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Welcome to The Guardian Long Read, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking. For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to theguardian.com forward slash. Kahane's Ghost. How a long-dead extremist rabbi continues to haunt Israel's politics. By Joshua Leifer. Read by Carrie Shale. On the evening of 5th November 1990, Meir Kahaneh, the extremist American rabbi turned far-right Israeli politician.
had just finished speaking at the Midtown Manhattan Marriott Eastside Hotel when a man named El Saeed Noser put a bullet through his neck. Two hours after the shooting, Kahane was pronounced dead. Kahana believed in the ideology that you shall murder, said Avraham Borg, then a labor member of the 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 ethno-nationalism 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 demands.
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 criminalizing 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.
Kahane's political career was marked by failure. Throughout his life, he appeared to most Israelis to be a grotesque U.S. import. his relentless demagogic campaign to expel the palestinians won him notoriety and a small cadre of fanatical followers Yet he never enjoyed the mainstream acceptance that he believed he had been promised by providence. Since childhood, he had dreamed of becoming Israel's prime minister. Instead, he became the leader of a movement shunned across the political spectrum.
In his multiple attempts to enter the Knesset, he succeeded only once, in 1984, before Kach was barred from electoral politics. At the time he was assassinated, his movement was on the verge of collapse, starved for funds, beset by infighting, and hounded by authorities in the U.S. Kahana and Kahanism, the ideology to which he gave his name, seemed destined for historical obscurity.
But Kahanism did not die. It survived. Not in its fully-fledged theocratic form, but as an ultra-nationalist vision of a land and body politic purged of a non-Jewish presence. The germ of Kahanism persisted, because the conditions that produced it did not go away. To the contrary, they grew more dire. Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza became ever more entrenched, its maintenance more brutal and deadly.
In the 1970s and 80s, Kahane had drawn much of his support from the disfranchised, predominantly Mizrahi working class. and portrayed his movement as a populist revolt against Israel's secular progressive Ashkenazi elite. In the 21st century, as the uneven gains of capitalist globalization and the country's high-tech boom deepened in equality, Kahanism re-emerged. to provide the grammar for a reinvigorated right-wing class war.
In the wake of the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, Kahanism was also buoyed up by an increasingly widespread radical pessimist. that Israel is doomed to war. that this war is zero-sum, and that it can end only through a total eschatological victory, that ultimately, as Kahana was fond of saying, it is either they or we.
For more than 30 years, Israel's political system maintained a cordon sanitaire that largely succeeded in excluding Kahanist parties from mainstream politics and parliament. but in the late 2010s, this cordon sanitaire fell. Against the backdrop of successive wars in Gaza, veteran Kahanist militants with thick criminal rap sheets began to appear on primetime television.
Ideas that were once taboo became commonplace. Vulgar anti-Arab racism became an easy way to generate attention on TV and social media. Support for the expulsion of Palestinians ceased to be a fringe proposal and became a routine part of political debate.
by twenty twenty two thanks to the intervention of the prime minister benjamin netanyahu parties that had until recently been deemed too dangerous to participate in elections now formed part of the coalition government Itamar Ben-Givir, a lifelong Kahanist agitator and convicted criminal, became National Security Minister, responsible for overseeing the police. Since the 7th of October, 2023, Kahanism has become mainstream.
It is the political style that relishes the dehumanization of Palestinians. It is the ethos according to which Jewish lives are seen as more valuable than all others. It is the ideology behind the normalization of population transfer and ethnic cleansing.
netanyahu's likud has undergone a process of near total kahanization to say nothing of the settler right In a January 2025 op-ed for the liberal daily Haaretz, the veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Levy described what had ensued since the 7th of October as the country's first Kahanist war. Almost everything about it was meant to appease the fascist, racist, population transferist, far-right, Levy wrote. the spirit of Kahanism seized control over its goals and content.
Indeed, over the past year and a half, it has often seemed as if Kahane's malignant, vengeful ghost had been suddenly reanimated, manifest in the chorus. calling to wipe Gaza off the map. In the images of grinning troops standing over white-hooded detainees, kneeling, hands zip-tied behind their backs. in the videos of uniformed men dancing with flags and Torah scrolls in the cratered landscape of the Strip. In the line, Kahana was right, graffitied above scorched doorways.
