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Meir David Kahane ([3][4] He later became known in the United States and Israel for violent terrorist attacks as well as political and religious views that included proposing emergency Jewish mass-immigration to Israel due to the imminent threat of a "second Holocaust" in the United States, advocating that Israel's democracy be replaced by a state modeled on Jewish law, and promoting the idea of a Greater Israel in which Israel would annex the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In order to keep Arabs from becoming a numerical majority in Israel, he proposed a plan allowing Arabs to leave Israel and receive compensation for their property, or to remain as non-citizens without political or voting rights, and forcibly removing Arabs who refused both options.[5]
Kahane founded the FBI listed terrorist group the Jewish Defense League (JDL) [6] in the USA as well as an Israeli political party Kach ("This is the Way"). In 1971, he was convicted for plotting to manufacture explosives.[7] In 1984 he became a member of the Knesset when Kach gained one seat in parliamentary elections. In 1988, the Israeli government banned Kach as "racist" and "anti-democratic" under the terms of an ad hoc law.[8]
Kahane was killed in a Manhattan hotel by an Arab gunman in November 1990 after Kahane concluded a speech warning American Jews to emigrate to Israel before it was "too late".[9][10] Some researchers, such as Peter Lance, consider him one of the first, if not the very first, victim of the then-nascent Al Qaeda, as his killer is believed to have links to Osama bin Laden's network.[11] The cell that Kahane's assassin belonged to had been training in the New York metro since the middle of 1989.[12]
In 2007 the FBI released over a thousand documents relating to their daily surveillance of Kahane since the early 1960s.[13]
Kahane's name has come up as precedent in many court cases. Two examples are the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case, where the defense tried unsuccessfully to argue that informants Emad Saleem and Ali Mohamed had entrapped the conspirators, as had been done by the FBI to Kahane.[14] In another case brought up at the Israeli Supreme Court, the banning of Kahane's political party first and then upheld in appeal, within the framework of the Israeli Democracy, can be used to ban other parties deemed racist or which espouse racist views.[15][16] The prosecution argued that Arab MP Haneen Zoabi should be banned for denying the Jewish People's existence and was banned by the Central Elections Committee, using the Kahane precedent. A week later this was unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court. Attempts at banning of Strong Israel and Balad political parties were overturned using the Kahane precedent unsuccessfully as well.[17][18]
Some notable 1960s-era folk singers have made positive comments about Kahane. Woody Guthrie's son Arlo described Kahane as "a really nice, patient teacher" who tutored him for his Bar Mitzvah. However, he felt that Kahane subsequently "started going haywire".[19] Woody and his wife Marjorie had both met Kahane, and separately decades later Bob Dylan referred to him as "a really sincere guy".[20]
Kahane was born in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, in 1932 to an Orthodox Jewish family. His father, Rabbi Yechezkel (Charles) Kahane, studied at Polish and Czech yeshiva religious schools, was involved in the Revisionist Zionism movement, and was a close friend of Ze'ev Jabotinsky.[21]
As a teenager, he became an ardent admirer of Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Peter Bergson, who were frequent guests in his parents' home, and joined the Betar (Brit Trumpeldor) youth wing of Revisionist Zionism. He was active in protests against Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary who maintained restrictions on immigration of Jews (including Nazi death camp survivors) to Palestine after the end of the Second World War. In 1947 Kahane was arrested for throwing eggs and tomatoes at Bevin, as the latter disembarked at Pier 84 on a visit to New York. A photo of the arrest appeared in the New York Daily News.[22] In 1954, he became the mazkir (director) of Greater New York City’s sixteen Bnei Akiva chapters.
