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
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, 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.
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.
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 and 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 the 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, 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.
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” 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 to 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”.
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 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 in the northern Israeli city of Afula as an act of retribution.
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”. 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 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.
They became known as the hilltop youth. 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, 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, 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.
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 that recommended expelling Gaza’s population into the Sinai desert. After Donald Trump, in February 2025, announced his own plan 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 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 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.
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