Thirty years ago, Kahana was the name of a man who most thought would be forgotten. Today, Kahanism is the governing coalition's operational ideology. Without America, there would be no Kahanism. As a young man, Mayor Kahane metabolized the contradictory currents, anxieties, and obsessions of post-war American Jewish life into a toxic, volatile brew. His father, Charles, was a rabbi from a long line of Hasidic rabbis.
He led a modern Orthodox congregation in Brooklyn and translated the Torah into an accessible English prose that he thought his flock, relatively ignorant of the tradition, would be able to read. Charles was also a political man. In the 1930s, he became an important fundraiser for the IRGUN, the underground Zionist paramilitary organization, and helped the group acquire weapons for its terrorist activities in British Mandate Palestine.
Mayer grew up in a house where right-wing Zionist leaders were frequent guests at the Shabbat dinner table. On one occasion, Vladimir Jabotinsky, leader of the revisionist Zionist movement, visited the Kahane family home in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush. rivals to David Ben-Gurion's labor Zionists. Jabotinsky's revisionists rejected socialism in favor of a martial nationalism that drew inspiration from Mussolini's fascists in Italy and Piuszki's Sanacia movement in Poland.
Mayor Kahane spent much of his teenage years in the revisionist youth movement, Betar, and the Jabotinskyite cult of force would remain a core part of his worldview throughout his life. but his megalomania and fanaticism made him, even at a relatively early age, restless. After losing a leadership contest, he left the doctrinally secular Beitar for B'nai Akiva, the Orthodox Religious Zionist Youth Movement.
and enrolled in the Mir Yeshiva, the flagship institution of Lithuanian ultra-Orthodoxy, a stricter environment than the milieu in which he was raised, from which he would receive rabbinic ordination. A peculiar product of the 20th century, Kahane managed to incarnate in his person the major ideological tendencies revisionist ultranationalism, religious Zionist messianism, and ultra-Orthodox fundamentalism that would come to dominate Israeli political life in the 21st century.
The same amalgam of opportunism and zealotry propelled Kahana through America's far right and New York City's underworld. The particulars of his bizarre trajectory nearly outstrip the imagination. In the early 1960s, he infiltrated the conspiratorial anti-communist John Birch Society and informed on the organization to the FBI. Kahane disliked the group because of its anti-Semitic tendencies.
He co-founded the July 4th Movement to drum up support for the Vietnam War on college campuses and published a book titled The Jewish Stake in Vietnam. During this time, Kahana was living a double life, secretly posing as a Gentile under the pseudonym Michael King. a fire-and-brimstone Orthodox rabbi in public, Kahana was a swindler and womanizer in private. Estelle Evans, a non-Jewish woman he abandoned two days before they were supposed to get married, took her own life soon after.
Kahana could deliver a sermon, clutching a Talmud tractate, one day, and shake the hand of an Italian mafia boss the next. In 1968, Kahana and a group of like-minded reactionaries founded the Jewish Defense League, JDL. as a vigilante organization that claimed to combat rising black antisemitism in New York's outer borough. Kahana asserted that, within black Jewish tensions, there existed a potential for another Shoah, and that only Jewish force of arms could ward it off.
The JDL's twin slogans were Never Again and Every Jew a 22. Yet more than its anti-black agitation, it was the JDL's anti-Arab, and in particular its anti-Soviet activities, that brought Kahane fame. And if there was anything he liked more than violence, it was fate. Kahane was not the leader of the Soviet Jewry movement, which aimed to force the Soviet Union to allow its several million Jews the freedom to emigrate. But JDL members were at the movement's militant vanguard.
Approvingly dubbed chayas, or wild animals, by Kahana, they carried out acts of vandalism, shootings, and bombings against Soviet political and cultural institutions in the U.S. At its height, the JDL's campaign of terrorism even threatened to derail President Richard Nixon's efforts at detente with the Soviet Union. In 1972, the JDL bombed the offices of Saul Hurok, a Jewish impresario for many Russian cultural acts, including the Bolshoi Ballet.
