The American Origins of Israel’s Armament Campaign
How Kahanism infiltrated the political mainstream.
DECEMBER 5, 2023
In the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, the Israeli government has overseen the massive distribution of firearms to Jewish civilians and the erection of local armed squads across Israel. In the first 50 days after October 7, around 250,000 applications for private firearm licenses were submitted in Israel, a volume equal to the sum of applications submitted in the preceding twenty years combined. Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the far-right party Otzma Yehudit (“Jewish Power”) and Minister of National Security, moved in the immediate wake of the attacks to triple the number of licensed gun-holders in Israel, pouring between tens and hundreds of thousands of guns onto the streets while bypassing various legal and bureaucratic checks. As one security operative put it: “They are giving out weapons like candy.” In November, the average rate of approvals for private gun licenses was around 1,700 a day. Palestinian citizens are largely excluded from applying because one of the qualifying criteria is past military service, from which Israeli Palestinians are exempt.
While dramatic, this civilian armament campaign did not arise in a vacuum, but rather is one result of the governing coalition’s intensive, year-long campaign to weaken the rule of law in Israel. It has been further supported by a series of prior measures taken to increase individual gun ownership, as well as a more fringe right-wing push for recognizing a right to bear arms in Israel, modeled after the American example.
In the months preceding October 7, Israel was embroiled in a fierce internal conflict. The war that has followed Hamas’s brutal attack has pushed this internal conflict away from the public eye, both domestically and internationally, but it has not resolved it. The internal battle has only been put on the back burner for the moment, yet the back burner burns still. The war has simultaneously clouded these internal divisions and raised their stakes. The legal overhaul that preoccupied the Israeli public until the war broke out was ostensibly concerned with structures of checks and balances. But the legitimation of violence toward Palestinians was always an essential, though often overlooked part of that campaign. For the Israeli public, the war has made these links easier to see, yet harder to resist.
The intra-Israeli conflict included mass demonstrations against a legal overhaul that would take power away from the judiciary and the bureaucracy and concentrate it instead in the hands of the extreme right-wing government that was erected one year ago, in December 2022. There were also much smaller counter-demonstrations, in support of the government. Among the banners carried in these counter-protests were two seemingly contradictory American symbols: the Confederate flag and images and slogans that explicitly invoked the Black Panthers.
Today, “Kahanism” is an oft-used term in Israeli political discourse to refer to violent Jewish supremacism. It is invariably circumscribed to extremist settler ideology and messianic politics.
Why does American imagery resonate with supporters of the Israeli government? How might we make sense of the brandishing of these two symbols at the same time? And what do these images have to do with the country’s drive to rapidly arm its Jewish citizenry? What follows suggests that we can understand these connections by turning to a militant worldview that has steadily moved over the past several decades from the periphery into mainstream Israeli public discourse. That political worldview, called “Kahanism” after Rabbi Meir Kahane, has shaped the ideological roots of Otzma Yehudit, the most extreme party in Netanyahu’s coalition without whose support his government would collapse. And the origins of this virulent strain of violence are not to be found in Israel/Palestine at all, but rather in the United States.
I.
The spiritual and organizational father of Otzma Yehudit is Rabbi Meir Kahane, an American radical activist who grew up in mid-century Brooklyn. Only in 1971, at the age of 39, did he immigrate to Israel, where he became a highly controversial political figure. He eventually served one term as a member of Knesset, the Israeli parliament, before he was assassinated in 1990 in New York by El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian-born American with ties to Al Qaeda. Today, “Kahanism” is an oft-used term in Israeli political discourse to refer to violent Jewish supremacism. It is invariably circumscribed to extremist settler ideology and messianic politics. But Kahane was very much a product of his time and place. His philosophy merged three discursive frames that emerged in the civil rights era: the fear of crime discourse of the strong; the identity empowerment discourse of the weak; and the all-American imperative of self-defense.
