The rise of Meir Kahane is a boon to Jew haters and Arab haters alike.

THE DEMONS OF THE JEWS

BY LEON WIESELTIER

/ / A SPECTER is haunting the Jewish world—X~V Kahanism." So says Rabbi Meir Kahane to any-

body who will listen. It is one of the very few true proposi-tions that issue from the foul man's mouth. Upon theJewish world he has been, in Israel and in the UnitedStates, for almost 20 years, a kind of curse with a return airticket. There is a sickening fascination about his ideas andhis commotions; they are the most definitive representa-tions of the triumphalism and the intolerance that haveaccompanied, like a lengthening shadow, the achieve-ments of the Jewish community. Kahane is the perfectproduct of the contemporary Jewish underside. He is aboorish and maddened little man, whose soul is merelythe sum of its angers, who succeeds in the street becausehe belongs in the gutter, who cloaks a violent desire forpower in the concepts of great religious traditions that hehas a rare talent for twisting.

Until recently, Kahane was merely of sociological andpsychological interest, a sinister sectarian within a Jewishworld that could not have been expected to cope complete-ly well with the many complications of its modern history.Alas, there is now a more pressing reason for botheringwith him. He sits in the Parliament of Israel. For now, hesits alone, the member from Kach (which is best translatedas "Thus!"); but a succession of polls in recent monthsmakes his prospects impossible to ignore. In June, Israel'smost respected polling service produced numbers thatshowed Kahane increasing his electoral popularity five-fold in new elections. (In the election of 1984 he improvedhis showing fivefold over the election of 1981, winning 1.2percent of the popular vote.) In early August, 600 Israelihigh school students were surveyed for their opinion ofKahane. Forty-two percent declared their support, and 11percent promised their votes. In late August, another pollby the same service predicted 11 seats for Kach. In Sep-tember the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv conducted a surveythat confirmed such a prediction.

All these studies concur that Kahane's new supportcomes at the expense of the right-wing parties, particular-ly Menachem Begin's Likud. But there is small solace inthat. Kahane is a price that many on the right may beprepared to pay; with anywhere from five to 11 seats,Kach would almost certainly constitute the largest reli-gious party in Israel. It is hard to imagine a Likud leader-ship that would not invite the demagogue into a coalition,if it required his membership to form a government. For

one of the consequences of Kahanism, the smoother pro-testations of the Likud notwithstanding, will be the fur-ther radicalization of the Israeli right, precisely during theperiod of the Israeli right's ascendancy.

Among Meir Kahane's fantasies is the fantasy that hewill be the prime minister of Israel (or, more exactly, the"king of Israel," as the mob that attends him likes to rant).About that there is no need to worry. Indeed, if the prag-matists in the Likud led by David Levy prevail over therabble-rousers led by Ariel Sharon, even the worry aboutKahane iii a cabinet may be exaggerated. Of course, thereis a kind of critic of Israel who will insist on such a worry.Kahane is a boon to those who hate Israelis and to thosewho hate Palestinians, to those who hate Jews and tothose who hate Arabs. His political fortunes make manyforms of prejudice suddenly seem plausible.

But Meir Kahane is not the real danger to Israel; he is thesymptom of something that he did not sow and will notreap, the discharge of a deeper, and in some ways moredisturbing, danger. He will not influence Israeli policy; buthe will influence a political culture in Israel, the radical andfrequently racist nationalism that is sedulously amassingstrength, that may determine for many years to come thedisposition of the occupied territories and the nature of therelations between Jews and Arabs on all of the west bankof the Jordan River. Almost more urgent than the questionof Kahane's future, then, is the question of his past. Howdid this monster come to pass? What dark forces in theJewish community, in Israel and in the United States,conspired to create the first Jew who may be properlycompared to the Nazis (". . . the growing number of Jew-ish girls who date and sleep with and marry Arabs. Whoeasily bed the foreign laborers and foreign soldiers. Theincredible pollution of the sacred Jewish seed. . .")? It isnot only anxiety that this man should occasion amongJews. It is a reckoning.

I.

KAHANISM is really about rage, but it includes a fewideas, too. Like many extremists, Kahane likes to

pretend that he is a mere creature of logic. Indeed, there isa logic. It is crude, and its conclusions are immoral andunacceptable, but it has a broken basis in reality. It goessomething like this: Judaism is in contradiction to democ-racy. Zionism is in identity with Judaism. Zionism, there-fore, is in contradiction to democracy. And so the Arabs

NOVEMBER 11, 1985 15

within the boundaries of the Jewish state must be ban-ished. Or, as he likes to say, "they must go." SometimesKahane delivers his proposal to punish tens of thousandsof innocent people and permanently compromise Jewishhonor as if it were only an obvious solution to an obviousproblem. This is how it sounds in his mock-analytic voice,with which he learned a long time ago to mask the im-mense volume of hatred that impels him:

There is an ultimately insoluble contradiction between a Jew-ish state of Israel that is the fulfillment of the 2,000-year-oldJewish-Zionist dream and a state in which Arabs and Jewspossess equal rights—including the right of the Arabs demo-cratically and peacefully to put an end to the Jewish state.Those who refuse the Arab that right but tell him he is equalthink he is a fool. He is not. The Jews and Arabs of the Land ofIsrael ultimately cannot coexist in a Jewish-Zionist state. Atime bomb in the Holy Land ticks away relentlessly. . . . Thegreat Arab weapon in the battle against Jewish Israel is: ba-bies. . . . Eventually the very majorityship of the Jews will bethreatened by the Arab birthrate. . . . In this the "hawks" areas hapless as the doves: they have no answer for what to dowith either the Arabs of Israel or the liberated lands. . . . If wehope to avoid this terrible result, there is only one path for usto take: the. immediate transfer of the Arabs from Eretz Israel. . . to their own lands. . . . There is only one answer: separa-tion, Jews in their land, Arabs in theirs. Separation. Onlyseparation.

