For the first time in over 30 years, a proper Kahanist party could be entering the Knesset. But is the rise of a party that advocates for Jewish supremacy, theocracy, and ‘total war’ as unprecedented as the outcry has suggested?
Members of the Kahanist Otzma Yehudit party Benzi Gopstein (left) Michael Ben Ari (center) and Attorney Itamar Ben Gvir (right) seen in Israeli Supreme Court in Jerusalem, March 12, 2018. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)
The last week has been an eventful one in the annals of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dalliances with the racist ultra-right. Fresh from upsetting his authoritarian, antisemitic allies in Europe by failing to adequately maintain his recent efforts at Holocaust revisionism, Netanyahu has now paved the way for homegrown Israeli fascists to take their place — once again — in the Knesset.
The prime minister’s overtures to the Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) party are not, in the context of his political character, surprising. His readiness to rely on white supremacists and ultranationalists abroad to prop him up provides ample evidence of the types of characters he’ll make common cause with. It has also long been clear that there are very few depths Netanyahu will not plumb when his perch at the top of Israeli politics is under threat.
And that threat does, with the national elections in April looming, feel real. Faced with some of his current coalition partners failing to pass the electoral threshold, Netanyahu successfully lobbied the Jewish Home party to team up with Jewish Power, which brings the real prospect of an explicitly Kahanist party entering the Knesset for the first time in over 30 years.
Rabbi Meir Kahane, who founded the Jewish Defense League and for whom the Kahanists are named, was a fascist. He wanted to remake Israeli society by expelling Palestinians and making Jewish law the law of the land. He believed in Jewish supremacy, was fixated on ethnic purity, and declared antisemitism in the diaspora necessary in order to prevent assimilation. Violence and militarism were, for Kahane, instruments through which to ensure national rebirth.
The JDL manifestos Kahane wrote in the 1960s and ‘70s in New York contained seeds of this fascist ideology. The policy platform his party, Kach, ran on in the 1984 Israeli elections, and which got him elected, was explicitly fascist. It’s important to state this unequivocally. Referring to ‘Kahanism’ without naming its ideological pedigree makes it impossible to have an honest discussion about this latest evolution in Israeli politics.
From fringe to mainstream
Kahane undoubtedly shifted the parameters of Israeli discourse during his turbulent parliamentary career. Among Kach’s principles and policies were those calling for mass expulsions of Palestinians; the annexation of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai; and a ban on marriage, and all sexual contact, between Jews and non-Jews — punishable by prison sentences ranging from five to 50 years. This last point was a particular obsession for Kahane: his political rallies in Israel regularly featured histrionic, concocted tales of scores of Jewish girls kidnapped and taken to Palestinian villages; and during a Kach election broadcast in the 1980s (delivered, curiously enough, in English), he warned of “the destruction of Israel not through bullets but through Arab babies.”
His party’s security principles, meanwhile, continued the theme of righteous Jewish violence that informed his writings for the JDL — violence that he invested with both a biblical lineage (Bar Kokhba, Judah Maccabee) and a redemptive potential (an end to Jewish oppression). His Second Amendment-style JDL slogan, “Every Jew a .22,” made aliyah in the form of a call to give the Israel Defense Forces a “free hand” when dealing with Arabs — in other words, a shoot-to-kill policy with no questions asked.
Rabbi Meir Kahane. (Yossi Zamir/Flash90)
Among Kahane’s other visions were an ethnically-segregated education system, which would be focused on teaching love for Israel and the Jewish people; a small government with minimal bureaucracy that would allow the flourishing of a “Jewish economy”; and the outlawing of the Israeli Communist party.
The list goes on. Above all, Kahane sought the dismantling of what passed for Israeli democracy, calling for a state based on Jewish religious law. Indeed, he believed that Judaism and “Western” democracy were fundamentally incompatible, although he was not against the temporary use of democratic institutions in order to further his other political goals.
