How the ultra-right Kahanists infiltrated the US Democratic Party

One of the most extreme, racist governments in the short history of Israel has been driving the ongoing genocide that began on 7 October 2023.

This ultra-right coalition came to power in the November 2022 election to the Knesset. The coalition was led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but shored up by an alliance of smaller, even more fanatical right-wing parties, including the infamous Jewish Power party.

Lawmakers from that alliance were then handed several key roles in Netanyahu’s current government.

These include Itamar Ben-Gvir, the current minister for national security, now in charge of policing and prisons. Another high-profile member of this ultra-racist political force now at almost the highest level of Israeli government is Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister and settler.

Ben-Gvir is notorious, among other things, for idolizing Baruch Goldstein, the American Jewish settler who massacred 29 Palestinian people at the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron in 1994.

The head of America’s Union for Reform Judaism called Netanyahu’s naming of Ben-Gvir as national security minister akin to “appointing David Duke, one of the heads of the KKK, as attorney general.”

Ben-Gvir and Smotrich represent a political trend known as Kahanism, the ultra-rightist followers of Meir Kahane, a extremist Zionist rabbi from New York City who founded the Jewish Defense League, a terrorist group that carried out a nationwide bombing campaign in the US in the 1970s and 1980s.

Kahane later moved to Israel where he founded the Kach party and won a seat in the Israeli parliament on a platform of expelling all Palestinians from the entirety of historic Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

But in the latest episode of The Electronic Intifada Podcast, journalist David Sheen explained how pro-Zionist liberals in both the US and Israel have been directly responsible for the rise of the Kahanists.

Infiltrating the mainstream

Sheen is an investigative journalist and an expert on Kahanism and other forms of Jewish extremism both inside present-day Israel and around the world.

Last year he wrote an important essay on the history of Kahanism, published by The Institute for Palestine Studies.

In this episode of the podcast, Sheen takes us through some of his findings.

He explains the history of Rabbi Kahane and his followers. Sheen explains how the Kahanists have for decades infiltrated local Democratic Party politics in the United States – the topic of the bulk of the essay.

Due to the fact that most American Jews tend to vote Democratic, explains Sheen, “if a politician wanted to so-called ‘Get the Jewish vote,’ then their way to do so is to present themselves as a Democrat. And Kahanists realize this.”

This is the reason Dov Hikind – a former Jewish terrorist with incredibly regressive and bigoted politics – was a Democratic Party lawmaker in the New York State Assembly for 35 years, Sheen explains.

My colleague Nora Barrows-Friedman and I interviewed Sheen a few days before the current genocide began – on 4 October 2023 to be precise.

But we’ve decided to release the interview in full, as the issues it raises are more relevant than ever.

In a new introduction for the episode, filmed recently, Sheen says that “if anything, the thesis of the monograph has been borne true: that the Democratic Party can be even worse in some cases than the Republican Party.”

He said that “what we have in recent months is the culmination of all that: we have the [Democratic Party] president of the United States [Joe Biden] who was the biggest recipient ever of AIPAC aid, supporting genocidal policies, supporting Kahanist policies.”

You can watch the whole interview in the YouTube video above or listen to the audio below.

Article we discussed

“Kahanism and American Politics: The Democratic Party’s Decades-Long Courtship of Racist Fanatics,” David Sheen, The Institute for Palestine Studies

Video production by Tamara Nassar.

Subscribe to The Electronic Intifada Podcast on Apple Podcasts (search for The Electronic Intifada) and on Spotify. Support our podcast by rating us, sharing and leaving a review. You can also donate to fund our work.