The attack sent Hurok to the hospital and killed Iris Cohns, his 27-year-old Jewish secretary. It also put the JDL's members in the federal authority's crosshair. By then, Kahana had departed for Israel, reportedly on the heels of an FBI warning that another felony conviction would land him in prison. As with many of his decisions, his move to Israel was motivated as much by self-interest as ideology.
It took Kahana time to adjust to his new home. At first, his U.S. preoccupations largely dictated his politics. He initially targeted the small sect of black Hebrew Israelites and Christian missionaries, proselytizing to Israeli Jews. Yet he came to realize that in Israel, anti-Arab sentiment could mobilize far greater numbers than any of his other obsessions. from his shoebox office in Jerusalem, which Kahane called the Museum of the Potential Holocaust.
He warned that Israel faced an existential threat posed by the Soviet-backed Arab armies, which could amass at any moment on its borders. and by the Palestinians living in the territories under its control. He began to describe Israel's struggle for survival in the language of race war. Kahane's transplanting of the U.S. psychopolitics of race onto the conflict with the Palestinians made him something of a pioneer in bigotry and incitement.
Israeli society was no stranger to racism, but Kahane made subtext into text, then text into melodrama. I say what you think, he relished saying. He led his followers on hate marches. through Palestinian-majority cities and towns and East Jerusalem neighborhoods, where they attacked storefronts and threatened people, brandishing their yellow flags, chanting, Death to Arath. His successors have continued this practice today, only under different colored banners.
As Kahane's movement crystallized through the 1970s, its central demand became the call for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from both Israel and the occupied West Bank and Gaza. They must go, became a catchphrase. and the title of a book, published in 1980, which Gahanna wrote in Israel's maximum security Ramallah Prison for plotting to blow up the Dome of the Rock in the hope of igniting an apocalyptic religious war.
Four years later, in 1984, a group of militant West Bank settlers known as the Jewish Underground were arrested for attempting to do the same. Kahane made the case for ethnic cleansing as a religious imperative. The presence of non-Jews, he argued, defiled the Holy Land and delayed the redemption. He also framed it as a demographic necessity. Without expelling the Palestinians, he insisted, there was no way to guarantee a Jewish majority.
The idea of population transfer was not foreign to Zionist thought. Jabotinsky's revisionists had at times advocated for it. Ben-Gurion had discussed it with British mandate authorities. But after Israel's establishment, which resulted in the expulsion and flight of roughly 700,000 Palestinians, what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, the idea was rarely raised in public. By the 1950s, it was no longer considered a viable political position. Kahana shattered this taboo.
His view, and particularly the religious language in which he articulated it, was arguably unprecedented in Zionist history, writes Shoal Magid, a leading scholar of Judaism. in his recent study of Kahane's thought, extending beyond even the most maximalist revisionists. Kahane mounted several electoral campaigns in the 1970s, each of which ended without success. Yet that did not prevent him from building support in the street.
He understood the explosive power of transgression and the disruptive, even revolutionary potential of Israel's internal social division. While Kahane was seen by the Israeli establishment as a malign and foreign transplant, with his American-accented Hebrew and barely-concealed stutter, He found that being an outsider was a political asset as leader of what was Israel's first far-right protest movement.
When he traveled to Israel's poor peripheral towns and cities, he cast himself as the tribune of Israel's forgotten man. the Mizrahi working class, the Russian-speaking immigrants, the impoverished ultra-Orthodox. At countless rallies and with his tireless, demonic charisma, Kahana amplified a narrative, then only in its infancy, but now a widely accepted structure of grievance.
that Israel's secular Ashkenazi elite had betrayed not only the country's authentic Jews to appease the Arabs, but even worse, Judaism itself. This internal Jewish stab-in-the-back myth was just one part of what Israeli scholars Adam and Gedalia Afterman have called Kahana's radical theology of revenge. For kahana, revenge, in Hebrew, nekamah, was at once a comprehensive worldview, a slogan, a strategy, and a religious obligation.
Jewish violence in defense of Jewish interests is never wrong, he declared. Decades before the radical hilltop youth settlers began putting the idea into practice through their price tag attacks on Palestinian farmers and towns. Kahana proclaimed, there is one solution to Arab terror, Jewish counter-terror. Over time, terror neged against terror, or TNT, would become another of the movement's catchphrases. Thanks for listening to The Guardian Long Read. The story continues right after this.
