Anshel Pfeffer Opinion How Netanyahu Revived Jewish Supremacism and Paved Its Way to Power
Last night I noted on Twitter that the only political ideologysuccessfully transplanted from the United States to Israel was the racist Jewish supremacism of the Brooklyn-born Rabbi Meir Kahane, and that apart from him, American Jewish immigrants to Israel failed to have much of an impact on contemporary Israeli politics.
I was swiftly told off by proud Americans Israelis - for disregarding the important contributions made by American olim to a wide range of liberal causes, including feminism and human rights. So I’ll use this column, a much more respectable platform than Twitter, to apologize and offer another observation, which I hope will be more complimentary to American Jews.
Had Meir Kahane remained in the U.S., and not made aliya himself in 1971, his toxic ideology, which emerged first in the American Jewish Defense League, and then migrated with him to the Israeli Kach Party, would have withered away. Kahane himself would today have been at the most an obscure footnote to recent history.
Netanyahu Now Endorses Jewish Fascism. U.S. Jews, Cut Your Ties With Him Now >> Drawing Inspiration From Trump, Far-right Kahane Movement Seeks U.S. Revival
If Kahane had not become an Israeli citizen, and not been shot deadin 1990 by a jihadist in his native New York, he may have met an early death by other means, perhaps due to some of his dealingswith organized crime. Or he’d still be alive, disgruntled and frustrated in his obscurity, writing screeds for far-right websites from his low-grade retirement home.
This isn’t hypothetical. He tried to keep the JDL alive from his new base in Israel, frequently traveling back to the U.S. to meet with his followers. But it was already a failing organization by the time of his murder and has since disappeared from the scene, with the exception of a few disconsolate thugs in the U.S. and some pathetic Kahanist wannabes in France and Canada.
Meanwhile, Kahanism, like one of those Hassidic sects which keep worshiping a dead Rebbe, has persevered and ultimately flourished in its new homeland.
Its latest reincarnation, Otzma Yehudit ("Jewish Power"), which last week entered an electoral pact with Habayit Hayehudi, brokered personally by Benjamin Netanyahu, is now not only on the way back to the Knesset, which Kahane was forced to leave in 1988, but it is doing so with the prime minister’s seal of legitimacy. As a bona fide part of the - for now - ruling right-wing coalition.
It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that 28 years after Kahane’s death, his disciples would make such a resounding comeback.
Kahane was already an outcast for the last two years of his life. Nearly the entire Knesset, including Likud, which former Ambassador Netanyahu had just joined, voted to change the electoral laws, barring parties that "incite to racism" from running.
After four years of sitting in the Knesset, Kahane was finding it difficult to reacclimatize, and there were stirrings against him within the party. After he was gone, there was a split between the veteran lieutenants and Kahane’s son Binyamin, who set up the rival Kahane Chai movement.
Over the next decade, his organizational legacy continued to absorb blows as the old guard of U.S.-born Kahanists and younger Israeli acolytes fell out with each other.
After Baruch Goldstein, a member of the original American hardcore, carried out the mass murder of 29 Palestinians at prayer in Hebron in 1994, both splinter groups, Kach and Kahane Chai, were outlawed as terrorist organizations. Then, on the last day of 2000, Binyamin Kahane was murdered, along with his wife Talia, by a Palestinian in a shooting attack in the West Bank.
But just as it seemed that particular stream of Israeli racism had petered out, a new, third generation of Kahanists, Israeli-born like the second generation, but better educated and media-savvy, breathed life in to the putrid carcass.
Michael Ben Ari and Itamar Ben Gvir did two things that the old-school Kahanists could not, or were simply less inclined to. They worked through the legal system, finding the loopholes in the laws that had proscribed the old Kach, and formed alliances with other, less overtly racist, but nearly as extreme, right-wing and religious parties.
As terror organizations seeking respectability do around the world, just like Hezbollah or the IRA, Kach had a new "political wing," ostensibly a separate entity, allowing them to run in an elections once again.
In the justified hue and cry this weekend over the Jewish Home-Jewish Power alliance, it was forgotten that this is a second comeback for the Kahanists to the Knesset.
They returned already once in 2009, when Ben Ari made it on to the brown seats, courtesy of the hard-right National Union. That was already half-legitimacy. National Union, despite its politics, was regarded as legitimate; it even had the former Brigadier-General, professor and doctor Arye Eldad, son of revered revisionist ideologue and bible scholar Professor Israel "Schreib" Eldad, among its MKs.
Of course, the prime minister’s imprimatur for this Kahanist revival is a much deeper abomination, one that has finally been noticed even by mainstream Jewish-American organizations such as the AJC and AIPAC, but no one need to act surprised. This is a rehabilitation that has long been in the making. And it has been taking place from inside the prime minister’s office.
Two and a half weeks ago, in the Likud primaries, May Golan was elected to the 33rd spot on the Likud candidates list, the space reserved for a young party member. The articulate Golan has long been the poster-child for the race-baiting campaign against African refugees in south Tel Aviv.
In 2013, when Otzma Yehudit ran on its own and failed to cross the electoral threshold, she was on the tenth spot of its list, lending some variety to the slate of grim religious men. Now she has transitioned seamlessly to Likud. "I didn’t moderate my views to join Likud, they came to my position," May told me on primary day.
A few days after his poisonous "the Arabs are moving in droves" Facebook video on Election Day in 2015, and under pressure from the Obama administration, Netanyahu issued a half-hearted non-apology to Israeli Arabs. But Obama is long gone and there’s no need any longer to keep up any pretenses that this was a one-off.
Dan Meridor, one of the last truly moderate Likudniks once told me: "Bibi isn’t racist, but he does sometimes use racism." I think even Meridor would admit now that there’s no real difference between the two. He’s no longer a party member, and other seemingly moderate Likudniks have been dragged in to the racist morass by their leader.
Last night on television, Yoav Kisch, the fighter-pilot and colonel whom the "New Likudniks," centrists who have joined the party in the hope of pulling it back from the far-right, have seen as one of their champions, tried to explain on television why Otzma Yehudit is actually a legitimate Zionist party.
This morning on national radio, Nir Barkat, another self-professed Likud moderate, declared: "I will fight against [the Kahanists] beliefs," but then admitted that "if there’s no choice, they can be part of the next government." For no choice, read if Netanyahu’s political survival depends on it.
The Jewish Defense League, born in Brooklyn, is finally home and dry in the Jewish state. Just like any child of immigrants, it has shed all traces of its accent and has become a full-fledged native. Kahanism 3.0 is a totally homegrown Israeli strain of an old racist virus.
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