MARCH 2016 - The idea of a Zionist memorial
to the victims of Hitler's war against the Jews came to Mordechai Shenhavi (1900-1983) even
before the dreadful scale of the Holocaust was fully grasped.
In August 1942, Shenhavi,
a socialist-leaning member of Kibbutz Beit Alfa in the Jezreel Valley, had a terrifying
dream. In it he saw millions of Nazi victims marching toward Zion carrying tombstones
on their shoulders. Gripped by this vision, he struggled to persuade the
pre-state Zionist institutions to take up the proposal.
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Book Review: The Uncompromising Truth About Meir Kahane From the Woman who Knew Him Best
Rabbi Meir Kahane: His Life and Thought (1976-1983)
By Libby Kahane
Institute for the Publication of the
Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane
684 pages
$26. 50 | NIS 103
The legacy of Rabbi Meir
Kahane (1932-1990) remains so fraught that to say a sympathetic word -- no
matter how qualified-- about any aspect of his career is to invite opprobrium.
Yet the fact is that Kahane was one of the most influential, selfless,
brilliant American Jewish personalities of the post-World War II era.
In 1968,
he founded the Jewish Defense League in New York, and in 1971 after immigrating
to Israel he established the political party Kach (outlawed in 1988).
Under
Kahane, JDL was a catalyst pressuring the US Jewish establishment to put Soviet
Jewry, Jewish poverty, and urban anti-Semitism, higher on its agenda.
Kahane in his original
JDL incarnation saved the souls of countless impressionable young Jews from terminal
ennui if not outright assimilation.
After his move to Israel
he became ever more extreme in his religious views. Maybe that was because the
Zionist revisionist establishment spurned him. He was tarred as a racist
because he wanted to "remove" the Arabs from Israel. Today, his devotees
essentially reject the Herzlian model of Zionism and would replace it with a
theocracy led by "Torah-fearing" Jews.
There was no grey in the
mature Kahane's worldview. He paid the price for being obdurate. I can't think
of another Jewish leader who served prison sentences in both the US and Israel.
What other Israeli politician was held in administrative detention? How many
went on hunger strikes time and again?
No one of his generation
banged out as many fluidly-written, influential, polemical articles, pamphlets,
and books. No American-born Jew had so much influence on the Israeli body
politic. None could draw a crowd or mobilize young Jews to action like Kahane.
His ideas came rapid-fire replete with action plans, blueprints, and
milestones.
He was indefatigable and
unbelievably creative. One day marching in Skokie against the Nazis the next
organizing patrols in Brooklyn. One day forming a think tank another a training
camp. One day trying to salvage JDL (which had shriveled when he made aliya)
another articulating a platform against what he considered decadent Western
culture.
He created front-groups and spin-offs such as the Conference of Jewish
Activists, Student Activists for Soviet Jewry, Return [Diaspora Jews to Israel],
and the Museum of the Potential Holocaust, to cite just some.
And in 1990, tragically,
he was murdered in Manhattan by an Arab terrorist, part of a cabal that would be
tied to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing -- the forerunner of September 11,
2001 and the Long War we find ourselves in.
Did I say he was
charismatic? I found the early Kahane mesmerizing. I first appreciated the
enormity of the Shoah because he talked about it when others didn't. Following
him into the street from the auditorium of Hunter College chanting "Never
Again" and sitting down on Third Avenue and 67th Street near the
Soviet UN Mission in Manhattan was like an ecstatic-religious experience for
me.
But in his Kach
incarnation his ideas sounded reactionary and repugnant. And for most people
that is how he is remembered. For saying no to tolerance, no to respect for
minority rights, no to religious pluralism, and no to compromise with political
opponents. There were red lines. In response to a grenade attack on a 1983 Peace
Now demonstration that took the life of Emil Grunzweig, Kahane declared that
political violence against Jews was unacceptable.
No surprise then that the
second volume of Rabbi Meir Kahane: His Life and Thought (1976-1983)
written by his widow Libby Kahane has met not so much with disapproval as with averted
eyes.
This disregard is
unfortunate.
