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KAHANE’S GHOST: HOW A LONG-DEAD EXTREMIST RABBI CONTINUES TO HAUNT
ISRAEL’S POLITICS  
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Joshua Leifer
March 20, 2025
The Guardian
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_ A violent fanatic and pioneer in bigotry, Meir Kahane died a
political outcast 35 years ago. Today, his ideas influence the very
highest levels of government _

Meir Kahane in 1988, Benami Neumann / Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

 

On the evening of 5 November 1990, Meir Kahane, the extremist American
rabbi turned far-right Israeli politician, had just finished speaking
at the midtown Manhattan Marriott East Side hotel when a man named El
Sayyid Nosair put a bullet through his neck. Two hours after the
shooting, Kahane was pronounced dead. Kahane “believed in the
ideology that ‘you shall murder,’” said Avraham Burg, then a
Labor member of Knesset, “and died at the hands of someone who also
believed in that ideology”.

From the moment he arrived in Israel in 1971, Kahane preached a
shocking mixture of violent, exterminationist ethnonationalism and
apocalyptic religious fundamentalism. He claimed that violence was a
Jewish value and revenge a divine commandment. He agitated for the
expulsion of Palestinians from all the territories under Israel’s
control; the party he founded, Kach, was Israel’s first to make the
idea its central policy demand. He envisioned “a state of Jewish
totality” in which all matters would be decided according to his
idiosyncratic interpretation of Jewish law. During his brief tenure as
a legislator, he called for banning marriage between Jews and Arabs
and criminalising sex between Jews and gentiles. He proposed that
insulting Judaism be made illegal and Sabbath observance be made
compulsory. He demanded the ethno-religious segregation of the
country’s institutions, even its public beaches.

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
[[link removed]], 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
[[link removed]].
“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.

Without America, there would be no Kahanism. As a young man, Meir
Kahane metabolised the contradictory currents, anxieties and
obsessions of postwar American Jewish life into a toxic, volatile
brew. His father, Charles, was a rabbi from a long line of Hassidic
rabbis. He led a modern Orthodox congregation in Brooklyn and
translated the Torah into an accessible English prose that he thought
his flock, relatively ignorant of the tradition, would be able to
read.

Charles was also a political man. In the 1930s he became an important
fundraiser for the Irgun, the underground Zionist paramilitary
organisation, and helped the group acquire weapons for its terrorist
activities in British Mandate Palestine. Meir grew up in a house where
rightwing Zionist leaders were frequent guests at the Shabbat dinner
table. On one occasion, Vladimir Jabotinsky, leader of the Revisionist
Zionist movement, visited the Kahane family home in the Brooklyn
neighbourhood of Flatbush. Rivals to David Ben-Gurion’s Labor
Zionists, Jabotinsky’s Revisionists rejected socialism in favour of
a martial nationalism that drew inspiration from Mussolini’s
fascists in Italy and Piłsudski’s Sanacja movement in Poland.

Meir Kahane spent much of his teenage years in the Revisionist youth
movement Betar, and the Jabotinskyite cult of force would remain a
core part of his worldview throughout his life. But his megalomania
and fanaticism made him, even at a relatively early age, restless.
After losing a leadership contest, he left the doctrinally secular
Betar for Bnei Akiva, the Orthodox religious Zionist youth movement,
and enrolled in the Mir Yeshiva, the flagship institution of
“Lithuanian” ultra-Orthodoxy – a stricter environment than the
milieu in which he was raised – from which he would receive rabbinic
ordination. A peculiar product of the 20th century, Kahane managed to
incarnate in his person the major ideological tendencies –
Revisionist ultranationalism, religious Zionist messianism and
ultra-Orthodox fundamentalism – that would come to dominate Israeli
political life in the 21st century.