Kahane’s political philosophy emerged from what he witnessed first-hand in New York during the civil rights era. In 1968, against the backdrop of Black-Jewish friction in Brooklyn, he founded the Jewish Defense League (JDL), which formed the basis for his career as a political organizer. The JDL was a communal self-help organization that engaged in a range of activities that included organizing neighborhood patrols; running a youth summer camp where boys took lessons in martial arts, firearms, and Jewish studies; bullying and intimidating Black, Puerto Rican and Muslim neighbors and community leaders; and planning and carrying out terrorist operations against Soviet and Arab diplomats as well as other supposed representatives, including planting a smoke bomb in the office of a Soviet musician that killed a secretary. In 1975, Kahane was sentenced to one year in prison for violating probation conditioned on keeping away from “guns, bombs, dynamite or any other weapons,” after he conspired to manufacture and smuggle explosives and encouraged JDL members to kidnap or kill Soviet diplomats and bomb the Iraqi embassy in Washington. In its Brooklyn base, the JDL’s purpose was to safeguard Jewish residents and businesses and thereby to center the idea of self-defensive violence in the articulation of post-Holocaust Jewish identity.
Kahane denied any distinction between the threats Jews face from their Christian neighbors in Europe, their Black neighbors in the United States, or their Arab neighbors in Israel/Palestine; pogroms, crime, or national conflict — he believed that Jews should understand all these phenomena as instances of anti-Semitism. The solution Kahane offered was self-help, turning victims into survivors. He sought to make victimhood the basis of Jewish identity in a way that weaponizes the memory of Jewish suffering to undergird an imperative to actively resist.
Kahane was a charismatic speaker and a prolific writer. He argued that the violence he advocated for was justified because he saw it as self-defense. In earlier writings, his understanding of self-defense was anchored in an ethno-centric interpretation of Jewish law. Kahane invoked the Talmudic “law of the pursuer” doctrine, which justifies taking the life of “one who pursues his fellow to kill him.” Unlike liberal formulations of self-defense, this doctrine does not clearly prioritize one’s own life over others’, and rather views saving another who is in danger as the paradigmatic justification for lethal violence. The Talmud further tied the law of the pursuer with the imperative to not “stand against the blood of thy neighbor” (Leviticus 19:16). This passage could be read as an injunction to give precedence to human fraternity over self-interest, but this was not Kahane’s reading. He favored the English translation of this passage that supplants “neighbor” with “brother” (the original word is רֵעַ, pronounced re-ah — not to be confused with רָע, pronounced rah, which means bad or evil — which in modern Hebrew denotes a true friend though in Biblical times it may have referred more generically to “the other”). He understood the permission to use violence as tribal, and urged a kind of all-Jewish solidarity that would lead to the view that, as he wrote in 1975, “Jews who defend other Jews with violence are right.”
Kahane never lost his New York accent, nor the American roots of his violent philosophy, despite his references to Jewish sources.
Extremist rabbis who followed Kahane would later cite this doctrine in order to justify the most heinous acts of Jewish terrorism, including the 1994 killing of 29 Palestinians during prayer in Hebron and the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The former was perpetrated by one of Kahane’s students who had also been born in Brooklyn and had been a member of the JDL before joining Kahane’s political party in Israel. These acts were supported by interpretations of the law of the pursuer that broaden the justification for lethality to include potential threats to the territorial and demographic integrity of a Jewish Land of Israel, against the background of the 1990s Oslo peace process.
Kahane never lost his New York accent, nor the American roots of his violent philosophy, despite his references to Jewish sources. Even in later writings, where he advocated a messianic Arab-free Jewish state and spoke of violence as a divine imperative for the freeing of the holy land, he remained preoccupied with the JDL and his early endeavors in the United States. Myriad communal self-help efforts emerged in the 1960s with an agenda of empowerment and cohesion of marginalized groups. Black Power, feminist, and queer organizations developed self-defense techniques as a reaction to hegemonic violence perpetrated by state and private forces. The JDL was distinct in its understanding of the relationship between empowerment and solidarity. Kahane directed his group’s provocations toward elites but its violence toward other minorities. In Kahane’s narrative, the JDL was necessary due to the authorities’ failure to protect Jews from the violence of criminals. He did not shy away from the racial baggage of that term, and did not deny that it is the psychology rather than reality of fear and dangerousness which is key. “The Panthers symbolized the image of the murderous, dangerous Black anti-Semite that filled the average Jew’s heart with fear much in the manner that the Polish Jew looked upon the strong, health-looking Nazis as supermen whom one had to avoid since he could not fight them,” he wrote in 1975. “We were determined to put an end to this psychological fear.”
Nevertheless, Kahane shared the Panthers’ pessimism regarding mainstream American society, whose hatred toward the Jews he saw as irreparable, offering a “Judeo-pessimist” view parallel to afro-pessimism.