With the exception of Kahane's repugnant conclusion,there is much in this reasoning with which a sensiblestudent of Israel can concur. Kahane is right: Israel may bedestroyed demographically. A significant increase in thenumber of Arabs could take back the attainment of Zion-ism, which was to have created a state in which Jews are amajority, to which they could therefore flee fully confidentof sanctuary. (Of course, it is not the political achievementof Zionism that Kahane seeks to secure, but the racial andreligious exclusivity of the Jewish state.) This Israeli fear,moreover, is a Palestinian hope; I have heard Palestinianintellectuals in Nablus coolly contend that if their fedayeenwill not bring about a "secular democratic state in Pales-tine," their fertility will. Time, they believe, is Palestinian.

A N D S O TIME IS,- but only if the occupied territoriesMM. are annexed. The moral irony of the Israeli debateabout the West Bank and Gaza is that the liberals, thedoves, the traders of territory for peace, are the separat-ists; while the jingoists, the hawks, the believers in hal-lowed boundaries, may pose as the democrats. 1 say pose,because there can be no doubt that the annexers wouldinvent one excuse after another to prevent the enfran-chisement of the Palestinians. (Yuval Neeman, a majorideologist of Tehiya, a party to the right of the Likud,recently blurted out that the aim of annexation "is notthe transformation of the Arab population into citizens ofIsrael. . . Israeli citizenship is to be awarded only in rareinstances and after appropriate loyalty tests.") In the realworld, then, the choice before Israel is not between a smallJewish state with a democracy and a large Jewish statewith a democracy; it is between a small, democratic state

with a Jewish majority or no Jewish state at all.The essential point about a small state with a Jewish

majority, however, is that it is entirely consistent with thedemocratic ideal. The test of the democratic ideal, after all,is the respect for minorities. There is no philosophical orpolitical reason that an Arab minority cannot win suchrespect from a Jewish majority; indeed, in many criticalways it already has. What stands more and more in theway of such respect, on both sides, is rather the culture ofnationalism itself, the discord between the idea of self-determination and the idea of minorities. The idea of self-determination projects a world in which (in the words ofJohn Stuart Mill) "it is in general a necessary condition offree institutions that the boundaries of government shouldcoincide in the main with those of nationalities," in whichyour social or political being cannot be realized exceptamong your own. The idea of minorities, on the otherhand, projects a world in which differences are erased by asingle standard of citizenship, in which your social andpolitical being can be realized among anybody. In the pastcentury the idea of minorities has been generally bested bythe idea of self-determination; groups have elected, some-times for reasons of security but often for reasons of self-love, orders of political and cultural exclusiveness. As aPakistani nationalist put it in 1947, "Good government isno substitute for self-government." The story of the rela-tionship of nationalism to democracy is a sad one.

A M O N G the achievements of the Jewish state was itsJLM. more or less successful negotiation of that relation-ship. As nationalisms go, Zionism did very well. Arabs inIsrael certainly enjoyed more of the legal and politicalblandishments of the liberal state than Arabs anywhereelse in the Middle East. Still, there was a secret to Zion-ism's relative success in the matter of democracy. It en-joyed the luxury of easy numbers. The non-Jewish propor-tion of the Israeli population was never large enough tocreate a contradiction between the Jewishness of the stateand the freedom of the state. But the Six Day War mayhave changed that—that is, if the territories are annexed,or allowed to remain perpetually under occupation. Thesuccessful defense of Israel in 1967 put it in the way of agreat temptation; for the first time Jews would claim sover-eignty over a number of Arabs large enough to challengetheir legitimacy and their security.

Meir Kahane is correct. Zionism and democracy cannotcoexist in Greater Israel. They can coexist, however, inIsrael, in a state that improves significantly upon the 1967borders without increasing significantly the Arab popula-tion within them—that cleaves, in short, to the principle ofpartition, which is still the only just and practical basis fora settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. Since it isimpossible to argue against the justice of territorial com-promise (except from the ideological grounds upon whichMeir Kahane is battening), the argument against its practi-cality now abounds. Conor Cruise O'Brien, for example,has shown in gloomy detail in the October Atlantic the fullmagnitude of the difficulties that would face any imple-

16 THE NEW REPUBLIC

D R A W I N G BY V I N T L A W R E N C E FOR T H F N n W R I- P U B 1.1 C

mentation of the Allon Plan, the Labor Party's long-stand-ing design for territorial compromise. These difficulties,most of which still originate on the Arab side, are impossi-ble to deny; but the difficult is not quite the impossible.

A look back at the first map of partition will prove thepoint. Drawn by the British, it was a preposterous map,and not only because of its parsimony toward the Jews. Itssuggested solution for political chaos was geographicalnonsense. Still, David Ben-Gurion had the wit, and themoral seriousness, to realize that, for a stateless people,geographical nonsense made historical sense. He swal-lowed some of his ideological purity and historical prideand ancient dreams, and shattered the unity of the nation-al movement, and took for his miserable people what theycould get (all of which the Palestinian leadership has yet todo). The second map of partition, some version of theAllon Plan that would release Israel from the densely pop-ulated regions of the West Bank that loom over its reasonfor being, will also be geographical nonsense. It will bedramatically complicated by the requirements of securityin a world of high-technology war. And it will offer thePalestinians less than they feel they deserve and less thanthey could have won from the first map of partition. Butthe second map will represent not merely the least theIsraelis can do for the Palestinians, but the least they cando for themselves. The other way lies Meir Kahane.

The rabid rabbi, of course, answers to a higher authoritythan the state. His charter in politics is God's promise toAbraham ("Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the placewhere thou art northward, and southward, and eastward,and westward. For all the land which thou seest, to theewill I give it, and to thy seed forever . . ."). It is borders.

not numbers, that exercise Kahane. The borders are notnegotiable, because they are holy; and he who believesthat the borders are holy must indeed be perplexed aboutthe numbers, for he is asking for them. The fact is thatthere is an essential link between the religious reading ofthe occupied territories and the idea of expulsion. If Israeleventually absorbs the territories, the territories will even-tually absorb Israel Something, then, has to give. Since itcannot be the land, it will have to be the people who live onit. Kahane should give pause to all those ecstatic or roman-tic jews who see only Shechem in Nablus, only Beth El inRamallah, only the Bible on the West Bank; they must re-flect upon the extent to which religion may contribute tothe undoing of the state, because of all that it will forbid thestate to do in its own iiiterest.