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In the 1984 elections, Kahane made his breakthrough. His Kaag party won 25,907 votes, or 1.2% of all ballots cast. Enough for a single Knesset seat, his own. It is a disgrace to the Jewish people. Israel's then-president Chaim Herzog said, in response to Kahane's election, that a person could rise in the Jewish state and present a program that is very similar to the Nuremberg laws.
Although it had won far from an overwhelming mandate, Kach's entrance into parliamentary politics shocked Israeli society because of what it appeared to mean and what it might foretell. Yet Gahanism had not emerged from out of nowhere, but from within the precincts of the revisionist rite. When he was merely a U.S. rabble-rouser and anti-Soviet activist in New York, the then Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, who succeeded Begin as Likud leader, had encouraged his activity.
Begin once asked Kahana to write an introduction to the U.S. edition of his wartime memoir of the Irgun, and even offered Kahana a seat on the right-wing revisionist Herut party's list. In another world, he might have lived out his career as a stridently cooed backbencher. But, driven by a messiah complex, Kahana was never content to be a supporting act. He wanted to be the main show.
In 1985, a group of leading Israeli intellectuals headed by Aviezer Ravitsky, a left-wing religious philosopher, convened a study group under the auspices of Israel's president. to assess the seriousness of the threat Kahane posed and suggest how the state should respond. The group would later publish the record of its meeting in a pamphlet titled The Roots of Kahanism, Consciousness and Political Reality. Today it makes for a sobering and frighteningly prescient read.
Giving the session's prefatory remarks, Yehuda Bauer, the celebrated historian of the Holocaust, expressed the fear that gave the initiative its urgency. that Kahanism can, well, heaven forbid, turn out to be the tip of a very large iceberg threatening our society. As Ravitsky saw it, Kahanism was unlike any of the other extremist ideologies that had taken root in Israel. It was far more dangerous.
The Religious Zionist Settler Movement's official commitment to Jewish unity had limited the risk of intra-Jewish violence, Ravitsky observed, while the ultra-Orthodox tendency to political quietism meant that its representatives had made no active attempt to transform Israel into a theocracy. or bring about its vision for the end of days. By contrast, with Gahanism, Ravitsky warned, all restraints have been removed.
Here was a charismatic demagogue who openly proposed both a final redemptive genocide of the Palestinians and a Jewish civil war. a purgation of heretics, humanists, leftists, and Arab sympathizers. In response, Yehoshaphat Harkabi, a former IDF intelligence chief, argued that Gahanism was a phenomenon that grew out of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It could not have gained adherence without it.
For in his own maniacal way, Kahane was saying something that no Israeli leader, on either the left or the right, was prepared to admit. that Israel could not maintain control over millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories without sacrificing its Jewish demographic majority, to say nothing of its democratic character. Kahane himself liked to say, in a mocking pantomime of humanism, that no self-respecting Arab would ever consent to live under Israeli subjugation indefinitely.
For Israeli territorial maximalists, unwilling to accept partition of the land, this left one option. Ethnic cleansing. Hence, Harkabi said presciently, the Kahanists say, if we annex, we must expel. Another member of the study group was Avraham Borg, at the time a young peace activist who had faced down Kahanist thugs at demonstrations.
Throughout Jewish history, there has been a struggle against the zealots, Borg told me when we spoke last summer. It is a deep-rooted paradigm that rational Judaism has tried to suppress. Borg, who went on to become Speaker of the Knesset, made a version of the same argument to his colleagues back in 1985.
Rabbi Kahana is part of us, he told the other members of the study group. He did not emerge all by himself. He emerged from among us, from all who call themselves Zionists, and so the blame is ours. But whereas his interlocutors made the case for placing Kahana and his movement outside the law, Burg argued that it was safer to fight the extremists in the court of public opinion. I prefer to have them, Borg told me, where they can be seen. The Knesset decided otherwise.
In 1985, Israel's parliament passed a bill that amended the country's basic law. to bar any party or politician that supports violent terrorism against the state, incites racism, or rejects the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. That same year, Kahane told a pair of French journalists, democracy and Judaism are two opposite things. With Kach in the Knesset, the established parties swiftly attempted to build a cordon sanitaire around him.
