A RACE OR A RELIGION?:
Kahane’s ghost: how a long-dead extremist rabbi continues to haunt Israel’s politics (Joshua Leifer, 20 Mar 2025, The Guardian
Kahane’s political career was marked by failure. Throughout his life he appeared to most Israelis to be a grotesque US import. His relentless demagogic campaign to expel the Palestinians won him notoriety and a small cadre of fanatical followers. Yet he never enjoyed the mainstream acceptance that he believed he had been promised by providence. Since childhood he had dreamed of becoming Israel’s prime minister. Instead he became the leader of a movement shunned across the political spectrum. In his multiple attempts to enter the Knesset, he succeeded only once, in 1984, before Kach was barred from electoral politics. At the time he was assassinated, his movement was on the verge of collapse, starved for funds, beset by infighting and hounded by authorities in the US. Kahane and Kahanism, the ideology to which he gave his name, seemed destined for historical obscurity.
But Kahanism did not die. It survived – not in its fully fledged theocratic form, but as an ultranationalist vision of a land and body politic purged of a non-Jewish presence. The germ of Kahanism persisted because the conditions that produced it did not go away. To the contrary, they grew more dire. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza became ever more entrenched, its maintenance more brutal and deadly. In the 1970s and 80s, Kahane had drawn much of his support from the disfranchised, predominantly Mizrahi working class and portrayed his movement as a populist revolt against Israel’s secular, progressive Ashkenazi elite. In the 21st century, as the uneven gains of capitalist globalisation and the country’s hi-tech boom deepened inequality, Kahanism reemerged to provide the grammar for a reinvigorated rightwing class war. In the wake of the suicide bombings of the second intifada, Kahanism was also buoyed up by an increasingly widespread radical pessimism: that Israel is doomed to war, that this war is zero sum, and that it can end only through a total, eschatological victory – that ultimately, as Kahane was fond of saying: “It is either they or we.”
For more than 30 years, Israel’s political system maintained a cordon sanitaire that largely succeeded in excluding Kahanist parties from mainstream politics and parliament. But in the late 2010s, this cordon sanitaire fell. Against the backdrop of successive wars in Gaza, veteran Kahanist militants with thick criminal rap sheets began to appear on primetime television. Ideas that were once taboo became commonplace. Vulgar anti-Arab racism became an easy way to generate attention on TV and social media. Support for the expulsion of Palestinians ceased to be a fringe proposal and became a routine part of political debate. By 2022, thanks to the intervention of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, parties that had until recently been deemed too dangerous to participate in elections now formed part of the coalition government. Itamar Ben-Gvir, a lifelong Kahanist agitator and convicted criminal, became national security minister, responsible for overseeing the police.
Since 7 October 2023, Kahanism has become mainstream. It is the political style that relishes the dehumanisation of Palestinians. It is the ethos according to which Jewish lives are seen as more valuable than all others. It is the ideology behind the normalisation of population transfer and ethnic cleansing. Netanyahu’s Likud has undergone a process of near total Kahanisation, to say nothing of the settler right.
In a January 2025 op-ed for the liberal daily Haaretz, the veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Levy described what had ensued since 7 October as the country’s first Kahanist war. “Almost everything about it was meant to appease the fascist, racist, population-transferist far right,” Levy wrote. “The spirit of Kahanism seized control over its goals and content.” Indeed, over the past year and a half it has often seemed as if Kahane’s malignant, vengeful ghost had been suddenly reanimated, manifest in the chorus calling to wipe Gaza off the map; in the images of grinning troops standing over white-hooded detainees, kneeling, hands zip-tied behind their backs; in the videos of uniformed men dancing with flags and Torah scrolls in the cratered landscape of the strip; in the line “Kahane was right” graffitied above scorched doorways.
Thirty years ago, Kahane was the name of a man who most thought would be forgotten. Today, Kahanism is the governing coalition’s operational ideology.
The same specter haunts Christian andf Hindu Nationalists.