Kahane in New York in 1970. Photograph: New York Daily News
Archive/Getty Images

The same amalgam of opportunism and zealotry propelled Kahane through
America’s far right and New York City’s underworld. The
particulars of his bizarre trajectory nearly outstrip the imagination.
In the early 1960s, he infiltrated the conspiratorial
anti-communist John Birch Society
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informed on the organisation to the FBI. (Kahane disliked the group
because of its antisemitic tendencies.) He co-founded the July Fourth
Movement to drum up support for the Vietnam war on college campuses
and published a book titled The Jewish Stake in Vietnam. During this
time Kahane was living a double life, secretly posing as a gentile
under the pseudonym Michael King. A fire-and-brimstone Orthodox rabbi
in public, Kahane was a swindler and womaniser in private. Estelle
Evans, a non-Jewish woman he abandoned two days before they were
supposed to get married, took her own life soon after. Kahane could
deliver a sermon clutching a Talmud tractate one day and shake the
hand of an Italian mafia boss
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next.

In 1968, Kahane and a group of likeminded reactionaries founded the
Jewish Defense League (JDL) as a vigilante organisation that claimed
to combat rising Black antisemitism in New York’s outer boroughs.
Kahane asserted that within Black-Jewish tensions there existed a
potential for another Shoah, and that only Jewish force of arms could
ward it off. The JDL’s twinned slogans were “Never again” and
“Every Jew a .22”. Yet more than its anti-Black agitation, it was
the JDL’s anti-Arab and, in particular, its anti-Soviet activities
that brought Kahane fame. And if there was anything he liked more than
violence, it was fame.

Kahane was not the leader of the Soviet Jewry movement, which aimed to
force the Soviet Union to allow its several million Jews the freedom
to emigrate, but JDL members were at the movement’s militant
vanguard. Approvingly dubbed _chayas_, or wild animals, by Kahane,
they carried out acts of vandalism, shootings and bombings against
Soviet political and cultural institutions in the US. At its height,
the JDL’s campaign of terrorism even threatened to derail President
Richard Nixon’s efforts at detente with the Soviet Union.

In 1972, the JDL bombed the offices of Sol Hurok, a Jewish impresario
for many Russian cultural acts, including the Bolshoi ballet. The
attack sent Hurok to the hospital and killed Iris Kones, his
27-year-old Jewish secretary. It also put the JDL’s members in the
federal authorities’ crosshairs. By then Kahane had departed for
Israel, reportedly on the heels of an FBI warning that another felony
conviction would land him in prison. As with many of his decisions,
his move to Israel was motivated as much by self-interest as ideology.

It took Kahane time to adjust to his new home. At first his US
preoccupations largely dictated his politics. He initially targeted
the small sect of Black Hebrew Israelites and Christian missionaries
proselytising to Israeli Jews. Yet he came to realise that in Israel,
anti-Arab sentiment could mobilise far greater numbers than any of his
other obsessions. From his shoebox office in Jerusalem, which Kahane
called the Museum of the Potential Holocaust, he warned that Israel
faced an existential threat posed by the Soviet-backed Arab armies,
which could amass at any moment on its borders, and by the
Palestinians living in the territories under its control. He began to
describe Israel’s struggle for survival in the language of race war.

Kahane’s transplanting of the US psychopolitics of race on to the
conflict with the Palestinians made him something of a pioneer in
bigotry and incitement. Israeli society was no stranger to racism, but
Kahane made subtext into text, then text into melodrama. “I say what
you think,” he relished saying. He led his followers on hate marches
through Palestinian-majority cities and towns and East Jerusalem
neighbourhoods, where they attacked storefronts and threatened people,
brandishing their yellow flags, chanting: “Death to Arabs.” His
successors have continued this practice today, only under different
coloured banners.

As Kahane’s movement crystallised through the 1970s, its central
demand became the call for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians
from both Israel and the occupied West Bank and Gaza. “They must
go” became a catchphrase and the title of a book, published in 1980,
which Kahane wrote in Israel’s maximum-security Ramle prison for
plotting to blow up the Dome of the Rock in the hope of igniting an
apocalyptic religious war. (Four years later, in 1984, a group of
militant West Bank settlers known as the Jewish Underground were
arrested for attempting to do the same.) Kahane made the case for
ethnic cleansing as a religious imperative: the presence of non-Jews,
he argued, defiled the Holy Land and delayed the redemption. He also
framed it as a demographic necessity: without expelling the
Palestinians, he insisted, there was no way to guarantee a Jewish
majority.