As much as almost the entire spectrum of Israel’s political establishment pronounced their shock at Kahane’s rhetoric and actions, even going so far as to boycott his speeches in the Knesset, his popularity in Israel only rose after his election. Having failed to make the electoral threshold in 1973, 1977 and 1981, and after winning a single seat in the 1984 elections, Kach was projected to win four seats or more in the 1988 elections. The Israeli Election Commission barred Kach from running on the grounds that the party’s platform incited racism, but by then Kahane’s talk of mass expulsions was already being aired by mainstream parties in the Knesset.
Waging ‘total war’ against Israel’s enemies
Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990, and Israel outlawed Kach as a terror organization in 1994 (the U.S. followed a year later). But his movement lived on in Israel: the core members of Jewish Power — Baruch Marzel, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Michael Ben-Ari, and Benzi Gopstein — are all disciples of Kahane and former Kach activists. Between them, they have variously persecuted Palestinians, leftists, African asylum seekers, and the LGBTQ community.
Jewish Power’s 2019 election manifesto bears a resounding resemblance to Kach’s platform. The party proposes implementing Jewish law as the law of the land, and having an education system that teaches love of Israel and the Jewish people. It promises “total war” against “Israel’s enemies,” and seeks the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza. It calls to expel “Israel’s enemies” (which should be read as Palestinians) “back to their countries of origin.” At the same time, the party wants to encourage diaspora Jews to emigrate to Israel, in order to try and prevent assimilation.
Jewish Power party Michael Ben Ari speaks during a ceremony honoring Jewish extremist leader Rabbi Meir Kahane in Jerusalem, October 26 2010. (Yossi Zamir/Flash 90)
As far as security policy, the party wants “deterrence” to be restored to the Israeli army, and for the military to move from “a policy of ‘containing the enemy’ to one of elimination and annihilation.” They want to encourage procreation and fight abortion. They envision a “Jewish democracy” that “rejects universal values.” And they name their economic policy “Jewish capitalism” — part of which proposes that once “Israel’s enemies” have been expelled from the country, the security budget will be reduced by billions of shekels that can be partially reinvested in industry, small businesses and the periphery.
Total war, expulsions, annihilation, mandatory Orthodox religious law, pro-natalism, ethnic supremacism — those were Kahane’s calling cards, and they are Jewish Power’s, too. Thirty years ago, those policy proposals saw Kach outlawed. Today, they have led to an invitation from the prime minister, delivered via Jewish Home, to join his coalition. So what happened?
It didn’t start with Kahane
It would be easy — and for many, a cold comfort — to point to men like Kahane, Netanyahu, and the Jewish Power crowd as aberrations in Israel’s politics. Yet to take this stance is to suggest that Kahane’s ideas, and Netanyahu’s policies, are without precedent in Israel’s history. And when we take an honest look at the last 70 years, can we really say they are?
Expulsion was on the lips of Israel’s first prime minister, and was instrumental to the founding of the state. Intermarriage has never been possible in Israel, albeit without the threat of incarceration (a Conservative rabbi was briefly detained last year for officiating non-Orthodox weddings). Campaigns for a Greater Israel, backed by public figures from across the political spectrum, have been around since the occupation commenced, and even before. Legal status aside, Israel has been in the process of de facto annexing the West Bank for years, through a combination of demolitions, evictions, land expropriations, settlement-building, and “transfer” plans. Every discussion of the “demographic threat” that accompanies supposedly progressive two-state proposals invokes the specter of ethnic segregation.
For the past 20 years Israeli society has been shifting inexorably to the right, with the process accelerating since Netanyahu was elected in 2009. But neither Kahane nor Netanyahu is solely responsible for brutalizing Israeli society. The roots of what we are witnessing go back much further, and to something much more fundamental about the state. The fact is that Israel has not, for a single day since its founding, been a state for all its citizens. And in this lies the raw material for the havoc that we see today.
Far-rights activists attend a ceremony honoring Meir Kahane in Jerusalem on November 17, 2016. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Indeed, the real impact of this latest political development is that it has once again blown apart the “bad apples” defense that is applied to everything from settler violence to the occupation itself. Indeed, progressive defenders of the “Jewish and democratic” balance tend to exceptionalize acts of state and social oppression against Palestinians, arguing they are signs of a political system wheezing under the strain of a 50-year military occupation and malfunctioning dangerously, perhaps beyond repair. But such protestations have long rung hollow, in much the same way that the cries of “this is not us!” did following Trump’s election in the U.S. — as if white supremacy had never darkened the country’s door. And as if racist state and interpersonal violence was a novelty in Israel’s history.
