is not. They indulge in willful blindness.
While no one person can entirely explain this massive shift, I believe that one key actor in this change was Meir Kahane. He was assassinated in 1990 but I think his influence has been highly consequential.
The veteran Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy, has described what has ensued since the October 7 attacks as the country’s first Kahanist war. Levy wrote:
“Almost everything about it was meant to appease the fascist, racist population-transferist far right. The spirit of Kahanism seized control over its goals and content.”
The ideology of Netanyahu’s governing coalition is an amalgam of ultra-nationalism, hyper-Orthodox fundamentalism and religious Zionist messianism. It is a Jewish supremacist vision rooted in the dehumanization of Palestinians, mirroring Kahane’s views. Kahane believed that Jewish lives were more valuable than all others.
Kahane was born in the United States in 1932. From early on, he claimed violence was a Jewish value. He was a founder of the Jewish Defense League in 1968 and they carried out many acts of vandalism, shootings and bombings.
He was arrested and charged with a number of violent offenses but managed to evade jail time. Like his father, Kahane became a rabbi. While he had a sanctimonious exterior, he had a secret double life as a swindler and a womanizer.
Kahane left the U.S. in the early 1970’s because things were getting too hot for him with the JDL crime spree. When he arrived in Israel, he realized that anti-Arab racism would be the path he could use to shock, gain attention and mobilize followers. He told Israelis “I say what you think.” He led his cadre of followers on hate marches through East Jerusalem and other Palestinian-majority towns chanting “Death to Arabs.”
He founded a political party, Kach, which made ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel, the occupied West Bank and Gaza its central demand. For Kahane, ethnic cleansing was a religious imperative. For a long time, Kach was irrelevant but in 1984 it won a seat in the Knesset. The Israeli political establishment tried to cordon them off.
It remained on the political fringe for almost 25 years but Kahane’s use of vulgar anti-Arab racism grabbed Israeli media attention. He wanted a totalist Jewish ethnostate. He called for banning marriages between Jews and Arabs and he favored criminalizing sex between Jews and gentiles.
As mentioned, Kahane was shot and murdered in 1990 in New York but his persistence had created a band of fanatical loyalists. Among them was Baruch Goldstein who in 1994 ruthlessly shot and murdered 29 Palestinian worshippers at a mosque in Hebron. Yigal Amir, the 1995 assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, was also inspired by Kahane and Goldstein.
Subsequent events, particularly the second intifada, which lasted from 2000 to 2005, changed the fortunes of the Israeli far right movement. Unlike the first intifada, which was largely about mass protest, in the second intifada, suicide bombings and violence were far more prominent. The bloody tactics both repulsed Israelis and opened far more to a Kahanist perspective. Kahanism has been like an infectious disease spreading through the population.
Kahane’s disciples made it their business to oppose any peace deal or two state solution. They remain dedicated to the goals of annexing the West Bank and Gaza and expelling all Palestinians from there. Kahanists want to replace the secular state with a theocracy.
When Benjamin Netanyahu formed his coalition with the far right in 2022, he boosted leaders like Itamar Ben-Gvir, a graduate of the Yeshiva of the Jewish Idea, a seminary Kahane established. He has hung a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the Hebron mass murderer, in his living room.
Kahane exemplifies the danger of a charismatic demagogue. When conditions changed, his message resonated widely. No doubt there are many, many Israelis who were and are disgusted by Kahane and his acolytes but they are now in the background. Kahane’s legacy led to relentless bellicosity, disregard for Palestinian life and widespread acceptance of anti-Arab racism among Israelis.
Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.