The idea of population transfer was not foreign to Zionist thought.
Jabotinsky’s Revisionists had at times advocated for it; Ben-Gurion
had discussed it with British Mandate authorities. But after
Israel’s establishment, which resulted in the expulsion and flight
of roughly 700,000 Palestinians – what Palestinians call the Nakba
[[link removed]],
or catastrophe – the idea was rarely raised in public. By the 1950s
it was no longer considered a viable political position. Kahane
shattered this taboo. His view, and particularly the religious
language in which he articulated it, was “arguably unprecedented in
Zionist history”, writes Shaul Magid, a leading scholar of Judaism,
in his recent study of Kahane’s thought, “extending beyond even
the most maximalist Revisionists”.

Kahane mounted several electoral campaigns in the 1970s, each of which
ended without success. Yet that did not prevent him from building
support in the streets. He understood the explosive power of
transgression and the disruptive, even revolutionary potential of
Israel’s internal social divisions. While Kahane was seen by the
Israeli establishment as a malign and foreign transplant – with his
American-accented Hebrew and barely concealed stutter – he found
that being an outsider was a political asset as the leader of what was
Israel’s first far-right protest movement. When he travelled to
Israel’s poor peripheral towns and cities, he cast himself as the
tribune of Israel’s forgotten man: the Mizrahi working-class, the
Russian-speaking immigrants, the impoverished ultra-Orthodox. At
countless rallies, and with his tireless, demonic charisma, Kahane
amplified a narrative – then only in its infancy but now a widely
accepted structure of grievance – that Israel’s secular Ashkenazi
elite had betrayed not only the country’s authentic Jews to appease
the Arabs but, even worse, Judaism itself.

Supporters of Kach outside the Damascus gate in Jerusalem in
2023. Photograph: Eyal Warshavsky/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty
Images

This internal Jewish stab-in-the-back myth was just one part of what
Israeli scholars Adam and Gedaliah Afterman have called Kahane’s
“radical theology of revenge”. For Kahane revenge – in
Hebrew _nekama_ – was at once a comprehensive worldview, a slogan,
a strategy and a religious obligation. “Jewish violence in defence
of Jewish interests is never wrong,” he declared. Decades before the
radical hilltop youth settlers began putting the idea into practice
through their “price tag
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attacks on Palestinian farmers and towns, Kahane proclaimed: “There
is one solution to Arab terror – Jewish counter-terror.” Over
time, “Terror _neged _[against] terror” or “TNT” would
become another of the movement’s catchphrases.

In the 1984 elections, Kahane made his breakthrough. His Kach party
won 25,907 votes, or 1.2% of all ballots cast – enough for a single
Knesset seat, his own. “It is a disgrace to the Jewish people,”
Israel’s then president, Chaim Herzog, said in response
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Kahane’s election, “that a person could rise in the Jewish state
and present a programme that is very similar to the Nuremberg laws.”
Although it had won far from an overwhelming mandate, Kach’s
entrance into parliamentary politics shocked Israeli society because
of what it appeared to mean, and what it might foretell.

Yet Kahanism had not emerged from out of nowhere but from within the
precincts of the Revisionist right. When he was merely a US
rabble-rouser and anti-Soviet activist in New York, the then prime
minister, Menachem Begin, and Yitzhak Shamir, who succeeded Begin as
Likud leader, had encouraged his activities. Begin once asked Kahane
to write an introduction to the US edition of his wartime memoir of
the Irgun and even offered Kahane a seat on the rightwing Revisionist
Herut party’s list. Kahane refused both. In another world, he might
have lived out his career as a strident Likud backbencher. But driven
by a messiah complex, Kahane was never content to be a supporting act.
He wanted to be the main show.

In 1985, a group of leading Israeli intellectuals headed by Aviezer
Ravitzky, a leftwing religious philosopher, convened a study group
under the auspices of Israel’s president to assess the seriousness
of the threat Kahane posed and suggest how the state should respond.
The group would later publish the record of its meeting in a pamphlet
titled The Roots of Kahanism: Consciousness and Political Reality.
Today it makes for a sobering and frighteningly prescient read. Giving
the session’s prefatory remarks, Yehuda Bauer, the celebrated
historian of the Holocaust, expressed the fear that gave the
initiative its urgency – “that Kahanism can well, heaven forbid,
turn out to be the tip of a very large iceberg threatening our
society”.

