IT'S NOT TERRORISM WHEN WE DO IT:

The next Israeli government may include terrorists that are barred from entering the United States.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu crossed every moral line for political gain in Israeli politics last week when he brokered a merger of the religious nationalist Jewish Home party with Otzma Yehudit, the racist successor to the Kach and Kahane Chai parties, who advocated for the "transfer" of Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories. This completes the near total rehabilitation of Kahanists into mainstream Israeli politics, despite the fact that Otzma's leader, Michael Ben Ari, has been banned from entering the United States for nearly a decade because of his links to terrorism.

I know this because I made the case for his ban.

In 2007, AIPAC invited no less a racist than the evangelical preacher John Hagee to address its annual convention. That would be the same John Hagee who suggested in his book "Jerusalem Countdown" that Hitler was sent by God to drive the Jews back to Israel in order to fulfill a biblical prophecy. The Holocaust, Hagee has also opined, occurred because "the Jews rebelled and denied the true God." Thousands of pro-Israel activists cheered the man who said that "it was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews" that had led to the Jews' trials and tribulations over the centuries and that the Jewish Rothschild family was part of a global economic conspiracy.

AIPAC did not break its silence even when Netanyahu recently cooperated with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in waging an anti-Semitic campaign of incitement against the Jewish American philanthropist George Soros. The American gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson, philanthropist to Netanyahu and Orban and patron of Israel's political right, does not appreciate Jews such as Soros who donate to human rights causes advocating minority rights.

Netanyahu knows that what most American Jews think does not matter. What counts is what AIPAC does for presidential and congressional candidates. As long as he has the wealthy, conservative lobby in his pocket, Reform and Conservative Jews can shout until they're blue in the face about his violating promises he made to enable egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest site.

AIPAC's tolerance of Netanyahu's alliance with Liberman and with pro-annexationists such as Education Minister Naftali Bennett, head of the New Right, has resulted in complacency on the right. So did AIPAC's tolerance of the series of discriminatory laws that Netanyahu, Liberman and Bennett enacted attacking minority rights.

Netanyahu was too busy with the police investigations against him and a possible indictment for bribery to examine what was happening in the American Jewish arena. He figured that his struggle against anti-Semitism from the left -- such as against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and anti-Zionists -- would leave him free to conduct his affair with Hagee and Co., those who convinced President Donald Trump to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem last May. The prime minister surmised that inflating the threat from enemies such as Iran and BDS would distract US Jewry's attention from other issues. It would conceal the threat by Israel's right to Israeli democracy and human rights from the eyes of American Jews, most of them Democrats.

Even more so, Netanyahu took into account that American Jewish organizations such as the liberal lobbying group J Street would protest his embrace of Otzma Yehudit. In fact, this provided him with an excuse to lash out at the "hypocrisy and double standards by the left," which he said "acted to bring extreme Islamists into Knesset." He was ill prepared for AIPAC to "make such a big deal" of the new alliance he cooked up on the right.

For Kahanism the purpose of Jewish chosenness isn't to serve humanity - "and through you will be blessed all the families of the earth" - but to rule over it. The messianic era isn't Isaiah's vision of a world united in prayer but Kahane's vision of vengeance against the nations. Violence isn't a necessity to be dealt out with the measured caution of the rabbis, but an ecstatic affirmation of God's power and purpose.

The bitter irony is that Kahanism imagines itself to be the theology of Kiddush Hashem - sanctification of God's Name. According to Kahanism, the Jewish people sanctifies God's Name by defeating Amalek - the archetypal enemy that is the embodiment of evil, and that takes different forms in each generation. The ultimate expression of Kiddush Hashem, of the Kahanist inversion of the sacred, was the Goldstein massacre - which not coincidentally happened on Purim, celebrating the victory over Haman, a literal descendant of the tribe of Amalek.

The way to defeat Amalek, and thereby prepare the way for the coming of the messiah, is by showing, like Goldstein, a fearless contempt for the world, embracing our destiny of total isolation. We are forbidden to seek alliances: Only by freeing ourselves from the illusion of non-Jewish support will we merit redemption. The greatest Hillul Hashem is for Jews to seek friendship with "the goyim." Kahanism despises classical Zionism, which aspired to do precisely that by restoring the Jews to the community of nations.

The political agenda of Kahanism - the mass expulsion of Palestinians, the destruction of the Dome of the Rock - would ensure Israel's total isolation, proving we fear no one but God. Political madness as Kiddush Hashem.

Kahanism is the sanctification of our woundedness, the fantasies of vengeance of a powerless people wedded to the renewal of Jewish power. No one is more dangerous than armed fanatics who see themselves as victims.

In its final descent, Kahanism became a theology of racism. The platform of Kach - political precursor of the Otzma Yehudit party - promoted a law outlawing sexual relations between Arabs and Jews.

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