Yet even KaJiane's disquiet about the demographicthreat is more than a little false. For Kahane, Zionism isantithetical to democracy even within the 1967 borders.No minority of Arabs has a place in the state. Most ofKahane's provocations have been directed at the Arabs ofthe Galilee, not at the Arabs of the West Bank. They allmust go. The roots of Kahane's solution to the Arab ques-tion are twofold. First, there is racism, of a particularlyvirulent kind. Talking to Mike Wallace, the rabid rabbi willprotest that he has no contempt for the Arab, that heunderstands the Arab's refusal to live under Jewish sover-eignty, and therefore wishes that he will leave and flourishelsewhere; and he can write affectingly, in words thatmight have come from The journal of Palestine Studies, that"the Arab of Israel can enjoy full religious and culturalfreedoms, can say and write wha t he feels, can exercisepolitical rights . . . just like a Jew. But to think t h a t . . . is

N O V E M B E R I 1, 1985 17

to fail to understand that not by bread alone does the Arablive, and that a man needs to dwell in and feel part of hisown land. . . . " But this compassion is counterfeit. In thebooks and pamphlets that he has published over theyears, contemptible contributions to the exceedingly slimgenre of Jewish hate literature, Kahane's genuine feelingsabout Arabs emerge. They are "dogs" and "jackals," they"go into the Jewish night with money in their pocketsseeking Jewish women," they are "a cancer . . . whosevery presence in the Land . . . is abominable desecration,"and so on. Kahane's writings on the Arabs are littered inparticular with a pathetic sexual fear of them, which wasexpressed last year in his notorious proposal to make sexu-al relations between Jews and Arabs illegal in Israel.

But Kahane's hatred is not bounded by the Arab. Notmerely the Arab, but the gentile, too, must be expelled."Close the doors of the Holy Land to those gentiles unwill-ing to abide by its sanctity and who enter it with theirluggage of abomination." Kahane admonishes Israel'sgovernment about the peace with Egypt that "the dogs ofthe gentile world, smelling the fear, will salivate in hungerfor more concessions as their appetite is whetted." Andamong these "dogs" is the United States, which cannot betrusted. There a holocaust awaits the Jews; "it is a Divinedecree." (One of the first institutions established byKahane in Jerusalem was something called the Museum ofthe Future Holocaust. The man simply kindles to Jewishcatastrophes.) Nor are even the Jews spared the rabbi'swanton wrath. Some of Kahane's most lurid passages aredevoted to the Jews who oppose him; "a Jewish state rosefrom the crematoria not because we deserved it, but be-cause the gentile did." Against Jews he has threatened allkinds of political and physical intimidation. "There are noallies," Kahane uncontrollably concludes.

THE OTHER ROOT of Kahane's readiness to throwthe Arabs out of Israel is, alas, Judaism. "Kahanism is

Judaism," he humbly says. In a sense, it is true. There isno such thing as a tolerant religion, and Judaism is noexception. It is indeed not democratic. Its texts are riddledwith exclamations of exclusiveness, and with the odium ofthe other; there is much in the canon for Kahane to use.Still, here one must be very circumspect. For every rabbin-ic insistence upon Jewish superiority there is a rabbinicinsistence upon Jewish justice.

Eor the last decade or so a war has raged in the religiouscommunity about the proper theological interpretation ofthe Jewish state; and there is an impressive array of argu-ments and exegeses that rule against racism and fanati-cism and the refusal to make concessions for the sake ofpeace. Moses may have been commanded to destroy theHittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and theother peoples of Canaan ("thou shalt make no covenantwith them, nor show mercy unto them": the verse inDeuteronomy is a favorite of religious annexationists, par-ticularly for the Talmudic gloss that "you shall not givethem a place of settlement on the soil"), but Abrahamcommitted what we would call a territorial compromise for

the sake of peace with Lot. Moreover, the rabbinic tradi-tion is persistent in its softening of the harshness of theBible toward "the nations of the world," particularly in itsstubborn dissociation of all monotheists, Christian andMoslem, from the category of idolatry. But there is notrace of this in the fundamentalist exhortations of Kahane,who must have a usable Jewish past for fascism.

Still, a "dovish" construction of Israel's religious mean-ing may be as egregious as a "hawkish" construction,because Israel may have no religious meaning at all. To besure, there is a thrill, even a bit of bliss, that a Jew must feelas he passes through the land. The Bible, after all, isbroached by the West Bank; it is hard not to recall Jacobasleep under the stars in Beth El, dreaming of a ladder,and angels ascending and descending, as you come toRamallah. The tradition of Labor Zionism is now payingdearly for pretending otherwise, for the shallow socialistanticlericalism that made it indifferent to this form of Jew-ish arousal.

There is nothing morally or politically objectionableabout the love of the past or the imagination of the holy.But it comes from the land, not from the state; and it comesto the individual, not to the citizen. The state of Israel isnot, in the canonical phrase of the religious nationalists,reshit tsmikhat geulateynu, the beginning of our redemp-tion. It is a completely secular thing, created for a com-pletely secular purpose, according to the completely secu-lar conventions of modern politics. The government ofIsrael was not appointed by God (and the Chief Rabbinateof Israel was appointed by the British Mandate). The ex-tension of sanctity to the state, in the form of myth or inthe form of law, has been the source of many distortions ofIsraeli life, not least among them the view that the Pales-tinians are merely the new Hittites or the new Girgashites.