Kahane’s formal education included elementary school at the Yeshiva of Flatbush and high school at both Abraham Lincoln H.S. and at the Brooklyn Talmudical Academy. Kahane received his rabbinical ordination from the Mir Yeshiva in Brooklyn, and earned a B.A. in political science from Brooklyn College. He was fully conversant with the Talmud and Tanakh (Jewish Bible), and worked as a pulpit rabbi and teacher in the 1960s. Subsequently, he earned a Bachelor of Law – LL.B. from New York Law School and M.A. in International Relations from New York University.[23]
In 1956, Kahane married Libby, with whom he had four children,[24] including Tova,[25] Baruch[26] and Binyamin. In 1958, he became the rabbi of the Howard Beach Jewish Center in Queens, New York City. The synagogue was traditional rather than strictly Orthodox but they installed a mechitzah, a partition that is used to separate men and women, before he took the position. At the Jewish Center, Kahane influenced many of the synagogue’s youngsters to adopt a more observant lifestyle and this angered their parents.[27] He trained Arlo Guthrie for his bar mitzvah.[28] His contract was not renewed and he soon published an article entitled “End of the Miracle of Howard Beach.” This was Kahane’s first article in the Jewish Press, American-Jewish weekly, for which he continued to write until his assassination in 1990.[29] Kahane also used the pen name David Sinai and the pseudonyms Michael King, David Borac and Martin Keene.[30]
At some time in the late 1950s, Mr. Kahane took on the persona of a non-religious individual, living a double life, shaving his beard and renamed himself Michael King.[31] Kahane became a demagogue at this point according to most accounts, and re-imagined himself as virulently and violently anti-Communist and anti-hippie. He created the 'July Fourth Movement' which targeted left wing groups on US college campuses across the US, financed by the US Government. During this period, Kahane attempted to rekindle his Brooklyn College friendship with Joseph Churba which resulted in them co-authoring the text, 'The Jewish Stake in Vietnam' together, which was an attempt to convince American Jews of the 'evil of Communism'.[32] Kahane and Churba wrote "All Americans have a stake in this grim war against Communism.... it is vital that Jews realize the threat to their very survival [should Communism succeed]" from the introduction. Churba had a major falling out with Kahane over the use of para-militarism, and they permanently parted ways, he went on to pursue his own career, joining the US Air Force, writing many books on the Middle East, later becoming one of Ronald Reagan's consultants. Kahane chose a violent path, even attempting to acquire and grow biological weapons to use on a Soviet military installation[14] but failed. Following the failure to get FBI training in the use of biological weapons, and the suicide of his 'Michael King' persona's non-Jewish mistress, he began using the phrase 'Never Again'[33] (wrote a book with that title, a few years after his first article using that phrase appeared), also conceiving the Jewish Star and fist insignia, a similar symbol to the Black Panther party, though Kahane himself was against the Black Panther party due to anti-Jewish riots they had supported in Massachusetts as he saw it, and leftist leanings as he saw it.
In the late 1950s to early 1960s, Kahane's life of secrecy and strong anti-communist views landed him a position as a consultant with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). According to his wife Libby, his assignment was to infiltrate the anti-communist John Birch Society and report his findings back to the FBI.[24] As reported by Michael T. Kaufman in The New York Times[34] (and subsequently followed up by The Village Voice in the early 1980s), Kahane (under his pseudonym Michael King) allegedly had an affair with a non-Jewish woman, Gloria Jean D'Argenio.[35][36] In 1966, Kahane/King allegedly sent a letter to D'Argenio in which he unilaterally ended their relationship. According to Friedman, Kahane had proposed to D'Argenio, and two days before the wedding, admitted he was already married with children. In response, D'Argenio jumped off the Queensboro ("59th Street", "Ed Koch") Bridge; she died of her injuries the next day. According to Kaufman, Kahane admitted to him that "he loved Ms D'Argenio and had placed roses on her grave for months after her death." He also established a foundation which carried the name she used in her modeling career, Estelle Donna Evans. Ads for the foundation appeared weekly in the Jewish Press, although the group never filed legally required financial documents detailing what it did with the money it collected.[37]