During these years, there was much talk in Israel of the need to insulate the democratic system from forces that would exploit its freedoms to subvert it. Israel's education minister launched an initiative to inculcate democratic values in the country's school children. The army embarked on an endeavor to combat Kahanist sympathies among the rank and file, rolling out a program to teach new conscripts, courses on the virtues of democracy.
Parties on the left, right, and center worked together to block discussion of Kahane's proposals and prevent him from taking the podium. When he did rise to speak, members of the Knesset, including the ultra-hawkish Likud leader Shamir, exited the chamber. Israeli Public Radio refused to broadcast Kahane's speeches.
the police routinely blocked him from exploiting his parliamentary immunity to instigate violence against Palestinians, leading him to decry Israel's courts, police, and other gatekeepers of the rule of law as the real fascist. Such measures reflected the immune response of a comparatively healthier Israeli political system. Of course this anti-Kahana project would not have been so thorough going had it not also been politically convenient.
it was not lost on Shamir that Kahana appealed in both substance and style to much of the Likud base. In an article about the 1984 elections for the New York Review of Books, journalist Bernard Avashai asked whether Kahane was simply carrying to its logical extreme what had become the conventional wisdom under Begin.
But this also meant that Israeli leaders, even or especially those on the right, feared that Kahanism was a kind of virus that fed on the darkest fears in the Israeli collective consciousness. and which, if left unchallenged, would ultimately devour its host. As a functional matter, the amendment to Israel's basic law works.
Kach was banned from running in the 1988 elections, and the Supreme Court rejected Kahane's appeal. He never recovered from this setback, growing even more radical in response. In what might be called his mature philosophy, Kahane rejected Israel's system of rule outright. Kahana's Zionism, Magid wrote, became a battle against the state. Not only were secular Jews not really Jews, he argued, but Israel was not a Jewish state at all.
It's a Hebrew-speaking Portugal that would like to be a Hebrew-speaking Sweden, Kahana wrote. To make Israel into a true Jewish state, he proposed replacing Parliament with a Torah-mandated king and Sanhedrin, or Supreme Rabbinic Court. which would rule the country according to the strict interpretation of Jewish law. Towards the end of his life, Kahane joined a doomed far-right separatist movement to establish an independent state of Judea in the occupied West Bank.
he was elected the state's honorary president. The project found little support. At the time of his assassination, Kahane and his movement appeared to be on the inexorable descent into obscurity. In the 1990s, as Israel inched towards territorial compromise with the Palestinians, Kahane's movement assumed the mantle of violent opposition to a peace deal.
Kahaneh's remaining disciples, marginalized and ridiculed by Israel's mainstream, retreated to the ultra-radical settlement of Kiryat Arba, near the Palestinian city of Hebron in the occupied West Bank. and to Kaffar Tapuach, the northern West Bank settlement, where a small group of Kach supporters, led by Kahane's son, Benjamin Zev Kahane, briefly made their home.
From these strongholds, the Gahanist fringe set out to derail the peace process and, by extension, change the course of Israel's history. As practitioners of political violence, the Kahanists proved devastatingly effective. On the 25th of February, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born doctor and Kach member from Kiryat Arba, entered Hebron's Ibrahami Mosque and opened fire on Muslim worshippers. killing 29 Palestinians.
Two months later, the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas launched its first suicide bombing against civilians within Israel proper in the northern Israeli city of Afullah as an act of retribution. The organization had carried out suicide bombings in the occupied territories the previous year. Goldstein's massacre prompted Rabin's government to finally outlaw Kah and the Kahana Chai movement, a splinter outfit led by Benjamin Kahana, designating both terrorist organizations.
In a speech after Goldstein's massacre, Rabin described Kahana and his supporters as an errant weed. He proved to be tragically wrong. The same morning as Goldstein's massacre, Yigal Amir, a 25-year-old law student, was learning Talmud in the Bar-Ilan University study hall when he heard the news on the radio.