The mingling of religion with nationalism did not beginwith Meir Kahane. It originated with Zionism itself, in thelate 19th century; and it has been responsible for manyintellectual, social, and political achievements of the high-est order. (In the person of Rabbi Abraham Kook, the firstchief rabbi of Israel, it produced one of the most originalthinkers in modern Jewish history, and a remarkable mys-tic.) Still, Meir Kahane would not have been possible with-out that mingling. It set the snare of metaphysics for thestate, the permanent possibility for a national illusion ofreligious grandeur. Many have fallen into that trap, partic-ularly since the Six Day War. Meir Kahane is merely themost fallen of all.

II.

MEIR KAHANE deserves to be denounced as thenational disgrace of the Jewish people. But a de-

nunciation of Kahane is easy, and not quite the end of it.The ground for his success was prepared for him by oth-ers. It was not Meir Kahane who dominated the Israelidebate about peace and the Palestinians in recent years,who expropriated Palestinian land on the West Bank, whoregularly abused and vandalized Palestinians there, whoorganized a terrorist underground for the purpose of de-

18 THE NEW REPUBLIC

stroying the Dome of tbe Rock mosque in Jerusalem, wboplanted bombs in tbe cars of freely elected Palestinianmayors or sprayed machine-gun fire at tbe students of tbeIslamic College in Hebron.

THE PHENOMENON of Kabanism must be under-stood in tbe context of a seismic sbiff in tbe political

culture of Israel occasioned by tbe rise to power of Mena-cbem Begin and Ariel Sharon. In tbeir different ways tbesemen presided over a great stimulation of extremisms, of avariety of irrationalisms that Israeli politics, not least be-cause of tbe discipline of its self-defense, bad successfullycontained for decades. Tbere occurred a general poppingof tbe corks. More tban ever before in tbe state's bistory,politics left Parliament for tbe street. A new politics ofsymbol and mytb, of entbusiasm and excitement, of activ-ism and agitation, materialized. And fbe new politics roseprecisely as the old politics fell. The presence for fhe hap-py duration of Shimon Peres in the prime minister's officenotwithstanding, the Labor Party is now tbe minority par-ty; and it is in a state of moral, intellectual, and politicalexbaustion. Israel is in an age of ideology, wbicb leavesLabor, tbe party of tecbnocrats and bureaucrats and man-agers and pols, at a sorry disadvantage. Israel is also in anage of class and etbnic rancor, and tbat, too, leaves Laborbebind. Tbe energy is else wbere.

Menacbem Begin unleashed forces in Israeli politics thatbe believed he could control. Ariel Sharon unleashedtbem knowing he could not control them, but tbat theprofit from the turbulence would be his. There are threesuch forces that have transformed Israeli politics undertheir authority, and created the conditions for the promo-tion of Meir Kabane from a malcontent on tbe margins to afact of contemporary Israeli life: radical nationalism, mili-tant millenarianism, and social resentment.

Radical nationalism. Tbe evolution of electoral campaignsin recent years tells tbe story best of all. In 1981 Beginpreached to mobs who proceeded fo attack tbe property ofpeople affiliated with tbe Labor Party or Peace Now, and afateful new appellation was introduced into Israeli politicaldiscourse: ha-makhane ha-leiimi, "tbe national camp,"wbich was how the Likud successfully characterized itself(and, tolerantly, Tebiya too, ifs competitor to tbe rigbt).Tbose outside tbe Likud were simply outside tbe nation.By tbe campaign of 1985, worried by tbe reversal in Leba-non and tbe Kaban commission's disclosure of tbe govern-ment's partial responsibility for tbe massacres at Sabra andShatila, Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Shamir (Begin's paltrysuccessor) let loose a famous advertisement, whichshowed a picture of Yasir Arafat advising the viewer to votefor Peres. (Sharon's rbeforic against Peres remains warped;fbese days he enjoys inflaming party meetings with the re-mark that Peres, by freezing settlement on the West Bankbecause of the economic crisis, has imposed another WhitePaper on tbe Jews, referring to tbe Britisb interdiction ofJewish emigration to Palestine on tbe eve of tbe Holocaust.)

These political phenomena were the result of a deeperhistorical and philosophical change that Begin set in mo-

tion. In 1977, affer 30 years in the political wilderness, ifwas time to act upon the Revisionist chauvinism, its obses-sion witb borders, its appetite for confrontation, its cult ofnational glory. Tbus Begin set about systematically rewrit-ing tbe bistory of tbe state, at least for tbe popular imagi-nation; suddenly it appeared tbat tbe Irgun, Begin's ter-rorist underground of fbe 1940s, was tbe bero of Israeliindependence, and tbe Haganab a kind of auxiliary force.Stamps were issued with the images of tbe Irgun's mar-tyrs, including Avrabam Stern, tbe poet and murdererwbo led tbe gang tbat bore bis name. A commission wasformed to look into tbe assassination in 1933 of a well-known Labor Zionist leader, witb tbe aim of clearing fbeRevisionists of the time-honored charge that they wereresponsible. More examples could be cited.

Tben tbere came a new glorification of Jewisb milita-rism, an attempt to discredit fhe old Haganah policy ofhavlagah, of restraint in the use of force and circumspecfionin the taking of reprisals. When Begin visited the Museumof the Diaspora in Tel Aviv, a comprehensive display offhe full range of Jewish creativity in the medieval and earlymodern eras, be wisbed only to know wby no Jewisbsoldiers had been included. Begin's love of militarism is acorny kind of Betar love, gained in tbe paramilitary youtbmovement tbaf bis mentor Jabotinsky founded. Sbaron'sinfafuation witb force is a more worldly tbing, and' wellproven; as is Rafael Eitan's, bis cbief of staff until theKahan commission recommended relieving him of his du-ties, and now a leading figure in Tehiya.