The Jewish Defense League (JDL) is an FBI listed terrorist group[6] founded by Kahane in New York City in 1968. JDL's self-described purpose was to protect Jews from local manifestations of antisemitism.[38] According to the Anti-Defamation League, Kahane "preached a radical form of Jewish nationalism which reflected racism, violence and political extremism"[38] and those attitudes were replicated by Irv Rubin, the JDL successor to Kahane.[39] In a 1971 interview, Bob Dylan made positive comments about Kahane. In Time Magazine, Dylan stated, "He's a really sincere guy. He's really put it all together."[40] According to Kahane, Dylan did attend several meetings of the Jewish Defense League in order to find out "what we're all about"[41] and started to have talks with the rabbi.[42] Subsequently, Dylan downplayed the extent of his contact with Kahane.[43]
A number of the JDL members and leaders, including Kahane, were convicted in relation to acts of domestic terrorism in the United States.[44] In 1971, Kahane was sentenced to 5 years in prison, suspended, for conspiring to manufacture explosives.[7] In 1975, Kahane was arrested for leading the attack on the police outside the Soviet United Nations mission and injuring two officers, but was released after being given summonses for disorderly conduct. Later that same year, Kahane was accused of conspiring to kidnap a Soviet diplomat, bomb the Iraqi embassy in Washington, and ship arms abroad from Israel. He was convicted of violating his probation for the 1971 bomb conviction and sentenced to one year in prison.[45] However he served most of it in a hotel, with frequently unsupervised absences, due to a concession over the provision of kosher food.[46] He also announced that the JDL planned to recruit a 150,000 member volunteer "army" of Americans to fight for Israel, even as such an "army" had no approval from the Israeli government.[38] In a 1984 interview with Washington Post correspondent Carla Hall, Kahane admitted that the JDL "bombed the Russian [Soviet] mission in New York, the Russian cultural mission here [Washington] in 1971, the Soviet trade offices."[47][48]
In 1971, Kahane emigrated to Israel. When he moved to Israel, Kahane declared that he would focus on Jewish education.[49] However, he soon began initiating protests advocating the expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories. In 1972, Jewish Defense League leaflets were distributed in Hebron, calling for the mayor to stand trial for the 1929 Hebron massacre.[50] Kahane was arrested dozens of times.[51] In 1971, he founded the Kach party. In 1973, the party ran for the Knesset (Israeli parliament) during the general elections under the name "The League List". The party won 12,811 votes (0.82%), just 2,857 (0.18%) short of the electoral threshold at the time (1%) for winning a Knesset seat. The party was even less successful in the 1977 elections, winning 4,836 votes.
In 1980, Kahane was arrested for the 62nd time since his emigration and jailed for six months following a detention order based on allegations of planning armed attacks against Palestinians in response to the killings of Jewish settlers.[52] Kahane was held in prison in Ramla, where he wrote the book They Must Go. Kahane claimed in the book's preface that a prisoner in the same wing was a Bedouin from the Negev about to be released after serving an eighteen-year prison sentence for the rape and murder of a Jewish girl.[53]
In 1981, Kahane's Kach party again ran for the Knesset during the 1981 elections, but did not win a seat, receiving only 5,128 votes. In 1984, the Central Elections Committee banned him from being a candidate on the grounds that Kach was a racist party, but the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the ban on grounds that the committee was not authorized to ban Kahane's candidacy.[54] The Supreme Court suggested that the Knesset pass a law that would authorize the exclusion of racist parties from future elections, and the Anti-Racist Law of 1988 was later passed. In the 1984 legislative elections, Kahane's Kach party received 25,907 votes, enough to give the party one seat in the Knesset, which was taken by Kahane. Kahane refused to take the standard oath of office and insisted on adding a Biblical verse from Psalms, to indicate that when the national laws and Torah conflict, Torah (Biblical) law should have supremacy over the laws of the Knesset. Kahane's legislative proposals focused on transferring the Arab population out from the Land of Israel, revoking Israeli citizenship from non-Jews, and banning Jewish-Gentile marriages and sexual relations, based on the Code of Jewish Law compiled by Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah.
