Friends,
This was a difficult week for Israel once again with much pain. The hostage agreement with Hamas appears to be winding down, and it’s unclear whether it will reach the next stage, or whether Israel will return to war in Gaza, even as a significant number of hostages remain trapped there. Perhaps in response to this, there has been increasing embrace of Meir Kahane and his thought, which I seek to address this week.
In addition, Drisha has uploaded the first two classes to my series: This Year We Are Slaves, Next Year We Will Be Free. If you are interested, the videos are below.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Truboff
Meir Kahane Was Not Right
In recent weeks, Meir Kahane’s face and name have started to appear in the news and social media, and in truth, he’s never been far removed from discourse about Israel, especially not since October 7th. They reflect a deep-seated fear among many Jews and Israelis that coexistence with Palestinians is impossible. Kahane’s ideology had come to be seen not as extremist, but as the only viable solution. This shift is precisely why his ideas, despite being long condemned as racist and undemocratic, are gaining renewed legitimacy.
Going back to the 1980s, Kahane advocated for the expulsion of all Palestinians, whether they be in Israel or in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. His argument for it was simple. Jews and Arabs cannot coexist within the Land of Israel. The growing Palestinian population within Israel presents an existential threat to the Jewish state, and when it grows large enough, it will use democratic mechanisms to dismantle the Jewish character of Israel.
This assertion was rooted in his belief that hostility between Jews and Arabs was not a modern phenomenon nor was it caused by the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. For Kahane, Arab hatred toward Jews is intrinsic and immutable, and therefore the Jewish State has no choice but to remove them. To be honest, Kahane did say that some could remain, but only if they remained in Israel as non-citizens. Otherwise, they would either leave voluntarily or be forcibly expelled. While Kahane also based his beliefs on rather simplistic readings of Jewish texts, his primary appeal today, is not derived from the idea that he was a rabbi. Rather, it's the sense that he was a realist, sharing uncomfortable truths the establishment wouldn’t acknowledge.
There are many problems with Kahane’s ideas, and perhaps I will dedicate more time to them in the future. But today, I wanted to highlight the degree to which Kahane’s ideas were deeply unoriginal, if only because nearly everything he said about the Palestinians was also said about the Jews throughout the previous century.
While most Jews today are aware that Zionism emerged as a response to European anti-semitism, many fail to grasp that modern anti-semitism was not just a continuation of Christian anti-semitism in a new form. A look at the language and rhetoric of its most extreme expressions makes this clear, for as nationalism became a dominant force in European politics, so too did anti-semitism. In many ways, the two seemed bound together, one couldn’t exist without the other.
The anti-semitic logic of nationalism was quite simple, as shown by the philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), a critical influence on the development of German Nationalism.
“To give them the rights of citizenship, I see no other way than to cut off all their heads in one night and to replace them with others in which there is not a single Jewish idea.”
A Jew could have no real place in the German nation state. Therefore, they could not be given rights, and all the better if they left. Fichte’s opinion was held by many in Germany, for ten years later, after the emancipation of the Jews had begun, Germany would see the Hep-Hep riots attacking Jewish homes and businesses. This pattern would repeat itself throughout Europe in the coming decades. In 1840, the famous blood libel of the Damascus Affair in Syria was heavily promoted in France by French nationalist circles. The famous Dreyfus Affair in 1894 was also fueled by French nationalism, as Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was falsely accused of espionage, leading to mass public outcries and anti-Semitic riots. Nationalists promoted the case as proof that Jews could never be true French patriots.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Zionism has often held on to a fantasy that the Palestinians will some day just disappear, but as Fichte shows, this fantasy was not unique to Zionism. Rather, it was held by nearly all nationalist movements regarding large minorities that existed within their borders. Anyone who chooses to embrace nationalism must be conscious of this.
In 1862, Lord Acton, perhaps best known for his famous quote, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” wrote an important essay on this danger. The great risk of nationalism, he argued, was that by tying a state to a particular national identity, it would not be able to tolerate the existence of others within its borders who did not bear that same identity, something the Jews knew all too well.
“The greatest adversary of the rights of nationality is the modern theory of nationality. By making the State and the nation commensurate with each other in theory, it reduces practically to a subject condition all other nationalities that may be within the boundary. It cannot admit them to an equality with the ruling nation which constitutes the State, because the State would then cease to be national, which would be a contradiction of the principle of its existence. According, therefore, to the degree of humanity and civilisation in that dominant body which claims all the rights of the community, the inferior races are exterminated, or reduced to servitude, or outlawed, or put in a condition of dependence.”
Some may argue that Jewish nationalism differs from European nationalism because the Jewish people lack another homeland, and unlike the German or French nationalists of the 19th century, who sought to purify their nations, Israel exists in a precarious regional context where it has been subject to great violence from Gaza. One can believe all those things, but Lord Acton’s warning still stands. States built on ethnic purity are very likely to see minorities as existential threats to their sovereignty, leading to cycles of oppression and violence.
Before Kahane was elected to the Knesset, he was put in prison for planning attacks on Palestinians. When put on trial, his racist beliefs were highlighted, including his desire to outlaw intermarriage between Arabs and Jews, and to separate between Arabs and Jews in the public sphere. The prosecutor noted the similarity between Kahane’s platform and the Nuremberg laws of the Nazis, but as Ehud Sprintzak notes,“When asked, Kahane always maintains that he is not a racist, but rather an anti-Arab Jewish nationalist, who is guided by Halakha.”
If Kahane was right, then so too was Fichte, and the nearly endless array of anti-semitic nationalists who followed. But if we reject Fichte—if we insist that Jewish survival should not depend on the elimination or removal of groups, even those we see as threats— then we must also reject Kahane. The challenge for Zionism is not to outdo the nationalists of Europe in their exclusionary fervor, but to prove that a Jewish state can be something more than what they believed possible.