And there came a new politicization of tbe Holocaust, asbamelessness about tbe adducing of Auschwitz for politi-cal gain. Arafat, wbo is quite evil enougb for being Arafat,was always compared to Hitler. Wbile fhe Israeli army laidsiege to Beirut in 1982, Begin wrote to Reagan that "1 feelas a Prime Minisfer empowered to instruct a valiant armyfacing Berlin, where among innocent civilians Hitler andhis henchmen hid in a bunker beneatb tbe surface." Ofcourse, for Begin, as for many survivors of tbe Holocaust,Hitler may ne\ er be dead; but tbe same may not be said ofmany others with a talent for the tactic.

THE BEGIN revolution really amounted to the removalof the inhibitions from tlie paranoid style in Jewish

politics. Begin represented, almost anachronistically, theold-fashioned and radically simplified mentality of the Di-aspora Jew; for him there were only two actors in worldhistory, tbe Jew and tbe goy, wbo were eternally locked instruggle. He promulgated the time-honored typologicalview of Jewish history, according to which the Amalekiteswere the Ronians were tbe Crusaders were tbe Cossackswere tbe Nazis were tbe Arabs were tbe PLO. After tbemassacre at Sabra and Sbatila, Begin remarked tbat "goy-im kill goyim and tbey come to bang tbe Jews," wben infact Christians killed Moslems and they came to hang fheJews (who were anyway not completely innocent). Includ-ed in this typological trap, moreover, were all the Palestin-ians. "Two-legged animals," Begin called them, thoughhe more than made up for his part in the new Israeli preju-

NOVEMBER 11, 1985 19

dice when he signed the Camp David accords and ac-knowledged "the legitimate rights of the Palestinian peo-ple." It was Sharon, and Eitan (he called them "druggedroaches in a bottle"), and many of the propagandists of fhesettlers' movement, who prodded and prompted an anti-Palestinian feeling, particularly among Moroccan and Ye-menite Jews, whose fund of anti-Arab feeling the Arabshad themselves established long ago. In 1984 a poll inHaaretz reported that 32 percent of Israelis considered thatviolence against Arabs, including terrorism, was either"totally" justified or has "some justification."

Is Meir Kahane, then, only a fluke? After the Jewishsettlers' council in Qiryat Arba, the large settlement out-side of Hebron, accepted a representative of Kach to itsmembership, Elyakim Ha-etzni, an important figure in thesettlers' movement and a man of fire, argued that no apol-ogies were necessary, that Kahane was "archaic" and"medieval" but "not Nazi," indeed, that he was only asomewhat too extreme "nationalist radical." Writing lastAugust, Yuval Neeman condemned Kahane for his "viewof Arabs—and goyim in general—as sub-human"; but inthe very same breath he called for "the settlement of Arabrefugees (about half a million in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza)outside of the land of Israel," and considered "differentpossibilities of population transfer within the frameworkof negotiated arrangements."

And writing in September, Ariel Sharon, who has takenthe occasion of Kahane's sudden prominence to presenthimself as the true Jewish Jeffersonian, maintained thatKahane's ideas are "strange to us, as Jews, even crazy,"that "our shared life with the Arabs in the land of Israel is. . . a geographical and historical fact, with many positivesides"; and then he proceeded to warn that even though"democracy is a supreme value . . . which must be pre-served at any price. . . we have another supreme value: se-curing the existence of the Jewish people and the state ofIsrael and its development, as the state of the Jews and as aJewish state. . . . It must not enter anybody's mind that therules of the democratic game will lead to a weakening or aloss of the Jewish uniqueness and complexion of the stateof Israel." The Arabs "must enjoy, as a matter of principle,equal rights as individuals. . . . But west of the Jordan, inthe territories of the Jewish state, national rights . . . be-long only to Jews. "With such critics, Kahane can live com-fortably. And they with him; he can do their dirty work.

"^ /flLlTANT millenarianism. The settlement of the WestJL yJL Bank for the sake of annexation was not solely thework of the radical nationalists, who are generally seculartechnocrats or veterans of the resistance. The most power-ful impulse for the settlement movement was religious.After the 1967 war there arose from the mystical national-ism of Rabbi Abraham Kook, particularly as it was devel-oped by his son. Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, known as "TheHermit," a vigorous application of the traditions of Jewishmessianism to the reality of the Jewish state. Both the SixDay War and the Yom Kippur War were given elaborateapocalyptic meanings. Political activism, meticulously

planned and aggressively executed by the Gush Emunim(the Bloc of the Believers), was undertaken in an eschato-logical spirit.

The messianic doctrine of Maimonides is frequentlycited as the basis for the pioneering and the politics of thesettlers. "The messianic age is this world," Maimonideswrote, "and the world keeps to its customs, except thatsovereignty will be restored to Israel." Endorsing a Talmu-dic text that may be found throughout the writings of theGush Emunim, Maimonides judged that "there is no dif-ference between this world and the messianic era exceptthe subjugation of the [other] kingdoms." Such opinionshave led Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, an influential rabbi andone of the prophetae of the millenarian movement, to char-acterize the politics of the settlers as "messianic realism."

They have also led to certain more concrete develop-ments. The chief rabbinate has issued a number of rulingsforbidding the return of any territory for peace. In 1979,for example, it decreed that "according to our holy Torah,and to clear and authoritative law, there is a strict ban ontransferring ownership to gentiles" of any part of the landthat God promised Abraham. (During the Lebanon war,the attempt was made by the millennial commentators toinclude Lebanon in the promise.) The speciousness of thelegal reasoning in these decisions has been exposed by anumber of great rabbinic scholars, but their influence isdrastically limited by their historical indifference to Zion-ism and the state.