Full transcript

Lightly edited for clarity

Asa Winstanley: Welcome to The Electronic Intifada Podcast. I’m Asa Winstanley joined in the background as ever by producer Tamara Nassar and I’m here today with the journalist David Sheen. Now David is a longtime contributor to The Electronic Intifada. For many years he’s been reporting on Jewish extremism inside the territories of historic Palestine first occupied in 1948. That is to say, inside of present day Israel. Now David is an expert on the phenomenon of what’s known as Kahanism: the ultra-right followers of Meir Kahane, an extremist Zionist rabbi from New York City, who founded the Jewish Defense League, a terrorist group that carried out a nationwide bombing campaign in the 1970s and 1980s. Kahane later moved to Israel, where he founded the Kach party and won a seat in the Israeli parliament on a platform of expelling all Palestinians from the entirety of historic Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

The party was later banned, yet today Kahane’s followers are running some of the highest levels of the Israeli government. Itamar Ben-Gvir is a leading minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government. Ben-Gvir has long been a disciple of Kahane and has pursued openly genocidal policies in government.

Now way back in 2023 David wrote this in-depth article about how Kahanism has infiltrated US politics, especially in the US Democratic Party. A really fascinating topic that might be surprising to many, this article is really an essential read. Now my colleague, Nora Barrows-Friedman and myself filmed an episode with David back on the 4th of October 2023, only three days before the start of the current Israeli genocide against the Gaza Strip.

Now due to the whirlwind of other priorities we had at the time the episode was kind of neglected and we never aired it. It has never seen the light of day until now. So we’ve decided to air the episode in full, as we filmed it, due to the fact that it’s largely dealing with historic issues in our discussion. Issues that are in fact more relevant now than ever before, given the influence of the Kahanists on the Israeli government. If anything, it’s only increased since we filmed this episode on the topic of David’s long article about Kahanism and the US Democratic Party.

So David, you’ve just recently rewatched this episode that we filmed back last year. Is there anything you’d like to add now, by way of an update since we filmed it?

David Sheen: It’s really something because I feel in many ways that it’s timeless. As things go along we’re going to encounter more egregious examples of Democratic Party perfidy. And we have in recent months. In fact if anything the thesis of the monograph has been borne true, that the Democratic Party can be even worse in some cases than the Republican Party. I listed a whole host of examples of how the party have been strong allies to the Kahanists and helped them out in many ways over the course of decades. But what we have in recent months is the culmination of all that: we have the president of the United States, who was the biggest recipient ever of AIPAC aid, supporting genocidal policies, supporting Kahanist policies.

So on one hand, we have pretty much the entire Israeli electorate, from the far right to what is considered the center left in Israel, meaning the Labor Party – the Labor Party that founded the country, but today it’s headed by Yair Golan, former army commander, deputy chief of staff. And at the beginning of the war, just after October 7th, and the days that followed, if you look at the public statements of Israeli leaders like Yair Golan, you will find that they’re barely distinguishable from the statements of right wing members of Knesset or ministers in the Israeli government. So the opposition and the coalition are almost uniform in saying we need to shut off water, we need to shut off food, we need to shut off electricity, we need to completely cut off the Gaza Strip and not let anyone in or anyone out. So these are the kinds of genocidal statements that were made by Yair Golan. And so it’s an example of how the whole country essentially, was shock-doctrined into Kahanism.

Before the war the Kahanists were constantly calling for the reconquest of the Gaza Strip. It was a regular feature amongst them. But then after the war, it became commonplace to hear this from all sectors of society, pretty much. And as we will talk about in later episodes, it was actually people who sprung from the well of racism that the Kahane movement flourished in: in Kiryat Arba, Hebron. It was racists from that school that essentially were the most pivotal, in a way, in that shock doctrine that we saw in the wake of October 7th.

So really the Kahanists have been extremely important in making that shift in Israeli society. And the Democratic Party has been very important in supporting that shift and in arming that shift, and in manufacturing consensus for that shift in Israeli society and Israeli policy. We’ve seen for months now that the Biden government has not stopped shipments of arms to Israel, is continually backed in international fora. So the masses of dead are just as much on the Democratic Party’s hands and on Biden’s hands as they are on Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir’s hands.

Asa Winstanley: Thanks for that David. Well, let’s go to that discussion now. And just a reminder that the following interview was filmed on the 4th of October 2023. So any time references to recent events should be understood in that context.