At the same time, Kahane was labeled a “Jewish Panther.” Indeed, despite crucial differences, the JDL and the Black Panthers (originally titled “The Black Panther Party of Self-Defense”) also shared some important features. The principle of self-defense anchored their ethical worldviews, which led to a shared openness to the use of force, especially with firearms. The Panthers were among the pioneers of the individualistic interpretation of the Second Amendment to justify their armament in order to conduct effective neighborhood patrols and curb police or white supremacist brutality. The JDL supported dealing with racial tensions in urban environments via rough policing. They nonetheless mistrusted the police and resorted to self-help because, Kahane reasoned, Jews ought to have learnt from history that they cannot count on anyone to protect them but themselves. Hence, Kahane wrote: “Young Jewish men and women, learn to shoot. Drink thirstily at the feet of the non-Jew this one art in which he excels.” In this sense, Kahane joined other Jewish-American groups who adopted U.S. gun culture, which was rebranded in the 1960s as centered around individuals’ right to defend themselves against the criminal activity of their fellow citizens and positioned this right at the heart of the meaning of American citizenship. Kahane anticipated ideas that Second Amendment advocates would voice after 9/11, arguing that Jews should be allowed to carry firearms on airplanes in case there were terrorists aboard.
Although both Black Power and Jewish Power protested the status quo, and although both groups claimed to draw inspiration from other places on the globe, their ethical elevation of self-defense was what allowed them to claim the place of Black or Jewish men as equal members of American society. In line with the constitutive image and the legal reality of the American subject as he who stands his ground in the face of danger, Kahane rebuked liberal, dovish Jews for their cowardice and emasculation in retreating from threats, regarding those who opposed the Vietnam War and invited Black activists to speak at their synagogues with particular disdain. He believed that legitimizing self-defensive violence would fill both vacuums — in masculinity and in courage — first and foremost in the Jews’ own eyes. Nevertheless, as Shaul Magid has argued, Kahane shared the Panthers’ pessimism regarding mainstream American society, whose hatred toward the Jews he saw as irreparable, offering a “Judeo-pessimist” view parallel to afro-pessimism. Any desire to integrate into Christain-American life, he thought, signaled defeatism, assimilation, and loss of self-pride. Kahane’s vision of Jewish self-defense aimed to tie individual and community conditions for survival into a Gordian knot.
II.
It took another generation for the magnitude of Kahane’s influence to become all too clear. Kahane was kept on the political fringes in his lifetime, yet today, his ideology and political agenda have entered deep into Israeli mainstream. The current war has accelerated this process manyfold.
Otzma Yehudit’s unprecedented success in the 2022 election and its subsequent negotiations to form the current governing coalition signaled the biggest triumph of Kahanism to date. Running under one ticket with another far-right, settlement-based party, they won 14 out of 120 seats in the Knesset, 6 of which for members of Otzma Yehudit. The party’s leader, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is a lawyer with several terrorism-related past convictions of his own, from when he was an active member of Kahanistic groups operating out of West Bank settlements. Today, he is a cabinet minister in charge of the police and several other law enforcement agencies. The ministry was formerly titled internal security, but Ben-Gvir had it changed to national security. The change is telling, corresponding with a shift in what a sense of personal security means for Israelis, and particularly Israeli Jews. Ben-Gvir’s goal is to collapse the fight against national threats and the fight against crime into a single issue, thereby casting every Arab as an adversary of Israel.
Fear of crime overtook American politics in the same period that gave rise to the JDL, becoming a primary factor in voting patters and trust in political figures. There are significant gaps between fear of crime and actual crime, as between the sense of security and real security — gaps that are filled by various kinds of bias. In Israel, fear of crime — as opposed to fear of terrorism or war — has not traditionally played any significant role in politics, and public discourse generally kept the two separate. The distinction between the enemy and the criminal became blurry after May 2021, when a series of military actions and religious tensions in Jerusalem and the West Bank escalated into violent protests, riots, and attempted lynchings in cities with mixed Palestinian-Jewish populations across Israel (by both groups). Additionally, crime rates within Palestinian towns in Israel have risen in recent years and garnered increasing media attention. Ben-Gvir identified a thirst in the general Jewish population to address the rising concerns for personal safety, and capitalized on their fears in his election campaign. The rhetoric of reestablishing citizens’ sense of security successfully won Otzma Yehudit voters who do not identify as extreme right-wing and who are averse to overt racism (and who are also not the ones usually victimized by crime).