As Ravitzky saw it, Kahanism was unlike any of the other extremist
ideologies that had taken root in Israel. It was far more dangerous.
The religious Zionist settler movement’s official commitment to
Jewish unity had limited the risk of intra-Jewish violence, Ravitzky
observed, while the ultra-Orthodox tendency to political quietism
meant that its representatives had made no active attempt to transform
Israel into a theocracy or bring about its vision for the end of days.
By contrast, with Kahanism, Ravitzky warned, “all restraints have
been removed.” Here was a charismatic demagogue who openly proposed
both a final “redemptive” genocide of the Palestinians and a
Jewish civil war – a purgation of heretics, humanists, leftists and
Arab sympathisers.

In response, Yehoshafat Harkabi, a former IDF intelligence chief,
argued that Kahanism was a phenomenon that grew out of Israel’s
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It could not have gained
adherents without it. For, in his own maniacal way, Kahane was saying
something that no Israeli leader on either the left or the right was
prepared to admit: that Israel could not maintain control over
millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories without
sacrificing its Jewish demographic majority, to say nothing of its
democratic character. Kahane himself liked to say, in a mocking
pantomime of humanism, that no self-respecting Arab would ever consent
to live under Israeli subjugation indefinitely. For Israeli
territorial maximalists, unwilling to accept partition of the land,
this left one option: ethnic cleansing. “Hence,” Harkabi said
presciently, “the Kahanists say: ‘If we annex, we must
expel.’”

Another member of the study group was Avraham Burg, at the time a
young peace activist who had faced down Kahanist thugs at
demonstrations. “Throughout Jewish history there has been a struggle
against the zealots,” Burg told me when we spoke last summer. “It
is a deep-rooted paradigm that rational Judaism has tried to
suppress.” Burg, who went on to become speaker of the Knesset, made
a version of the same argument to his colleagues back in 1985.
“Rabbi Kahane is part of us,” he told the other members of the
study group. “He did not emerge all by himself; he emerged from
among us, from all who call themselves Zionists, and so the blame is
ours.” But whereas his interlocutors made the case for placing
Kahane and his movement outside the law, Burg argued that it was safer
to fight the extremists in the court of public opinion. “I prefer to
have them,” Burg told me, “where they can be seen.”

The Knesset decided otherwise. In 1985, Israel’s parliament passed a
bill that amended the country’s basic law to bar any party or
politician that supports violent terrorism against the state, incites
racism or rejects “the existence of Israel as a Jewish and
democratic state”. That same year Kahane told a pair of French
journalists: “Democracy and Judaism are two opposite things.”

With Kach in the Knesset, the established parties swiftly attempted to
build a cordon sanitaire around him. During these years, there was
much talk in Israel of the need to insulate the democratic system from
forces that would exploit its freedoms to subvert it. Israel’s
education ministry launched an initiative to inculcate democratic
values in the country’s schoolchildren. The army embarked on an
endeavour to combat Kahanist sympathies among the rank and file,
rolling out a programme to teach new conscripts courses on “the
virtues of democracy”. Parties on the left, right and centre worked
together to block discussion of Kahane’s proposals and prevent him
from taking the podium. When he did rise to speak, members of Knesset,
including the ultra-hawkish Likud leader Shamir exited the chamber.
Israeli public radio refused to broadcast Kahane’s speeches. The
police routinely blocked him from exploiting his parliamentary
immunity to instigate violence against Palestinians, leading him to
decry Israel’s courts, police and other gatekeepers of the rule of
law as “the real fascists”.

A supporter of the Kach movement wears a T-shirt that reads: ‘Kahane
was right’. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/the Observer

Such measures reflected the immune response of a comparatively
healthier Israeli political system. Of course, this anti-Kahane
project would not have been so thoroughgoing had it not also been
politically convenient. It was not lost on Shamir that Kahane appealed
in both substance and style to much of the Likud base. In an article
[[link removed]] about
the 1984 elections for the New York Review of Books, journalist
Bernard Avishai asked whether Kahane was simply “carrying to its
logical extreme what had become the conventional wisdom under
Begin”. But this also meant that Israeli leaders, even or especially
those on the right, feared that Kahanism was a kind of virus that fed
on the darkest fears in the Israeli collective consciousness and
which, if left unchallenged, would ultimately devour its host.