Nora Barrows-Friedman: Today we’re delighted to be joined by our friend and longtime contributor to The Electronic Intifada David Sheen to talk about his latest monograph for the Institute for Palestine Studies journal: Current Issues In Depth, entitled “Kahanism and American politics: The Democratic Party’s decades-long courtship of racist fanatics.”

According to the summary of the study, quote: “American foreign policy on Israel and Palestine lurched to the far right during Donald Trump’s term as US president. Benjamin Netanyahu took advantage of Trump’s unmitigated support for Israel to oversee the installation of more illegal settlement infrastructure in occupied Palestine than had been built in the previous quarter century. Sadly, replacing the Trump administration with a Democratic one has hardly remedied the damage his policies wrought; if anything, the situation is more dire for Palestinians. For over half a century, followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, colloquially called Kahanists – the most racist and most murderous Jewish political movement of modern times – have cultivated an alarming level of influence on both sides of the aisle.”

In his 36 page piece, David uncovers how for decades, ostensibly liberal lawmakers at the highest levels of the Democratic Party have actively courted and embraced Kahanists, pandering to those who have sabotaged the struggle for Palestinian rights and enthusiastically promoted their ethnic cleansing.

David Sheen is a Haifa-based freelance investigative journalist who has reported for dozens of local, regional and international news outlets. It’s so good to have you with us on The Electronic Intifada Podcast, David.

David Sheen: Geat to be back. Great to see you guys.

Nora Barrows-Friedman: So let’s get right into it. Talk about the current Israeli government which is full of open Kahanists and how the Biden administration is continuing a tradition in US White Houses.

You write that quote: “For decades, ostensibly liberal lawmakers at the highest levels of the Democratic Party have actively courted Kahanists, pandering to those who have enthusiastically promoted the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”

What do you mean by that? And how does that play out? And how does it look right now in Biden’s administration?

David Sheen: Well, the bulk of the work actually looks at the past 50 years, well before Biden gets into power. Under Biden, if we fast forward just to the last few months: in May 2022, so just going back about 15 months ago, that’s when the State Department announced that the group Kahane Chai, founded by followers of Kahane, would no longer be considered a terrorist organization according to the State Department. And what that did essentially was give Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a blank check, saying to him: we’ve got no problem with you bringing Kahanists into your new government.

And that’s exactly what happened. As soon as Netanyahu came back to power a few months later, he did exactly that. He brought these people – who, as you’ve correctly stated, are the most racist and most murderous of the Jewish political movements of the last half century – brought them into the Israeli government. They are now considered the kingmakers of the Knesset. They’re the third largest faction in the government, key to holding up any government of Netanyahu. And, of course, that’s a frightening development: that a terrorist group, a murderous terrorist group, now is not only in the government, but you can say has the most important or most powerful positions in said government. Including the defense ministry, the police ministry. These are the ministries that have a monopoly on physical force. So to give the biggest murderers, the power over life or death is sickening and scary.

But the bulk of the essay really relates to the last 50 years, going back to the early 1970s, which is the earliest that I was able to know that this collaboration began. The collaboration essentially was one of community support for votes. Now we have to just briefly look back at the last century of American politics. I’ll be the first to say: I’m not an American, I’ve never been an American citizen, or lived in the United States. I’ve spent only brief visits there. And really this should have been written by an American journalist, someone based in the US at the very least. But no journalist did. No one picked up the glove and so I had to do so.

But what I found was that, going back 100 years already, you have a majority of the Jewish community in the United States voting for the Democratic Party consistently. See, for the last century consistently, Jewish Americans vote for the Democratic candidate for president in much higher percentages than the average American would vote for the Democratic candidate. That’s consistent. So the Democrats, seeing that they have a lock on the Jewish vote, essentially – not completely of course, there is diversity within the Jewish community like every community – but there is a tendency to vote, more liberal let’s say, or to the Democrats. So because of that, if a politician wanted to so-called “Get the Jewish vote,” then their way to do so is to present themselves as a Democrat. And Kahanists realize this. They realize that that’s how they’re going to get the Jewish vote. It’s already there in the Democratic camp.

