Kahane’s ghost: how a long-dead extremist rabbi continues to haunt Israel’s politics
A violent fanatic and pioneer in bigotry, Meir Kahane died a political outcast 35 years ago. Today, his ideas influence the very highest levels of government
On the evening of 5 November 1990, Meir Kahane, the extremist American rabbi turned far-right Israeli politician, had just finished speaking at the midtown Manhattan Marriott East Side hotel when a man named El Sayyid Nosair put a bullet through his neck. Two hours after the shooting, Kahane was pronounced dead. Kahane “believed in the ideology that ‘you shall murder,’” said Avraham Burg, then a Labor member of Knesset, “and died at the hands of someone who also believed in that ideology”.
From the moment he arrived in Israel in 1971, Kahane preached a shocking mixture of violent, exterminationist ethnonationalism and apocalyptic religious fundamentalism. He claimed that violence was a Jewish value and revenge a divine commandment. He agitated for the expulsion of Palestinians from all the territories under Israel’s control; the party he founded, Kach, was Israel’s first to make the idea its central policy demand. He envisioned “a state of Jewish totality” in which all matters would be decided according to his idiosyncratic interpretation of Jewish law. During his brief tenure as a legislator, he called for banning marriage between Jews and Arabs and criminalising sex between Jews and gentiles. He proposed that insulting Judaism be made illegal and Sabbath observance be made compulsory. He demanded the ethno-religious segregation of the country’s institutions, even its public beaches.
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