I was very intrigued by how a man like that could get up and sacrifice his life, Amir would later tell Israeli investigators. That's when I had the idea that it's necessary to take Rabin down. On the 4th of November, 1995, Amir fired two shots at the Prime Minister as he left a peace rally in central Tel Aviv. Rabin was pronounced dead later that night. In the following two decades, Kahane's disciples would carry out other devastating acts of terrorism.
Yet, as the extreme right blossomed through the early 2000s, fueled by the shattering violence of the Second Intifada, they would not act alone. In the aftermath of Israel's 2005 unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, a new generation of religious Zionist settlers also grew more radical. Whereas their parents' generation had sought to harness the state to entrench Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, this younger generation turned against the state.
viewing the Gaza disengagement as an unforgivable betrayal. And while the mainstream religious Zionist movement had traditionally endorsed the use of violence as a means to an end, The newly radicalized settlers embraced terror as a value, much like the Kahanists, whom they far outnumbered, and turned their violence not only against Palestinians, but also against Jews. They became known as the Hilltop Youth. Identifiable by their long, unkempt side locks and fraying, oversized skull caps.
The hilltop youth set out to build outposts, illegal under Israeli as well as international law, in the occupied West Bank. As part of their land grabs, they have terrorized Palestinians in the areas where they invaded, stolen their sheep, vandalized their homes, torched their crops, and attacked them physically. Since the 7th of October, hilltop youth attacks have become far more brazen and more dead. they have little use for doctrine kahanas or others
The entire ethos of the hilltop youth is a revolt against authority. Or rather, they resist all authority that is not Torah, said Idan Yaron, an Israeli anthropologist who studies the far right. Yaron has likened the hilltop youth to other forms of leaderless resistance that operate through networked cells and to Al-Qaeda. To the extent that there is an ideologue articulating a political theology for the hilltop youth, it is Mayer Ettinger, a gaunt, scraggly-bearded 33-year-old.
Since his twenties, Ettinger has been among the Shin Bet's most wanted Jewish Israeli target. In the early 2010s, he authored a polemic in which he outlined a program titled The Revolt. In it, he called for settler militants to ignite an epical violent conflagration between Jews and Arabs with the aim of imploding the Israeli state. replacing it with a halakhic kingdom, building the third temple in Jerusalem, and expelling or killing any non-Jew left in the land of Israel.
Although he arrived at these deranged fantasies on his own, he was, in a way, also following family tradition. Ettinger also happens to be one of Meir Kahane's 37 grandchildren. For a long time, the very extremism that made Kahanism so dangerous also prevented it from regaining a foothold in parliamentary politics. But, as the Israeli public lurched rightward, and Netanyahu transformed his Likud into a bastion of authoritarian, right-wing populism, Kahanist ideas became increasingly normalized.
The cordon sanitaire established in the 1980s started to fail. One of the most fateful decisions was giving permission to let the Kahanists run in the first place, Yaron told me. While Israel's high court barred Benzi Gopstein and Baruch Marzel, a Boston-born Kahanist disciple, from running for the Knesset in 2019, the court gave the green light. to Itmar ben Givir and the rest of the Jewish powerless. It was a mistake of the highest degree, Euron added, a sin that cannot be atoned for.
That year, to shore up his political coalition, Netanyahu tore up what remained of the Cordon Sanitaire by signing a vote-sharing agreement with Jewish power. In the five national elections between 2019 and 2022, Jewish power failed to garner enough votes to enter the Knesset, repeatedly denying Netanyahu the seats he needed to form a right-wing majority government.
In 2022, to solve this problem, Netanyahu cajoled Ben-Gavir, leader of Jewish power, and Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the hardline settler Religious Zionism Party, into forming a technical block. which enabled the parties to run jointly in the election before splitting once in the Knesset. The move paid off. In the November elections, the joint Jewish power-religious Zionism slate won a combined 14 seats, making it the Gnesset's third-largest faction.
Unlike many of Kahana's latter-day admirers, Ben-Gavir actually appears to have read part of the rabbi's voluminous oeuvre. Kahana's books sit prominently on glass case bookshelves in the Ben-Gavir home, above volumes of the Talmud and Torah commentary. A resident of the Kahanist bastion in Kiryat Arba, Ben Gevir hung a portrait of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein on the wall of his living room for years.