This party’s emphasis on personal security persists in its rhetoric and policy. At a time when legal professionals in Israel warn against viewing the U.S. criminal justice system as a desirable model, Otzma Yehudit explicitly appeals to the American tough-on-crime agenda as a source of inspiration. The party further strengthens this appeal by recreating the American link between the supposed absence of “law and order” in areas of high crime rates and the supposed leniency of a progressive judiciary toward minority offenders, thus providing a justification for the legal reform that may speak to moderate constituents too. The pernicious outcomes of this agenda materialized even before the war broke out, with unprecedented rates of lethal violence among the citizenry, particularly in Palestinian towns within Israel, and a police force responding with either inaction or more violence. The result is that Palestinian citizens are subject to under-enforcement and over-enforcement at the same time, disproportionately affected by the harms of criminal activity and state-sponsored coercion.
One of the central aspects of tough-on-crime policies in the U.S. (though not only there) is the empowerment of individuals and local communities to be independent agents of security. Following October 7, many Israelis do not feel safe in their own homes nor do they trust their government to protect them. Otzma Yehudit offers a happy synergy, supporting a combination of aggressive policing, the formation of semi-official militias, and the broad dissemination of guns to individuals. This approach facilitates an ultra-nationalist understanding of personal security, which the Hamas attack has entrenched among larger swaths of the Israeli population than ever.
The level of absurdity of the situation is such that the U.S., with its unequaled admiration for firearms at the hands of ordinary citizens, has withheld a shipment of guns for fear that if given to these makeshift units the weapons would find their way to West Bank settlers.
The civilian armament campaign that is currently underway in Israel brings the JDL and Kahane’s early activities in the United States directly to the fore. It rests on two legal frameworks. One is the individual gun licensing regime, whose qualifying criteria and approval procedure have been significantly laxed and tailored to Ben-Gvir’s personal priorities; the other is the procedure for establishing armed units of civilians in remote rural locations, under the auspices of the border police, to be activated in cases of imminent emergencies.
The existing legal regime governing rural emergency armed units is ill-equipped to regulate armed patrols in urban areas, lacking sufficient specifications and limitations on the powers it now allocates. For instance, the required training for participation is minimal and can be satisfied in just a few hours; such a squad caused alarm when it operated near a school in Tel Aviv; and they have detained citizens despite lacking any clear authority to do so. While individuals with protective orders issued against them, e.g. due to domestic violence, should be barred from obtaining firearms, there is concern that communication between different state agencies has not been able to keep up with the pace of armament. The level of absurdity of the situation is such that the U.S., with its unequaled admiration for firearms at the hands of ordinary citizens, has withheld a shipment of guns for fear that if given to these makeshift units the weapons would find their way to West Bank settlers.
Once the fog of war recedes, what will Israeli society see when it looks itself in the mirror?
There is every reason for concern that many of these guns will end up with domestic abusers, organized crime, or settler militias. But they are dangerous even if used for their intended purpose. While the Israeli penal code does require people in the public space to retreat from threat before responding with violence, courts in recent years have interpreted the self-defense provision to only require a subjective standard for scrutinizing self-defensive acts. A person may be exonerated due to “putative self-defense” if they honestly believed a violent response was necessary, even if in reality it was not and even if a reasonable person would not hold such a belief. This line of reasoning was cited to close a criminal investigation of Ben-Gvir himself, after he, while a member of the Knesset, brandished a gun at Palestinian security guards who asked him to move his illegally parked car at a conference center in December 2021.
There is real danger of another round of intra-Israeli violence, a reprise of the May 2021 hostilities. Some civilians are already working to prevent it, establishing mixed Jewish-Palestinian watches that aim to identify and de-escalate incendiary situations. Not so the people at the political helm, who are adamantly encouraging Jewish individuals to apply for gun licenses and join the urban armed units, “to defend themselves.” Current Otzma Yehudit policies bring to fruition the JDL worldview that Jews should always be prepared for urban combat against anti-Semites, and that this preparedness is the adhesive binding Jews together as such. Furthermore, these policies create or sustain the material conditions that prevent the self-defensive consciousness from becoming obsolete. Hope is the Kahanist’s worst enemy.
III.