These arguments long predate the current political moment and will, it seems, long outlive it. In the immediate term, however, Netanyahu’s decision to extend the hand of power to unabashed purveyors of Israeli fascism offers us both a particular and a universal lesson: firstly, that in trying to square the circle of a “Jewish and democratic state,” the latter always has, and always will, play second fiddle to the former; and secondly, that a purported democratic system which offers the trappings of true democracy to the hegemonic group alone can, even when it is functioning as intended, bring fascism into power. Israel is by no means alone in that regard.
It is, then, somewhat ironic that Rafi Peretz, the new head of the Jewish Home party, on Wednesday defended the Jewish Power merger by stating: “When the house is burning…I don’t look too closely at whoever will help me put out the fire.” He is right about the state of emergency — but wrong about who’s holding the matches.
Information on Meir Kahane’s policies and proposals, for both the Jewish Defense League and Kach, are taken from the following books: “The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane,” by Robert I. Friedman (1990); “Heil Kahane,” by Yair Kotler (1986); “The Story of the Jewish Defense League,” by Meir Kahane (1975); and “Never Again! A Program for Survival,” by Meir Kahane (1972).
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Bruce Gould
Let’s focus on one sentence: “Israel has been in the process of de facto annexing the West Bank for years, through a combination of demolitions, evictions, land expropriations, settlement-building, and “transfer” plans.”
https://mondoweiss.net/2019/02/ministers-palestinian-communities/
“Israeli ministers pledge to settle ‘2 million Jews’ in West Bank as gov’t approves 1000s more units in the heart of Palestinian communities”
There isn’t going to be two states – ever. It’s either one state with equal rights or some kind of apartheid arangement.
UnImpressedRealist
In other words: Israels are about to embrace the original ISIS of the region. Let’s just make this perfectly clear for the whole world. There is no middle ground here with these monsters. They will slaughter Jews and have in the past to get what they want, and they will most certainly start trying again to bring about their ‘Jewish State’— in the Levant. We are witnessing Natanayahu embrace the very monsters who murdered Rabin, and I hope people connect the dots.
Bibi was the man who incited against Rabin and set the wolves out to gain power, and now he is doing it again only this time he doesnt even need a pretext. This is where ‘power’ leads and this is why throughout Jewish history our people shunned it. Because we knew where it led ultimately and what it would do.
Now here we all are and people are still being timid, they still think this maddness can be pulled back. Don’t they understand the Israel the wanted never existed? It has been these monsters vision being implemented all along.
People need to decide, power or people. Facsism or revoltion.
Time to put on our oldest shoes we have always owned back on again, and reolt. Because if there is going to be bloodshed, let it be in fighting against this. And if there isn’t going to be bloodshed but consistant disruption, then let it be against this.
We must fly the flag of Palestine and our own together and break through their ideology like a tsunami. Or we are all going to lose together to it.
Ben
Make no mistake. Look at the picture here of these guys (including Eli Ben Dahan, the man who denies travel to Palestinians for cancer treatment):
Habayit Hayehudi members vote to unite with Otzma Yehudit on February 20, 2019
Kahane Returns to the Knesset
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/kahane-returns-to-the-knesset-1.6957376
Look at the picture. Jewish Home voted with enthusiasm, with relish, unanimously, to merge with Jewish Power. They love it.
And not just Jewish Home. Likud is entering into this with gusto. Just imagine if a leader of any Western country accused a political opponent of relying on “Jewish votes,” the way Netanyahu is accusing the opposition of relying on “Arab parties” who “are coming in droves” to vote. Just imagine the hue and cry.