The Yeshiva of the Jewish Idea, the seminary Kahana established on the border of East Jerusalem, counts Ben-Gavir among its most illustrious alumni. While Ben-Gavir has not abandoned Kahane's anti-Arab vitriol or the motifs of right-wing class war, he has endeavored to expand Kahanism's appeal. In contrast to the American Kahana, Ben-Gavir is the native-born son of immigrants from Iraqi Kurdistan and speaks of loving all the Jewish people.
On social media, he presents himself as a disheveled, avuncular, yet principled figure. Once a vociferous homophobe, by the time of the 2015 election campaign, he was telling journalists, LGBT people are my brothers, and if I have a gay son, I'll hug him and kiss him because he's my son. Ahead of the 2020 elections, Ben-Gavir acquiesced to removing the portrait of Goldstein from his home.
During the 2022 election campaign, Ben-Gavir diligently chided his supporters when they broke into their favorite, Death to Arabs chant. It's death to terrorists, he'd correct. Beneath these cosmetic changes, Ben-Gavir has remained faithful to the central plank of the Qahannes political project, the annexation of the occupied West Bank and Gaza, and the expulsion of the Palestinians living there.
He has shown less overt enthusiasm for the other parts of the Kahanist tradition, such as overthrowing the secular state, and its replacement by a theocratic one. If Kahane believed that the eschatological rupture could be instigated here and now through violence, Ben-Gavir is focused on accruing power and popularity.
In the weeks and months that followed the 7th of October, while much of Israel sat in mourning, the far right, Kahanists and hardline settlers alike, looked out onto the destruction with a sense of eager anticipation. they sensed opportunity. In the Kahanist cosmology, a prerequisite for the dawn of the messianic age is an apocalyptic war that purifies the land of Israel from the presence of non-Jews.
Orit Strohk, a member of the Knesset for the Religious Zionism Party, remarked in July 2024 that the days of war were like a period of miracles. The far right's hope that this war might lead to the divinely ordained conquest of all greater Israel, and perhaps to the war to end all wars, is one of the reasons it has continued for so long. With the far right in unprecedented positions of power, the possibility that it might achieve such devastating goals has also loomed since the start of the war.
In mid-October 2023, Israel's intelligence ministry prepared a white paper that recommended expelling Gaza's population into the Sinai Desert. After Donald Trump, in February 2025, announced his own plan to displace Gaza's two million residents, Netanyahu's government transformed the Kahane's obsession of transfer into official policy. the defense minister Israel Katz ordered the army to prepare for its implementation.
CBS News reported that the Trump administration and Israel have approached the governments of Sudan and Somalia as potential destinations for Palestinians expelled from Gaza. Deep within the ranks of Israel's right, even more lurid, violent fantasies have begun to bloom. Nassim Vattouri, a Likud member of the Knesset, said in a recent radio interview that Israeli troops should separate the men and children and kill the adult men in Gaza. adding, we are being too considerate.
on a dark thursday night in late december i attended an event organized by a group of radical right-wing settlers preparing as they saw it to return imminently to resettle gaza There, in the car park of the Starot train station, near the Gaza border, a mob of yeshiva students waved flags that read, Gaza is ours forever. and paraded across the pavement singing zohreine na a schlock rock song written by the kahanist musician dov shurin that has become an anthem of israel's extreme rite
The song's lyrics come from a verse in the book of Judges that relates how the biblical hero Samson, before he dies, prays to God. Remember me. Please strengthen me this time to take revenge on the Philistines. In the common Kahanist rendition, Palestinians replaces Philistines. The settler youth belted those words with zeal. Yet it seemed that in their fervor they had forgotten, or perhaps suppressed, how the story in Judges ends.
Samson, the hero, pulls down the walls of the temple of Dagon onto the Philistines gathered to offer a sacrifice, and onto himself. Although through his death he kills more than he slew in his life, Samson's act is a suicide. Thanks again for listening to The Guardian Long Read. That was Kahana's Ghost, How a Long-Dead Extremist Rabbi Continues to Haunt Israel's Politics, by Joshua Leifer, read by Kerry Shale. and produced by Nicola Alexandru. The executive producer was Danielle Stevens.
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