Once the fog of war recedes, what will Israeli society see when it looks itself in the mirror? The answer will depend on the sum of death and destruction it will have wrought upon Gaza, the fate of the hostages taken on October 7, the gains and losses for long-term Israeli interests, and the prospects for peace in the Middle East; but it should also include a reckoning with the ominous currents of violence and racism that have intensified within Jewish Israeli society while we were busy licking our wounds and protecting our borders.
When he was a member of the Knesset, Kahane was ostracized due to his overt racism, including by members of the liberal right-wing Likud party, which was in power then like it is now. The ironic turn of the measures taken then against Kahane himself illustrate the move of Kahanism into the political mainstream.
Kahane’s political party, Kach (officially designated a terrorist organization following the 1994 Hebron massacre), won one Knesset seat in the 1984 election. The party was barred from running again due to an amendment to the election law that prohibited parties whose platform includes incitement to racism (abolishing this provision was one of Otzma Yehudit’s demands in the negotiations to join the current coalition, though it has yet to be fulfilled). In tandem, an amendment to the penal code from the same term criminalized incitement to racism by individuals (among the convicted of this crime was one Itamar Ben-Gvir, in 2007). Later, the same model provision was used to also criminalize incitement to violence and to terrorism, as well as identification with a terrorist organization.
Today, these provisions are heavily utilized to silence citizens, especially Palestinians, who share views as innocuous as mere empathy for the suffering of Gazan civilians (in the first month after October 7, 57 indictments for incitement offenses were filed, most if not all for social media posts, as opposed to 88 in the preceding four years). This occurs notwithstanding those rule of law mechanisms that Israeli liberals fought to preserve. For instance, pressing charges for incitement offenses requires the consent of the Attorney General, due to their infringement on freedom of speech. Yet as of October 7, such legal gatekeeping checks have failed to scale back legally questionable Kahanistic efforts, including (but not limited to) the gun distribution campaign, turning a blind eye toward escalating settler violence and intimidation of West Bank Palestinians, overcrowding and worsening material conditions for some Palestinian inmates in Israeli prisons, and numerous arrests and indictments for online speech offenses as well as blocking or limiting anti-war protests.
Times of emergency are always dangerous for democracy and rule of law. After months of mass protests that aimed to more or less safeguard the status quo, the war has been chipping away at the status quo day by day.
Meanwhile, members of Likud, who once enacted anti-Kahanistic legal measures in response to his modest ascent, now openly align themselves with Kahane’s ideology. The latter is apparent in rhetoric and policy proposals as well as in action. For instance, when a mob in the city of Netanya sieged with threats of violence the local college’s dormitory, which houses almost exclusively Palestinian students, the Likud mayor responded by evacuating the students and, for the time being, not allowing them to return. This measure, she reasoned, meant prioritizing “the security of Netanya’s residents.”
Otzma Yehudit’s campaign, which promised to restore “governance” and “law and order,” proved to deliver neither and much worse. The vacuum in citizens’ sense of security is filled by the state actively delegating core functions to those among the Jewish citizenry who are eager to take them. But that’s not the only vacuum. Organizations that were originally set up to protest the legal overhaul have now voluntarily taken on the task of providing basic welfare and care for those affected or displaced due to the war, transforming their organizational infrastructure overnight. This transformation is perhaps unsurprising, as the biggest such organization is called “brothers in arms.”
Times of emergency are always dangerous for democracy and rule of law. After months of mass protests that aimed to more or less safeguard the status quo, the war has been chipping away at the status quo day by day. What will the protesters find once they are able to lift their heads again from their reserve duties, trauma, grief, and volunteer work? And perhaps more importantly: What reforms will they advocate for? The democratic rule of law they marched for in the streets never applied to millions of Palestinians under Israeli control in the West Bank and Gaza anyway. During the demonstrations, some snarky commentators remarked that Israeli Jews are now getting a taste of what they have been feeding Palestinians for generations. Defending Israeli democracy as it currently exists entails the prevention of democracy from those under occupation. Other commentators, however, were hopeful that the profound constitutional introspection imposed on the Israeli public might open people’s eyes to the injustices of these conditions. The Hamas attack and the war and public atmosphere that it engendered have made that option seem highly unlikely.
Portions of this essay were adapted from an essay originally published in Hebrew in Hazman Hazeh magazine in February 2023.
✺ Published in “Issue 11: Parties” of The Dial
