Rabbi Meir Kahane (1932-1990) was an American-Israel orthodox rabbi,
Credit: The Denver Post
murdered by an assassin in New York City on November 5, 1990.
Among his several claims to “fame,” he was co-founder of the Jewish Defense League, and a convicted terrorist (along with other members of the extremist JDL) who advocated the complete elimination of all Palestinians from Israel.
He emigrated to Israel in 1971 and founded the Kach political party, a racist, far-right, anti-Arab organization whose extreme-Zionist ideology he represented as a member of the Israeli Knesset from 1984 – 1988.
Even though the Kach party no longer exists, Israel’s orthodox community is filled with “Kahanists” who maintain a vocal presence in Israeli politics. They are Israel’s equivalent of the Klu Klux Klan, with a sizeable, noisy membership, openly campaigning for the expulsion of all black people from their country.
With national elections on the horizon, Meir Kahane still has many devotees loudly demonstrating in favor of his racist policies.
Gideon Levy’s newest piece in Haaretz describes the role of Kahanist-style racism as it interacts with Israel’s garden-variety racism in the current political campaign. The article is entitled, “The Kahanists Make It Easy to Ignore Everyone Else’s Racism.”
I have excerpted Levy’s piece below. You can read the entire story by clicking on the link above.
“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…
“Kahanism allows the rest of the racists to feel good; we are not like them…
“These Israeli neo-Nazis are genuinely repulsive and despicable…
“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 [see my note below] 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. They are partners to the crime — from the ethnic cleansing in 1948, through the military government in the Little Triangle and the Galilee, to the days of military tyranny in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. They have no moral right to condemn the Kahanists, because sometimes the Kahanists are only saying what the others are thinking.
“Of course there are degrees of evil and of racism… When Europe boycotts its extreme right — which is, by the way, more moderate than Israel’s non-extreme right — it’s relatively enlightened leaders who are doing so. Here, it’s respectable racists boycotting disreputable racists.”
[Dr. Michael Ben-Ari is an Israeli politician currently running for the Knesset. As a disciple of Meir Kahane, he was a member of Kahane’s Kach party. He once tore up a copy of the New Testament on the Knesset floor, calling it a despicable book responsible for the Holocaust, which belonged “in history’s trash can.” He resides in the illegal, Jewish-only settlement of Karnaei Shomron just west of Nablus in the West Bank. This colonial-settlement is located on Palestinian land forcefully confiscated from four different Palestinian villages. Read more about it here.]