Ben
Israel, the only “democracy”in the Middle East but a “democracy” where “Arab votes” are unacceptable. And where it is acceptable to say they are unacceptable. This, my friends, is Feiglinism, and the Prime Minister and the leading parties are all practicing it.
itshak Gordine
All this party advocates is in accordance with Jewish laws. Assimilation and mixed marriages are very serious fears according to our traditions. The Torah, on several occasions, warns us against this scourge. Many Jewish women have married Arabs over the years and suffered a nightmare. They are prevented from leaving Arab villages, kidnapped, as well as their children. Charities have commandos that release them. Otsma Yehudit is only a right wing party that does not violate Jewish laws.
Ray
It’s good to know that Judaism is obsessed with ethnic purity and preventing miscegenation; that only makes the concept of a “Jewish & Democratic” state all the more contradictory and worthless.
itshak Gordine
No, the Thorah forbids intermarriage. We are not going to abandon our holy Thora to please a handful of leftists
Ben
Itshak Gordine Halevy, you are the worst kind of religious nationalist Judeo-fascist. Truly, the Western world is becoming used to thinking that Judaism is tyranny.
You are blunt about what you have in mind. But not quite honest. To be clear, Jewish Power’s “advocacy,” your advocacy, is itself fascist. But all poor little “Jewish Power” wants to do is “advocate”? Give pep talks? Hold support groups? Suuure, Halevy, like Hitler and Heydrich and his buddies only wanted to “advocate” against mixed marriages of Aryans and Jews, which they saw as the severest threat. What makes you less crazy than them?
Halevy is one of these characters who simply must think people can’t read and have never been around the block; must think we don’t know that Otzma Yehudit is Kahanist to the core, the reincarnation of Kach ,the fervent torch carrier for the original Meir Kahane. So now we know that Halevy is frankly one of them.
Halevy, you’ve marked yourself as a Feiglinist many a time here but now you come out of the closet as an unabashed Kahanist too. (On the face of it. You cannot make apologies for Otzma as you are and not effectively be one of them. Which makes you loathesome.)
I gotta tell you Halevy, your Lehavist claptrap about “kidnapping from villages” is the supreme, nasty, racist Lehavist icing on the cake. This from the man whose beloved IDF nightly kidnaps Palestinian men, women and children from their beds at 3AM in sleeping villages.
All of this would be of scant import if Halevy were all that exceptional or weird, if Halevy were an Israeli outlier, an isolated crank. But he is not. Large numbers of people high up in the Israeli government share his view. To a T. All the while braying about being “the only democracy,” that “shares America’s values.”
Question to Netanyahu and Trump: Kach is on the American and EU lists of terror groups. Why isn’t Otzma Yehudit?
Ben
Halevy, your malady diagnosed. Dr. Rosenberg will send you a bill.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-forget-kahane-israeli-racism-is-going-to-be-something-different-1.6977772
“All types of racism may all be bad, each in their own way, but there are different kinds. The Kahanist variety shared by Otzma Yehudit and its allies, organizations such as Lehava and Hemla, is more about emotional disturbance than political ideology.
This kind of racism is particularly obnoxious because it is preoccupied with the idea of the despised other as sexual predators set on seducing our pure, innocent girls. In the Israeli context, Arabs are the predators and Jewish girls the victims. But the template is shared by rightist extremists the world over.
This sort of racism also insists that the other is an irreconcilable enemy of the state, a mortal danger to our personal and national security who has to be expelled. Then the nation will be safe, secure and purified.
Riding to the imaginary rescue
The reality is entirely otherwise. Although Lehava says it is busy rescuing Jewish women, a Pew survey estimated such only about 2% of Jews who are married or living with someone who is a non-Jew (and that includes someone who is religiously unaffiliated).
The idea that Israeli Arabs are enemies of the state has no basis either. However offensive occasional remarks by Israel-Arab Knesset members may seem, in the 70 years since Israel was created – the nation has never seen anything like widespread political protest by the Israeli Arabs, much less violence. That was even true in times of war when Israeli Arabs experienced anger and distress over the fate of their brothers and sisters in the West Bank and Gaza.