As a functional matter, the amendment to Israel’s basic law worked.
Kach was banned from running in the 1988 elections and the supreme
court rejected Kahane’s appeal. He never recovered from this
setback, growing even more radical in response. In what might be
called his mature philosophy, Kahane rejected Israel’s system of
rule outright. “Kahane’s Zionism,” Magid wrote, became “a
battle against the state”. Not only were secular Jews not really
Jews, he argued, but Israel was not a Jewish state at all. “It’s a
Hebrew-speaking Portugal that would like to be a Hebrew-speaking
Sweden,” Kahane wrote. To make Israel into a true Jewish state, he
proposed replacing parliament with a Torah-mandated king and
Sanhedrin, or supreme rabbinic court, which would rule the country
according to the strict interpretation of Jewish law.

Towards the end of his life, Kahane joined a doomed far-right
separatist movement to establish an “Independent State of Judea”
in the occupied West Bank. He was elected the state’s “honorary
president”. The project found little support. At the time of his
assassination, Kahane and his movement appeared to be on the
inexorable descent into obscurity.

In the 1990s, as Israel inched toward territorial compromise with the
Palestinians, Kahane’s movement assumed the mantle of violent
opposition to a peace deal. In the years after his death, Kahane’s
remaining disciples, marginalised and ridiculed by Israel’s
mainstream, retreated to the ultra-radical settlement of Kiryat Arba,
near the Palestinian city of Hebron in the occupied West Bank, and to
Kfar Tapuach, the northern West Bank settlement where a small group of
Kach supporters led by Kahane’s son, Binyamin Ze’ev Kahane,
briefly made their home. From these strongholds, the Kahanist fringe
set out to derail the peace process, and by extension change the
course of Israel’s history.

As practitioners of political violence, the Kahanists proved
devastatingly effective. On 25 February 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a
Brooklyn-born doctor and Kach member from Kiryat Arba, entered
Hebron’s Ibrahimi mosque and opened fire on Muslim worshippers,
killing 29 Palestinians. Two months later, the Palestinian Islamist
group Hamas launched its first suicide bombing
[[link removed]] against
civilians within Israel proper, in the northern Israeli city of Afula
as an act of retribution. (The organisation had carried out suicide
bombings in the occupied territories the previous year.)

Goldstein’s massacre prompted Rabin’s government to finally outlaw
Kach and the Kahane Chai movement, a splinter outfit led by Binyamin
Kahane, designating both “terrorist organisations”. In a speech
after Goldstein’s massacre, Rabin described Kahane and his
supporters as “an errant weed
[[link removed]]”.
He proved to be tragically wrong.

The same morning as Goldstein’s massacre, Yigal Amir, a 25-year-old
law student, was learning Talmud in the Bar-Ilan University study hall
when he heard the news on the radio. “I was very intrigued by how a
man like that could get up and sacrifice his life,” Amir would
later tell
[[link removed]] Israeli
investigators. “That’s when I had the idea that it’s necessary
to take Rabin down.” On 4 November 1995, Amir fired two shots at the
prime minister as he left a peace rally in central Tel Aviv. Rabin was
pronounced dead later that night.

In the following two decades, Kahane’s disciples would carry out
other devastating acts of terrorism. Yet as the extreme right
blossomed through the early 2000s, fuelled by the shattering violence
of the second intifada, they would not act alone. In the aftermath of
Israel’s 2005 unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, a new
generation of religious Zionist settlers also grew more radical.
Whereas their parents’ generation had sought to harness the state to
entrench Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, this younger
generation turned against the state, viewing the Gaza
“disengagement” as an unforgivable betrayal. And while the
mainstream religious Zionist movement had traditionally endorsed the
use of violence as a means to an end, the newly radicalised settlers
embraced terror as a value, much like the Kahanists whom they far
outnumbered, and turned their violence not only against Palestinians
but also against Jews.