As his political career progressed, Kahane became increasingly isolated in the Knesset. His speeches, boycotted by Knesset members, were made to an empty parliament, except for the duty chairman and the transcriptionist. Kahane's legislative proposals and motions of no-confidence against the government were ignored or rejected by fellow Knesset members. Kahane often pejoratively called other Knesset members "Hellenists" in Hebrew (a reference to Jews who assimilated into Greek culture after Judea's occupation by Alexander the Great). In 1987, Kahane opened a yeshiva (HaRaayon HaYehudi) with funding from US supporters, for the teaching of "the Authentic Jewish Idea". Despite the boycott, Kahane's popularity grew among the Israeli public, especially among working-class Sephardi Jews.[55] Polls showed that Kach would have likely received three to four seats in the coming November 1988 elections.[56][57]
In 1985, the Knesset passed an amendment to Israel's Basic Law, barring "racist" candidates from election. The Central Elections Committee banned Kahane a second time, and he appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court. This time, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the committee, disqualifying Kach from running in the 1988 elections. Kahane was thus the first candidate in Israel to be barred from election for racism.
In November 1990, following a speech to an audience of mostly Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn,[10] as a crowd of well-wishers gathered around Kahane in the second-floor lecture hall in midtown Manhattan's Marriott East Side Hotel, Kahane was assassinated.[58][59][60] He was shot to death by El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian-born American citizen who was initially charged and acquitted of the murder.[61] Nosair was later convicted of the murder in United States district court incident to the trial for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Prosecutors were able to retry Nosair for the murder because the federal indictment includes the killing as part of the alleged terrorist conspiracy.[62] He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and later made a confession to federal agents.[63] Kahane was buried on Har HaMenuchot in Jerusalem. Kahane's funeral was one of the largest in Israel's history, where approximately 150,000 participated.
Kahane argued that there was a glory in Jewish destiny, which came through the observance of the [65] "Western democracy has to be ruled out. For me that's cut and dried: there's no question of setting up democracy in Israel, because democracy means equal rights for all, irrespective of racial or religious origins."
Kahane proposed the forcible deportation of nearly all Arabs from all lands controlled by the Israeli government. He framed this deportation as an "exchange of populations" that would continue the [65]
Kahane proposed that Israel expand its boundaries "according to the description given in the [65] When critics suggested this would mean perpetual war between Jews and Arabs, Kahane answered, "There will be a perpetual war. With or without Kahane."
Following Kahane's death, no charismatic leader emerged to replace him in the movement, although the idea of transferring populations, mainly attributed to Kahane, was subsequently incorporated into the political platform of various political parties in Israel, such as Moledet (applying to Arab non-citizen residents of the West Bank) and Yisrael Beiteinu (in the form of population exchange). Two small Kahanist factions later emerged; one under the name of Kach and the other Kahane chai (Hebrew: כהנא חי, literally "Kahane lives [on]"), the second one led by his younger son, Binyamin Ze'ev Kahane. Neither one was permitted to participate in the Knesset elections by the Central Elections Committee, however.
In 1994, following the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
On December 31, 2000, Binyamin Ze'ev Kahane and his wife Talya were shot to death by Palestinian gunmen while on their way to the Israeli settlement of Kfar Tapuach, where they lived. Five of their six children were wounded in the attack. Palestinian gunmen fired more than 60 machine gun rounds into their van.[72]
In the 2003 Knesset elections Herut, which split off from the National Union list, ran with Michael Kleiner and former Kach activist Baruch Marzel taking the top two spots on the list. The joint effort narrowly missed the 1.5% barrier. In the following 2006 elections Jewish National Front led by Baruch Marzel, fared better but also failed to pass the minimum threshold. A self-declared follower of Kahane who was involved with Kach for many years, Michael Ben-Ari, was elected to the Knesset in the 2009 elections on renewed National Union list. He stood again in the 2013 elections as the second candidate on the list of Otzma LeYisrael, but the party failed to pass the minimum threshold.
Also author of Numbers 23:9: "...lo, it is a people that shall dwell alone and shall not be reckoned among the nations," I. Block, 1970s. Contributor—sometimes under pseudonym Michael King—to periodicals, including The New York Times. Editor of Jewish Press, 1968.
Those who refuse to accept noncitizen status shall be compensated for property, but not given a bonus, and shall be transferred only to Arab — not Western — lands. The transfer shall be effected peacefully, if possible, but if the Arab still refuses, then forcibly and without compensation.
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