Israeli Arabs may not be the blue-and-white blooded Zionists that Otzma Yehudit demands of every Israeli, but they are law-abiding citizens of the state and have equal claim to the same rights and opportunities as Jewish Israelis.
Unfortunately, the average Israeli isn’t quite convinced of that….
Ironically, it is the very advancement in Israeli society that is likely to worsen Israeli attitudes toward Arab Israelis.
Israeli Arabs, especially women, have been making remarkable progress in terms of education and jobs….
Eventually the economy will slow.Indeed, some forecasters see an era of tepid growth for Israel because of the demographic trends of an aging population and a growing share of ultra-Orthodox Jews.
It’s then, as pie stagnates or even shrinks, that Israeli Arab aspirations will collide head-on with Israeli Jewish anxieties, as they compete for jobs and pay….”
njh
What sideshow? It’s been center stage since the dawn and we are now simply reaching high noon.
Ben
“Kahanism is bad for racism. It gives racism a bad name, which it doesn’t have in Israel. It shakes Israeli racism out of its tranquility and correctness, exposes it and generates opposition to it. On the other hand, this opposition is good for respectable racists, allowing people who aren’t all that less racist to be portrayed as moderate and moral — downright champions of human rights.
The influence of the Kahanists on public debate should not be underestimated. Because of them, one can live comfortably in the settlement of Shilo and dare to talk about principles; to be Naftali Bennett and Bezalel Smotrich and still be portrayed as moderates; to be in the Labor Party and believe that you are enlightened, and to vote for Kahol Lavan and think you’re a liberal. After all, you’re against Itamar Ben Gvir. It’s the undeclared racists versus the professed ones. Just as the “illegal” outposts have legitimized the “legal” settlements, Kahanism legitimizes this other racism.
Kahanism allows the rest of the racists to feel good; we are not like them…
But contaminating the debate isn’t the worst damage they wreak. They conceal the other racism, institutionalized and accepted racism, which causes more harm to its victims. To live in a country that imprisons 2 million people and to be shocked by Ben Ari is outrageous. To be part of a society that abuses an additional 2 million people while clicking one’s tongue over a threat to an Arab waiter is arrogance.
Most of the Zionist parties are full partners in the Israeli race project; some even have founding shares…”
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-kahanists-make-it-easy-to-ignore-everyone-else-s-racism-1.6978802
Ben
One has to keep firmly in mind that the Lahava and Kach types that bid to enter the Knesset, or are already there in the government, serve a meta-purpose for the far right and for Labor and Blue and White types as well. Naftali Bennett loves these guys because they allow him and Ayalet Shaked and Bezalel Smotrich to pose as, believe it or not, “moderate” right wingers. As Gideon Levy pointed out, “one can live comfortably in the settlement of Shilo and dare to talk about principles; to be Naftali Bennett and Bezalel Smotrich and still be portrayed as moderates; to be in the Labor Party and believe that you are enlightened, and to vote for Kahol Lavan and think you’re a liberal. After all, you’re against Itamar Ben Gvir. It’s the undeclared racists versus the professed ones. Just as the “illegal” outposts have legitimized the “legal” settlements, Kahanism legitimizes this other racism….they conceal the other racism, institutionalized and accepted racism, which causes more harm to its victims. To live in a country that imprisons 2 million people and to be shocked by Ben Ari is outrageous.”
Wesley Parish
The irony of the Kahanist anti-Palestinianism is that Palestinians are most likely the direct descendants of am haáretz at the time of the Great Revolt against the Roman Empire – the farmers, shepherds, horticulturalists in the minor villages who the Romans ignored because they were inconsequential … and who consequently lost faith in the Temple and synagog authorities for making catastrophically bad decisions. (It’s hard not to lose faith in authorities who allow supposed defenders to burn down the symbol of their authority, the Temple.)
So the Palestinians were then Jews. Arab is the name of their culture; it’s what grew out of the mingling of the Muslim conquests and the pre-existing Levantine culture. It takes a lot to uproot a peasant culture. If as one rabbi discussed on Haáretz in the early 2000s, once Jewish, always Jewish, Israel is rather horribly anti-Semitic, and the Kahanists are the worst of the lot.