Hebron residents show graffiti reading ‘Death to Arabs’ after
their house was attacked by settlers Photograph: Idealink
Photography/Alamy

They became known as the hilltop youth
[[link removed]].
Identifiable by their long, unkempt sidelocks and fraying, oversized
skullcaps, the hilltop youth set out to build outposts – illegal
under Israeli as well as international law – in the occupied West
Bank. As part of their land grabs, they have terrorised Palestinians
in the areas where they invaded, stolen their sheep, vandalised their
homes, torched their crops and attacked them physically. (Since 7
October, hilltop youth attacks have become far more brazen and more
deadly.) They have little use for doctrine, Kahane’s or others’.
The entire ethos of the hilltop youth is a revolt against authority
– or rather “they resist all authority that is not Torah,” said
Idan Yaron, an Israeli anthropologist who studies the far right. Yaron
has likened the hilltop youth to other forms of “leaderless
resistance” that operate through networked cells, and to Al-Qaida.

To the extent that there is an ideologue articulating a political
theology for the hilltop youth, it is Meir Ettinger
[[link removed]],
a gaunt scraggly-bearded 33-year-old. Since his 20s, Ettinger has been
among the Shin Bet’s most wanted Jewish Israeli targets. In the
early 2010s, he authored a polemic in which he outlined a programme
titled The Revolt. In it, he called for settler militants to ignite an
epochal, violent conflagration between Jews and Arabs, with the aim of
imploding the Israeli state, replacing it with a halakhic kingdom,
building the Third Temple in Jerusalem, and expelling or killing any
non-Jew left in the Land of Israel. Although he arrived at these
deranged fantasies on his own, he was, in a way, also following family
tradition: Ettinger also happens to be one of Meir Kahane’s 37
grandchildren.

For a long time, the very extremism that made Kahanism so dangerous
also prevented it from regaining a foothold in parliamentary politics.
But as the Israeli public lurched rightward and Netanyahu transformed
his Likud into a bastion of authoritarian, rightwing populism,
Kahanist ideas became increasingly normalised. The cordon sanitaire
established in the 1980s started to fail. “One of the most fateful
decisions was giving permission to let the Kahanists run in the first
place,” Yaron told me. While Israel’s high court barred Benzi
Gopstein and Baruch Marzel – a Boston-born Kahanist disciple –
from running for the Knesset in 2019, the court gave the green-light
to Itamar Ben-Gvir and the rest of the Jewish Power list. “It was a
mistake of the highest degree,” Yaron added. “A sin that cannot be
atoned for.” That year, to shore up his potential coalition,
Netanyahu tore up what remained of the cordon sanitaire by signing a
vote-sharing agreement with Jewish Power.

In the five national elections between 2019 and 2022, Jewish Power
failed to garner enough votes to enter the Knesset, repeatedly denying
Netanyahu the seats he needed to form a rightwing majority government.
In 2022, to solve this problem, Netanyahu cajoled Ben-Gvir, leader of
Jewish Power, and Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the hardline settler
Religious Zionism party, into forming a “technical bloc”, which
enabled the parties to run jointly in the election before splitting
once in the Knesset. The move paid off. In the November elections
[[link removed]],
the joint Jewish Power-Religious Zionism slate won a combined 14
seats, making it the Knesset’s third largest faction.

Unlike many of Kahane’s latter-day admirers, Ben-Gvir actually
appears to have read part of the rabbi’s voluminous oeuvre.
Kahane’s books sit prominently on glass-case bookshelves in the
Ben-Gvir home, above volumes of the Talmud and Torah commentaries. A
resident of the Kahanist bastion in Kiryat Arba, Ben-Gvir hung a
portrait of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein on the wall of his
living room for years. The Yeshiva of the Jewish Idea, the seminary
Kahane established on the border of East Jerusalem, counts Ben-Gvir
among its most illustrious alumni.