NOR IS THAT ALL. The religious intellectuals of theannexationist movement have drawn a variety of dis-

heartening and undemocratic conclusions about the Pales-tinians in whose midst many of them live. For all of them,the idea of civil rights is a Western incrustation upon theJewish revival; the tolerant among them are those whosearch the classical sources for categories of second-classcitizenship for the Palestinians. But the prevailing viewconsists in a tacit consensus about the desirability of theirexpulsion. This is rarely stated plainly. As one rabbi put it afew years ago, there are "laws that are not to be publi-cized"; or, as many like to remind themselves, "the Torahspoke in the language of men," fhat is, it spoke euphemis-tically and allegorically, so as not to shock with a directdisclosure of its meaning. Still, the feeling is everywherethat there is no place for fhe Arab in fhe Jewish land—andthat the holiness of the Jews exempts them from the obliga-tions of morality that are binding on other peoples. Thecommandment to conquer the land, writes Rabbi Aviner,"transcends the human and moral considerations of thenational rights of the gentiles to our land." And in oneinstance, in an article called "The Commandment of Geno-cide in the Torah," a rabbi proposed that Israel'sPalestinian policy be guided by the injunction in the Torahto wipe out all traces of the ancient foe Amalek. As the lateUriel Tal observed, in one of his important studies of thepolitical culture of the West Bank millenarians, the articleoccasioned no controversy in its community.

I have been to the settlements on the West Bank many

20 THE NEW REPUBLIC

times, and I count some of the settlers among my friends. Ihave disputed with them fiercely. 1 have also prayed withthem, admiring the vitality of their venture and envying alittle the quantity of rapture that they have introduced intotheir lives. I believe that they are wrong, and that theymay be putting the whole of the state into jeopardy. I donot believe that they are all racists, or psychopaths, orterrorists, or fascists. Still, all these may be found intheir midst; and more important, they—I mean even thegentlest spirits among the settlers, the most thoughtfuland the most ethically exigent among them—have createdthe intellectual and political conditions for anti-Palestinianprejudice and anti-Palestinian violence.

It will not do for them to dissociate themselves from theworst consequences of their zeal, as they tried to do in theaffair of the Jewish terrorists. The people were theirs, andso, therefore, was the responsibility. Intoxicated by theirown idealism, the settlers do not see that they are pushingthe state in the direction of problems for which they haveno acceptable solution. Mystical experience will be a poorexcuse for historical blindness. Now Meir Kahane has ap-peared, and many of the settlers are embarrassed, and arenervously trying to make distinctions. Distinctions thereare; but without the legitimation and the popularization ofpolitical messianism by the settlers and their leaders, moreIsraelis may have recognized, in Kahane's screeds about"the irrational, dangerous, Jewish things," the full meas-ure of his grotesqueness.

S OCIAL RESENTMENT. The simultaneity of social un-rest with with messianic activity is an old story. In

Israel since Begin, interestingly, they occurred simulta-neously, but by different hands. There are very few Se-phardic (Oriental) Jews among the settlers of the WestBank; Sharon's attempt in the late 1970s to set up an entire-ly Sephardic settlement not far from Nablus failed miser-ably. The Sephardic rage was expressed elsewhere. Whilemore Sephardim voted for Labor in the elections of 1977,1981, and 1985 than is commonly realized, and while mostof the structure of the Likud (and a substantial portion ofthe supporters of Kach) is Ashkenazic (European), the factremains that one of the primary instruments of Begin,Sharon, and Kahane has been the politics of resentment.Begin, for whom a Jew is a Jew is a Jew, probably did notexploit the resentment intentionally. His strategists, andcertainly Sharon, did. Incitement became a standardLikud ploy. The results were rattling. I recall seeing"Askenatzim" ("Ashke-Nazis") scrawled on walls in morethan one development town.

What is the justice of the Sephardic grievance? It is hardto say. The great Sephardic immigrations of the late 1940sand early 1950s occurred in a period of grave economiccrisis; and, as Marie Syrkin wrote recently in these pagesconcerning the insensitivity of the government to the cul-ture of the new citizens, "in a rational society it is fair toask how far reverence for ancient folkways should go."Recent research in Israel, on the other hand, presents apicture of paternalism and prejudice in high places that is

hard to deny. Whatever the case, the availability of a vastfund of social bitterness proved to be a decisive fact ofIsraeli politics in the late 1970s.

The bitterness was both class and ethnic. For the Likudit included a foreign policy dividend as well. The economiccrisis worsened it; and the Begin government offered apolitically expedient boom for the short term that amount-ed to a hoax played upon its most loyal supporters. Per-haps the most vivid account of the bitterness is Amos Oz'sreport of an encounter with a group of Sephardic workersin Beit Shemesh, a development town near Jerusalem:

When you were on top, you hid us away in holes, in moshavimand in development towns, so the tourists wouldn't see us; sowe wouldn't stain your image; so they'd think this was awhite country. But that's all over now, because now we'vecome out of our holes. . . . You want the hatred between us toend? First of all, come and apologize, properly. We havesinned, we are guilty, we have dealt treacherously—that'swhat you should say. That's what you should say, looking usstraight in the eye at Beit Shemesh, and in front of Begin'shouse. . . . Say you're sorry for the thirty years you were inpower. . . . We're not out for revenge. You're Jews, too. Butone thing: come without that arrogance of yours. . . .

About the Arabs, the fury in Beit Shemesh is no less con-siderable, though it quickly turns to targets closer to home:

You think the Arabs want a state in the West Bank? They wantto eat us up alive—that's what they want. And Shimon Peresis willing to sell them the whole country, just as long as he getsback into power. The guy's sick. You're all sick. The sickestones are those writers and the left-wing professors and thetelevision reporters and Peace Now. . . . Look at the Arabs,just look! Do they have anything like Peace Now?

W'HEN Meir Kahane visits Beit Shemesh, he is wel-comed as a hero. "Kahane, king of Israel!" Kahane

has made a career out of the distrust of elites and thedisaffection from "establishments." He speaks proudlyabout the enthusiasm of this stratum of the population forhis extremism. His pride always is accompanied by a text-book illustration of paranoid anti-intellectualism. At theNational Press Club a few weeks ago, he defended hisSephardic supporters as "the last normal people [in Isra-el], untouched by college professors. Not every Jew has tobe a Ph.D." The coarseness of his mob pleases Kahane; heshares its fear of what he calls "the Hellenists—disturbedartists, intellectuals, and writers, the barons of televisionand radio and theater, placing their own needs, desires,and illnesses over that of the sacred yoke of Heaven."Kahane is indefatigable in playing upon the unhappy Se-phardic past. "This is the accusing finger," he writes,"that points at the Israeli Establishment, for what Muslimscould not do during more than 1,000 years of dominationof the Jews in their lands, the Jewish Establishment accom-plished in less than 25: the spiritual destruction of hun-dreds of thousands of Sephardic Jews. . . ."

