Meir Kahane

American Israeli activist

• Born: August 1, 1932
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: November 5, 1990
• Place of death: New York, New York

Cause of notoriety: Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in 1968, thus helping to incite racially based hatred of Arabs.

Active: 1968-1990

Locale: United States and Israel

Early Life

Meir Kahane (MI-yur kah-HAH-neh) was born in Brooklyn, New York, into an Orthodox Jewish family. His father, Rabbi Charles Kahane, had been born in Safed (then Palestine, now Israel), and his grandfather had traveled to Palestine from Poland. Perhaps the most influential event in Meir Kahane’s childhood was an ambush in 1938 in Palestine in which Charles Kahane’s sister-in-law was among those killed. This event led to Charles Kahane’s allying himself with some of the more radical elements trying to create a Jewish state in Palestine, and to Meir Kahane’s early antagonism toward Arabs. He tried to avoid mention of the murder in discussing his own history for fear of giving the impression that his hostility to the Arabs was a personal vendetta.

From an early age, Meir Kahane was involved in violent expressions of his political opinions. Even before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, Kahane took part in a New York-based attack on the British foreign secretary to protest the British government’s limitations on Jewish immigration to Palestine. This was to typify Kahane’s career as an attempt to publicize protests against groups with which he disagreed (whether it was the British, African Americans, the Soviets, or the Arabs). How Kahane spent the following few decades is not entirely clear, but he was married and had children within the Jewish community during this period. He was also accused of having had extramarital affairs and serving as an informer.

Political Career

Kahane reentered the public sphere with the foundation in 1968 of the Jewish Defense League. This was consciously an echo of the various organizations promoting black power, and the emblem of the group was a Star of David (a six-pointed star) with a clenched fist. With a motto of Never Again (in reference to the murder of millions of Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust during World War II), the group claimed to focus on protecting Jews from attacks by blacks in neighborhoods where the two ethnic groups lived together. Kahane also advocated a return to Jewish tradition, although his interpretation of such tradition involved a readiness to use weapons with slight provocation.

From the issue of protecting Jews in New York, Kahane turned the Jewish Defense League’s focus to the situation of Jews not allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union. The group’s course of leading protests against the Soviet Union involved several acts of violence, and in 1971 Kahane was tried on charges of conspiracy to violate the Federal Firearms Act. His receiving a suspended sentence of five years probably led to his decision to emigrate to Israel.

Even after moving to Israel, however, Kahane made frequent fund-raising trips to the United States. Subsequent court actions included his conviction after shots were fired at the Soviet Mission to the United Nations. After the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972, Kahane figured that support could be gained in calling for the expulsion of Arabs from Israel; he ran for the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) and was narrowly defeated. His second run for office was even less successful, and he was subsequently barred from seeking elected office in Israel.

After Kahane’s electoral setbacks, he continued to be vocal in his demands that Israel be a Jewish state, even if that meant its not being democratic. After the Camp David peace accords with Egypt in 1978, Kahane was even less inclined to compromise, and he was placed in administrative detention in 1980 after the discovery of a cache of ammunition at a yeshiva (Jewish academy for study) near the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

Then, in 1984, Kahane’s political party broke through, and he was elected to the Knesset with 1.2 percent of the popular vote. The attempt to bar his party from competing for office had been overturned by the Israeli court. Many of the leading figures in the Israeli government were disinclined to have anything to do with a figure who had espoused views as hostile to the Arabs as Kahane’s. These politicians pointed to Kahane’s willingness to give up majority rule as a feature of government and to his disagreements with the document on which the Israeli government was founded. Legislation was passed, with Kahane as the target, to prevent parties from running candidates if their platforms included incitement to racism.

After being barred from running in the 1987 elections, Kahane persevered in his protests and his fund-raising while out of office. In November, 1990, he was fatally shot in the streets of New York; his assailant was identified as an Islamic extremist. Various political parties claimed to inherit Kahane’s mantle, including one headed by his son, but none could boast a figure quite so able to capture popular attention as Kahane had been.

Impact

Some actors in the international political scene had doubts about the ability of Israel to deal satisfactorily with its Arab population. Meir Kahane made his conviction about the impossibility of coexistence the center of his political agenda. This attitude, combined with a readiness to use violence against the Arab community, helped to remind the public that Jewish extremists as well as Palestinian extremists indulged in excesses. In 1994, Baruch Goldstein killed a number of Arabs in Hebron, Israel, claiming to have been inspired by Kahane’s ideas. Kahane’s legacy is a spiral of violence which created much of the distrust that hung over Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in later years.

Bibliography

Cohen-Almagor, Raphael. The Boundary of Liberty and Tolerance: The Struggle Against Kahanism in Israel. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Offers a scholarly assessment of how Kahane’s views were received by Israel and the political and judicial reactions.

Elon, Amos. A Blood-Dimmed Tide: Dispatches from the Middle East. London: Penguin, 2000. Reprinting of the journalistic reactions to Kahane while he was alive by an informed observer.

Friedman, Robert J. The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane, from FBI Informant to Knesset Member. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1990. Viciously attacks Kahane’s personal life but provides details hard to find elsewhere.

Herzog, Chaim. Living History: A Memoir. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997. Autobiography by the president of Israel when Kahane was elected to the Knesset; presents his efforts to prevent Kahane’s views from being given a platform.

Kotler, Yair. Heil Kahane. New York: Adama Books, 1986. As the title indicates, the author aligns Kahane with Fascism and criticizes his claims to represent traditional Judaism.