While Ben-Gvir has not abandoned Kahane’s anti-Arab vitriol or the
motifs of rightwing class war, he has endeavoured to expand
Kahanism’s appeal. In contrast to the American Kahane, Ben-Gvir is
the native-born son of immigrants from Iraqi Kurdistan and speaks of
loving “all the Jewish people”. On social media he presents
himself as a dishevelled, avuncular yet principled figure. Once a
vociferous homophobe, by the time of the 2015 election campaign he was
telling journalists: “LGBT people are my brothers, and if I have a
gay son, I’ll hug him and kiss him because he’s my son.” Ahead
of the 2020 elections, Ben-Gvir acquiesced to removing the portrait of
Goldstein from his home. During the 2022 election campaign, Ben-Gvir
diligently chided his supporters when they broke into their favourite
“death to Arabs” chant. “It’s death to _terrorists_,”
he’d correct them, smiling.

Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir at the Knesset in
2023. Photograph: Ohad Zwigenberg/AP

Beneath these cosmetic changes, Ben-Gvir has remained faithful to the
central plank of the Kahanist political project: the annexation of the
occupied West Bank and Gaza, and the expulsion of the Palestinians
living there. He has shown less overt enthusiasm for the other parts
of the Kahanist tradition, such as overthrowing the secular state and
its replacement by a theocratic one. If Kahane believed that the
eschatological rupture could be instigated here and now through
violence, Ben-Gvir is focused on accruing power and popularity.

In the weeks and months that followed 7 October, while much of Israel
sat in mourning, the far right – Kahanists and hardline settlers
alike – looked out on to the destruction with a sense of eager
anticipation. They sensed opportunity. In the Kahanist cosmology, a
prerequisite for the dawn of the Messianic age is an apocalyptic war
that purifies the Land of Israel from the presence of non-Jews. Orit
Strock, a member of Knesset for the Religious Zionism party, remarked
in July 2024 that the days of war were like “a period of
miracles”. The far right’s hope that this war might lead to the
divinely ordained conquest of all Greater Israel – and perhaps to
the war to end all wars – is one of the reasons it has continued for
so long.

With the far right in unprecedented positions of power, the
possibility that it might achieve such devastating goals has also
loomed since the start of the war. In mid-October 2023, Israel’s
intelligence ministry prepared a white paper
[[link removed]] that
recommended expelling Gaza’s population into the Sinai desert.
After Donald Trump, in February 2025, announced his own plan
[[link removed]] to
displace Gaza’s 2 million residents, Netanyahu’s government
transformed the Kahanist obsession of “transfer” into official
policy. The defence minister, Israel Katz, ordered the army to prepare
for its implementation. CBS News reported that the Trump
administration and Israel have approached the governments of Sudan
and Somalia
[[link removed]] as
potential destinations for Palestinians expelled from Gaza. Deep
within the ranks of Israel’s right, even more lurid, violent
fantasies have begun to bloom. Nissim Vaturi, a Likud member of
Knesset, said in a recent radio interview
[[link removed]] that Israeli troops should
“separate the women and children and kill the adult men in Gaza”,
adding: “We are being too considerate.”

On a dark Thursday night in late December, I attended an event
organised by a group of radical rightwing settlers preparing, as they
saw it, to return imminently to resettle Gaza. There, in the car park
of the Sderot train station, near the Gaza border, a mob of yeshiva
students waved flags that read “Gaza is ours for ever” and paraded
across the pavement singing Zochreini Na, a shlock-rock song written
by the Kahanist musician Dov Shurin that has become an anthem of
Israel’s extreme right. The song’s lyrics come from a verse in the
Book of Judges that relates how the biblical hero Samson, before he
dies, prays to God: “Remember me. Please strengthen me this time to
take revenge on the Philistines.” In the common Kahanist rendition,
“Palestinians” replaces “Philistines”.

The settler youth belted those words with zeal, yet it seemed that in
their fervour they had forgotten, or perhaps suppressed, how the story
in Judges ends. Samson, the hero, pulls down the walls of the Temple
of Dagon on to the Philistines gathered to offer a sacrifice – and
on to himself. Although through his death he kills “more than he
slew in his life”, Samson’s act is a suicide.

 Listen to our podcasts here
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This article was amended on 25 March 2025. An earlier version
incorrectly said that 1994 saw Hamas’s first suicide bombing; it was
the first against civilians within Israel proper, but Hamas had first
carried out a suicide attack in the West Bank in 1993.

_Joshua Leifer is the author of Tablets Shattered: The End of an
American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life
[[link removed]] (Dutton
2024)_

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