Like the first volume,
published in 2008, this work presents essential material— and photographs— upon
which any future critical appraisal of Kahane's career will likely rely. While far
from iconography, his widow understandably writes with empathy and admiration.
That
said, Libby Kahane, a retired librarian, has written a lucidly crafted, well-organized,
and extensively footnoted narrative. Almost everyone in Kahane's circle is
acknowledged. Virtually every documented article and speech is synopsized. True
believers will be mesmerized. Historians will be grateful.
There is also a compassionate
humane reason not to ignore this work.
Kahane never made money by
being a "professional Jew." His family never enjoyed the
accoutrements of middle class Jewish life. He sought to keep his family out of
the limelight. Yet as fate would have it, Libby Kahane lost not only her
husband but also a son, Binyamin Ze'ev, to Arab terror. The younger Kahane and
his wife Talya were murdered in 2000 while driving early one morning on Road 60
in the West Bank during the second intifada. They were apparently random
victims of PLO shooters. The couple's young children sitting in the back of the
car came away, mercifully, physically unharmed.
Misfortune continues into the next
generation: Libby's grandson-- her daughter Tova's son Meir Ettinger-- a leader
of the so-called Hilltop Youth was arrested on suspicion of vandalism against
Muslim and Christian properties.
***
Volume II picks up in
1976 with Kahane's second attempt at running for the Knesset.
His first effort
in 1973 garnered nearly 13,000 votes about 3,000 short for that year's
electoral threshold.
Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook, spiritual leader of the Gush Emunim
settlement movement, was not altogether unsympathetic to Kahane's first Knesset
run even though most of Kook's followers would presumably have voted for Mafdal
(the National Religious Party). The book concludes on the eve of his election
in 1984 to the 11th Knesset. A third and final volume is planned.
Blocked by establishment
organizations and many synagogues from public speaking, Kahane developed
workarounds. There was his Jewish Press newspaper platform. He was also a
first-class propagandist (in the pre-social media era) coming up with catchphrases
that had instant resonance: "Not One Inch," "There is No
Palestine," "Jewish Blood Is Not Cheap."
He sought confrontation -- engaged in the propaganda of the deed. For instance, he had no compunction
about advocating the destruction of the Muslim shrines atop the Temple Mount.
In his 1977 Knesset
campaign, Kahane— now bearded— espoused a bellicose far-right Orthodox platform
on conversions to Judaism, abortion, and religious pluralism. He was visceral
in his attitude toward intermarriage and interpreted the presence of non-Jewish
volunteers in Israel as a mortal danger.
Some of Kahane's
positions are almost too painful to recount because he didn't begin his career
as a religious fanatic. But once he became one there would be no wiggle room for
compromise. That was no less true on politics. He vehemently protested against Menachem Begin for cutting a deal
with Anwar Sadat at Camp David that led to Israel's withdrawal from the Sinai.
Others did too, of course, but on military and strategic grounds.
What you don't get in
this book is a handle on Kahane the man, husband, and father. The couple married
in 1956 and had four children. Now a great-grandmother, Libby offers only a few vignettes about their personal
life -- a bar mitzvah planned while Meir was in prison or a throwaway line about how
much he missed the children. She seems determined to protect the privacy of a
very public man. I hope in the final volume she will say more.
Had Kahane lived he
would today probably be leading an opposition faction in the Knesset. I abhor
the messianic, demagogic, and apocalyptic positions he espoused as leader of
Kach. Israel's broken political system needs reform to bolster centrist and
moderate elements. That said, it's indisputable that the existing system treated
him shabbily. Rather than face up to the ideological challenge Kahane posed he
was stifled. The same system that abides Arab Knesset members who relish the
chance to incite would not tolerate Kahane's incitement.
Today those who carry
the torch for Kahane's ideas are rudderless. Some may see this as a blessing. But
the fact that they basically have no legitimate outlet for their views may do
more harm than good. To paraphrase Lyndon Johnson: It would probably be better
to have them inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.
---
Elliot Jager is a
Jerusalem-based journalist, senior editor at The Jerusalem Report, and author
of 'The Pater: My Father, My Judaism, My Childlessness' (The Toby Press). You
can follow him on Twitter @JAGERFILE.