The good news about the ethnic tension in Israel, how-ever, is that the edge seems to be going off it. The presentgovernment of national unity marks a decisive step in the

NOVEMBER 11, 1985 21

political enfranchisement of the Sephardim; both its depu-ty prime ministers, Yitzhak Navon of Labor and DavidLevy of Likud, are of Oriental origin. Indeed, the firstSephardic political elite in the history of the state is now information. And as the rates of ethnic intermarriage in-crease, and the integration by the common experience ofarmy service intensifies, the appeal of demagoguery andthe reliability of the protest vote declines. Thus, like anyaccomplished practitioner of the politics of resentment,Kahane will do his best to keep his supporters down evenas he pretends to raise them up. He needs their anger.

III.

MEIR KAHANE has the dubious distinction of com-bining the ugliest of American Jewry with the ugli-

est of Israeli Jewry.I remember Kahane well. In 1969, when I was 17 and a

student at a yeshivah high school in Brooklyn that mixed astrenuous curriculum with a passionate commitment to re-ligious Zionism, I joined the Jewish Defense League. Ka-hane had spoken at the yeshivah, and made an impression.He dressed like an Israeli and spoke like an American. Hewore a large woolen yarmulke, as did we all. His voice hada strange, and finally a soothing, rhythm; it would rise andsnarl, as if to frighten us, and then subside into a calm thatseemed more proof of conviction. (Later I learned that thecalm was of a different kind, what Charcot called la belle in-difference des hysteriques.) He would punctuate his speechwith ostentatiously heavy sighs, as if all that he was sayingwas obvious, as if all of the collective memory of the Jewishpeople was his to carry. Nobody knew very much abouthim; he seemed to have arrived from nowhere. Though hecalled himself a rabbi, he did not seem very learned. We didnot care. His appeal was not to our minds.. The climate in Brooklyn in 1969 was clement for Ka-hane's message, which was essentially that we, the Jewsof Brooklyn, were as besieged as our ancestors, and as ourbrothers and sisters in Israel. We, too, were fighting forour lives. He seemed to move our uneventful existencefrom the peaceful periphery to the calamitous center ofJewish history, to enlist us in the great Jewish melodrama.Two events had recently taken place that made us ripe forrousing. The first was the Six Day War; for us, this was theworld-historical war of the 1960s, and our primal politicalscene. When Kahane appeared, the flammable mixture ofdespair and exaltation of June 1967 was still vivid in ourhearts. On June 6, for example, all teaching at my yeshi-vah was halted, and replaced by the radio coverage of thewar, which was broadcast over the public address system.When our Israeli teachers wept, we wept too. A few weeksafter the war we all hung a large poster of a Hasid chang-ing into a Superman costume in a telephone booth. "Thewhole world is against us," we would say in Hebrew; or,as Kahane later put it, "a Jewish fist in the face of anastonished gentile world . . . This is kiddush ha-shem [theSanctification of God's Name]."

The other event was the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teach-ers' strike. There came the shock of black anti-Semitism:

"Hey Jew Boy with that yarmulke on your head / Youpale-faced Jew Boy, I wish you were dead . . . ," dedicat-ed by a young black girl, celebrated in her community, toAlbert Shanker. We had found our enemy. I will not pre-tend that we were betrayed liberals; in Flatbush, in BoroPark, in Bensonhurst, in Crown Heights, the blacks hadalmost always been shvartzes. Still, a young paranoidneeds an enemy, and we had agreed to let Kahane train usin paranoia. The Jewish Defense League was founded in1968 as a cross between a self-help group and a vigilanteorganization, to patrol the streets of Brooklyn's mixed andtroubled neighborhoods and protect elderly Jews fromattackers. I thought this was a worthy activity; and inacting self-reliantly I felt Israeli.

It was not long before the Jewish Defense League devel-oped into what it became—an American Jewish Poujadistmovement, organized around an endlessly ambitious andreckless leader, fascinated by lawlessness and brutality. Ashort time later, after Kahane found his "foreign policy,"his violent anti-Soviet and anti-Arab demonstrations, 1 qui-etly parted company with the movement. While Kahaneprided himself on "getting Soviet Jewry onto page one ofthe New York Times," 1 decided that it was really Kahane hewas trying to get there. (Another group, called StudentStruggle for Soviet Jewry, was doing the real work.) Thelust for violence—"Every Jew a .22"—frightened me. Onesummer I considered three plans for my vacation: Camp Je-del, a paramilitary summer camp Kahane had started in theCatskills; a program of social work for high school studentsin Appalachia, which was then a big draw for the childrenof the middle-class; and a first visit to Israel. I chose Israel,and it opened my eyes to what was happening in Brooklyn.

W'HEN I RECALL my attraction to the Jewish DefenseLeague, I begin to understand the attraction of

many Israeli teenagers to Kach. Kahane seemed to hitevery resentment, every fear of inadequacy, every fanta-sy. There was the resentment of Brooklyn for Manhattan.It was the class resentment of the lower-middle-class Jewsin semidetached houses for the genteel Jews in buildingswith doormen. And it was the cultural resentment ofyoung Jews who spoke Hebrew or Yiddish naturally butnever saw a foreign film for the well-educated and sociallygifted Jews across the bridge whose Jewishness seemedilliterate. "Is This Any Way for Nice Jewish Boys to Be-have?" was the JDL caption to a photograph of Jews inyarmulkes brandishing bats and chains.

