The Israeli election of November, 2022 brought into the Knesset some of the most extreme individuals in that country's history.  To bring himself back into office,  Netanyahu brought them into his cabinet.  (Smotrich and Bin Gvir get the most attention, but there are others).   These were people who had been brought up in the shadow  of Rabbi Meir Kahane.  Kahane had been banned from office and Netanyahu's new allies had also seen their party banned.  But they had reconstituted themselves into a new configuration and evaded the ban.

With the horrendous attacks of October 7 and the brutal Gaza war that followed,   suddenly the thinking of those religio-nationalists has moved closer to the center of the political system.  (Note:  1200 Israelis and Israeli-linked workers were  killed on October 7.   22,000 Palestinians are dead as of early January, 2024,  70% being women and children).

This is a reposting of an earlier podcast outlining the ideology of Rabbi Kahane.  Kahane was born in Brooklyn but moved to Israel and was elected to the Knesset.  He was later assassinated.  At the time, his views were considered shockingly extreme.  He was widely renounced by American Jews and by Israelis.   (Note that someone of his thinking had conducted the Ibrahimi Mosque Massacre in Hebron in February, 1994.  29 Muslims had been killed on the first day of Ramadan, plus ten more sot by Israeli soldiers in the aftermath).  And someone of this mind-set also assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin).

I heard Kahane speak twice in the Detroit area in the early 1980s.  I also read two of his books, Time to Go Home [a call for Americans Jews to escape to Israel before the American holocaust] and They Must Go! [ A call to expel all Palestinians so that Israel can become a Jews-only state].  Those books were chilling  I also read quite a few essays by him, and one biography.    As far as I can tell, those who today embrace his name and his ideas are not fundamentally different from what I heard in the 1980s.

Kahane believed that anything is justified to bring the new age and to save the Jews.  I thought of the accusations by radical Iraqi Jews that the 1952 bombings of synagogues were done by Zionist commandos in an effort to panic them into fleeing to Israel.  I have no way to know if those accusations are correct but such a thing would surely be justified by Kahane.  He was filled with hatred of Arabs, Americans and secular Jews.  He believed in his cause and would do anything to achieve it.  He had a definite support base in the American Jewish community, although certainly not nearly as big as the vast proportion who were hostile to him.  I don’t want to be inflammatory but I wrote in my notes back in the 1980s that I felt I was in a Munich beer hall in 1924 listening to Hitler polish up a speech.  I have never heard anyone quite like him.

Note that in the Knesset, there are religious parties connected to the rabbis.  Two are United Torah Judaism (Ashkenazi) and Shas (Sephardic).  These are NOT Kahanist.

If you are interested in how  a similar logic works out in American culture you might listen to my podcast on the Replacement Wars.