The Canadian Press

Radical rabbi followers rise to Israel amid more violence

JERUSALEM (AP) – In the 1980s, Rabbi Meir Kahane’s violent anti-Arab ideology was seen as so repulsive that Israel banned him from parliament and the United States classified his party as a terrorist group. Today, his followers walk the streets by the hundreds chanting “Death to the Arabs” and attacking those they meet. This week, they took part in a wave of communal violence in Jerusalem and mixed cities across Israel in which Arabs and Jews violently attacked people and set cars on fire. Thursday night there were more ethnic conflicts. In Tel Aviv, two Jewish men attacked a journalist covering a rally of ultra-nationalists. In the Israeli town of Lod, a Jew was shot and seriously injured by an Arab. In Jaffa, an Israeli soldier was attacked by a group of Arabs and was hospitalized in serious condition. Israelis shocked by the violence called right-wing extremism a nasty aberration or a reaction to Palestinian violence. But for Arab citizens, who make up 20 percent of Israel’s population, Kahane’s heirs are the natural result of a discriminatory system – normalized by some traditional rulers who broadly share their views. Kahane’s admirers were elected to parliament in March as allies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, and one of the most prominent has become a staple on Israeli television. Their resurgence injected another element of volatility into the conflict. It is also part of a larger shift to the right in Israel, where Kahane’s followers are not the only ones taking a hard line on Palestinians and trafficking in anti-Arab rhetoric. Right-wing parties that support Jewish settlements and oppose Palestinian independence won a large majority of seats in March, and Netanyahu and other right-wing leaders have often made Israel’s Arab minority a fifth column – unless they need their votes. During his sole term in parliament in the mid-1980s, before being banned, Kahane was shunned by his colleagues, including Likud, and often delivered speeches in front of an empty chamber. His racist agenda called for banning mixed marriages between Arabs and Jews, stripping Arabs of their Israeli citizenship and mass expulsions of Palestinians. At one point, he was suspended for waving a noose at an Arab lawmaker. Kahane was banned from running in 1988, and two years later was murdered by an Egyptian-American in New York. But his hateful ideology has remained influential in Israel. In 1994, Kahane’s disciple Baruch Goldstein opened fire at a holy site in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, killing 29 Muslim worshipers and injuring more than 100. This led to Israel and the United States labeling its Kach movement and an offshoot, Kahane Lives, as terrorist groups. In March, another admirer of the late rabbi, who for years had hung a picture of Goldstein on his living room wall, was elected to the Israeli parliament. Itamar Ben-Gvir joined the Knesset as part of Religious Zionism, a bloc of far-right parties that came together under Netanyahu’s leadership to ensure that none fell below the electoral threshold. Since then, Ben-Gvir has made frequent media appearances, displaying cheerful demeanor and a knack for deflecting criticism as he joked with TV and radio hosts. It works: Ifat, a research firm, claims Ben-Gvir is the third most interviewed politician on Israeli TV and radio, behind Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett, another right-wing politician. “He’s a good speaker and he knows how to play the game,” said Shuki Friedman, a far-right Israel expert at the Israel Democracy Institute. “On the one hand, he is addressing his supporters. … On the other hand, he knows that one should not anger the Israelis too much. He has organized provocative visits to Arab areas and has been an almost constant presence on the sidelines of recent clashes, bringing together ultra-nationalist supporters to confront the Palestinians and assert “Jewish power” – his party’s name. Last week he set up an open-air parliamentary “office” in an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem where Jewish settlers are trying to evict Palestinians from their homes, sparking a melee. He later called on the police to use live fire against Palestinian protesters inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a sacred site for Jews and Muslims. A long-range Hamas rocket fired at Jerusalem on Monday disrupted the Jerusalem Day Parade, which celebrates Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem. Crowd violence erupted the next day. A Telegram channel displaying the Kahanist emblem – a yellow fist in a black Star of David – has grown from a few hundred members to over 6,000. It was used on Wednesday to organize a crowd in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam , who pulled an Arab from his car and severely beat him. The attack horrified Israelis and was widely condemned, including by far-right politicians. Israeli media reported that the country’s police chief accused Ben-Gvir of inciting a Jewish “intifada,” the Arabic term used to refer to two Palestinian uprisings. As a lawyer with a long history of defending Jewish extremists accused of attacking Arabs, Ben-Gvir was careful not to break laws against incitement. He calls Kahane “righteous and holy,” but tried to distance himself by saying that he didn’t agree with everything the rabbi had said. Ben-Gvir first became a national figure when he smashed a hood ornament on Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s car in 1995. “We got to his car, and we’re going to join him too,” a- he said, a few weeks before Rabin. was assassinated by a Jewish extremist opposed to his peace efforts with the Palestinians. Since then, Israel has moved even further to the right, driven by failed peace efforts, repeated cycles of violence and demographic shifts. Ben-Gvir’s supporters are largely religious and ultra-Orthodox Jews, who tend to have large families. Netanyahu hoped to exploit this by assembling a far-right bloc with Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, another ultra-nationalist. Ironically, they foiled Netanyahu’s plan by blocking his outreach to a small Arab party needed to secure a parliamentary majority. Dan Meridor, a former justice minister and Likud heavyweight who helped lead efforts to ban Kahane from parliament in 1988, believes Netanyahu made a serious mistake in rehabilitating his supporters. “You can just see the dramatic and very nefarious change that Likud went through when it legitimized the Kahanists,” he said. “It has changed very tragically for me.” Palestinian citizens of Israel, meanwhile, see Ben-Gvir as the latest in a long line of Israeli politicians – including Netanyahu – who have treated them as second-class citizens, if not enemies of the state. This is one of the many grievances they cite to explain the recent protests and clashes with the police. Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer and citizen analyst for Israel, says it’s easy for Israelis to dismiss the Kahanists as a fringe group. “But if you step back and look at this country through the eyes of a Palestinian, you see that at every political level, in every political party, there has been some form of anti-Palestinian racism.” —- Contributed by Associated Press writer Ilan Ben Zion in Jerusalem. Josef Federman and Joseph Krauss, The Associated Press