There was a kind of Holocaust resentment, too. In Man-hattan they were making speeches and holding commem-orations; in Brooklyn we lived among the survivors, wewere their children, and met the death daily. "NeverAgain!" was Kahane's most popular slogan; it seemedproperly absolute, and had the additional advantage ofmaking Auschwitz into a mere political problem. We nev-er understood the Jewish organizations' objection to it.Everything, then, that Kahane said about "the Jewish Es-tablishment" sounded right. It had ignored and insultedus, the Jews from the provinces, the not-so-prosperous

24 THE NEW REPUBLIC

Jews, the Jews with accents, the Jews in yarmulkes.Kahane's skill was first to make us feel more powerless

than we were and then to make us feel that we had morepower than we did. The Jewish Defense League was basedon an odd combustion of feelings of superiority with feel-ings of inferiority. The Jews were victims and they werevictors. They were meek and they were mighty. And Ka-hane's other skill, I realized much later, was to niake itpossible for us to have the 1960s our way. The JewishDefense League was a right-wing protest movement thatowed many of its methods and much of its glamour to theexample of the radical left. It was an antiblack organizationwhose hatred of the Black Panthers was equaled only byits respect. In acting self-reliantly, we felt not only Israeli;we also felt black. I recall, riot a little to my shame, protest-ing to my parents that Eldridge Cleaver was making me abetter Jew. I remember a week in which I handcuffedmyself to the Soviet consulate on 67th Street and orga-nized a Jewish contingent to an antiwar rally on 42ndStreet. (I also remember Robert Lowell sitting next to meon the IND to Bryant Park, as on my lap I had a volume ofYehuda Amichai's verse.) For all its crude affirmations ofJewish authenticity, the JDL was for many of us a welcomeavenue of assimilation, a way of getting in on the greatmelodrama of the goyim, too.

IV.

T'HE EMERGENCE of Meir Kahane is a sign that theJews must attend to their demons as well as to their

enemies. But Kahane's emergence is owed in part to thebehavior of their enemies. No, Arabs are not responsiblefor what Jews do; only Jews are. For centuries the excuseof external hostility has existed for the Jews, for theirshortcomings and their failings, but they never took it up.The Jews will have to defeat Kahanism. But the Arabs, andthe PLO, and the Palestinians, are not helping.

In 1947 the Jews accepted the partition of Palestine andthe Arabs did not. Now many Jews do not, too; that isreally all that has changed over the past 40 years. It is afateful change, to be sure. But it is a change that the Arabswere instrumental in bringing about. Three times the Ar-abs dispatched their armies for the purpose of destroyingthe Jewish state, and scores of times they dispatched theirterrorists for the purpose of destroying Jewish men, wom-en, and children. Precisely how much punishment can theJewish willingness to compromise take?

Certainly, the Arab-Israeli conflict is a political problem;this the peace with Egypt, despite its chills, demonstrates.But who cannot forgive Israelis for believing that the prob-lem is cultural, or racial, or metaphysical? Certainly, thewar with the Arabs was not like the war (or what war therewas) with the Nazis; there is a difference between fightingto defend a state and fighting for a better way to die. Butwho cannot forgive Israelis for returning from the front in1967 and 1973 with thoughts of extinction? Asking the Jewsto cling to compromise is asking them to overlook a sub-stantial portion of their experience. This, very vigilantly,they have done—sometimes because peace seemed possi-

ble, sometimes because they refused to countenance a des-tiny of pure darkness; sometimes as an act of mind, some-times as an act of will. But it is a psychological feat of greatmagnitude to act as if the people who seem to want todestroy you do not want to destroy you, to withstand warafter war and hold that peace is imminent, to busy yourselfwith your own defense and still keep yourself open.

THE SPLITTING of the Jewish self required by the"peace process," the strain of negotiating with oneself

because there is nobody else prepared to negotiate withone, is becoming harder to bear. The rise to power ofMenachem Begin should have signaled this. From theelection of 1977 that brought Begin to the prime minister'soffice to the election of 1985 that brought Kahane to theKnesset, the evidence has mounted that the argument forhope is becoming less and less plausible to more and moreIsraelis. For years the PLO, with the assent of the king ofJordan, played upon the Israeli insistence upon riskingillusion; the "two-track" strategy of diplomacy and terrorwas a consummate cynicism, requiring that Israel heednew words while the PLO practiced old deeds. The angryman from Beit Shemesh was right. The Arabs have noPeace Now. They have no Labor Party, either. And theyhad their own Kahanes before the Jewish one was born.

The Arabs, in short, have made Israeli liberalism seemrefuted by reality. Every day that passes without the arriv-al of King Hussein and the announcement of a moderatePalestinian leadership on the West Bank is only moreproof against it. Still, it is early for complete despair. Therehave been some hysterical things said in the wake of Ka-hane's celebrity. Doubts have been raised, for example,about the resilience of Israeli democracy. It is true, certain-ly, that demagogues like Kahane flourish in democracies;they are the slime that democracies must suffer. But Israelidemocracy moved swiftly against Kahane. The Knessetpassed a law in July banning racist parties like Kach fromfuture elections. The law is problematic, and no doubtKahane will find a way around it; but at least this democra-cy is alive to the danger from the anti-democrats in itsmidst. Nor does Kahane's election prove that Israeli socie-ty is fundamentally anti-Arab; recent polls show a healthy(if dwindling) majority that opposes any such attitude.

Kahane is not Israel. He will never come to power. Buteven his limited success will aid and abet the forces inIsrael that may land Israel with a problem it will not be ableto solve. You do not have to be Meir Kahane, or YuvalNeeman, or Yitzhak Shamir, or Ariel Sharon to oppose thePLO. But the PLO was crippled militarily in Lebanon, andnow politically in the Achille Lauro affair; the Palestiniansremain. They may not be central to the rivalry between theUnited States and the Soviet Union, or to the imperishableinstability of the Middle East, or even to all of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but they are'central, surely, to the Israelisand to themselves. And there can be no greater blow to theprospects for peace than the poisoning of relations be-tween peoples who will share, whether they like it or not,with God's blessing or without, the same unknown fate. •

NOVEMBER 11, 1985 25