And so that’s why you have a Kahanist terrorist, Dov Hikind, playing off of his record as a terrorist and entering politics in the early 1980s. He’s actually the first Kahanist to come to power even before Kahane himself gets a Knesset seat here in Israel. A year earlier Dov Hikind gets a seat in the New York State Assembly and he does this based on his terrorist record appealing to people as a former Kahanist. The idea is that once he does that, he has no basis for being there. Historically, all of his positions are retrograde and racist. And we looked consistently over his record from back in the day, which no one had really done. He is vociferously speaking out against gay rights: this is at a time when gay people are suffering from the AIDS epidemic and people are dying in droves. And there’s an effort to step up and show solidarity with queer folks and at the very least to make it illegal to fire someone from their job or kick someone out of the apartment that they’re living in just over the fact that they’re gay or lesbian or bisexual, etc. etc. And he comes out and says, No! This is disgusting! Blah, blah, blah: whatever he says. He vocally opposes it. Same thing around racial issues. He says we need to fight for – white people are being discriminated against! So we need to stand up for white people’s rights! Just the most retrograde opinions that you can imagine.

So they obviously had no place in the Democratic Party, but by running as a Democrat he could then ensure that no person could take a position to the right of that because, if he’s taking that position and he’s on the so-called liberal side of the spectrum, then it kind of sets the bar for what a politician is expected to say in terms of their support for Israel, or what positions they’re gonna stake out. Okay that’s him: that’s an out-and-out Kahanist. But the bulk of the piece isn’t about this disgusting man, but rather about the disgusting men that weren’t themselves politicians, but who had the ears of politicians. Who held them close and were their personal spiritual leaders, essentially the people who collected their votes. Because as Hikind himself explained very well, the way that he was able to get elected is by going from rabbi to rabbi to rabbi and going to his district, which has probably the largest proportion of ultra-orthodox Jews of any district in the United States of America. And so by going to the leader of that community – because in general, these communities are very close knit and they listen to the rabbi, whatever the rabbi says goes. All it takes is to come to a deal with the rabbi. The rabbi says this is how you should vote and then the community votes nearly as a bloc. In respect for the rabbi they do whatever he says. This is not my words but Hikind’s. And so he would go for and elicit the support and then funnel them. Now of course Hikind himself did it in order to funnel votes to Republican candidates. Ironically, for decades, he’s been funneling votes to the Republicans, even though he’s a Democrat. He supported Republican after Republican after far-right Republican candidate. But in the case of other rabbis they would strike deals with Democratic lawmakers.

So in the early 1970s you have maybe the most racist rabbi in the city of New York. He’s the head of Yeshiva University’s theological seminary. This is the intelligentsia of New York orthodoxy. Very mainstream, I’m not going to the fringes. I’m not going to some dark alleys anywhere. This is the orthodox Jewish community’s principal institution of learning: Yeshiva University. And this man is the dean of the theological seminary, and he conducts Kahane’s funeral services and praises him and, you know: fire and brimstone at his opposition and he’d always invite Kahane to speak. And so over the decades he would continue to stake out the most racist far-right positions, even on Israeli politics. When no one, when no orthodox rabbi had the temerity to speak out in support of the rabbis’ letter of 2010 that said no Jews may sell or rent apartments to non-Jews in Israel, he was like the lone voice that stood out and said, yes: this is right, this is correct. We need to stop renting apartments to non-Jews. For decades orthodox rabbis said no, no: we shouldn’t go up to Haram al-Sharif, it’s the third holiest Muslim site, it’s the oldest Muslim structure still standing from the ancient world, it’s the most beautiful building in Palestine. Anyways, let’s not freak out a billion Muslims around the world and let’s allow it to be a Muslim shrine. But this man, this racist rabbi – Moshe Tendler was his name – he went out and he organized support and he said: Yes, every time we need to go up, we need to take back Haram al-Sharif. The plan of the Templars is to demolish the mosques there and to build a temple/abattoir to Yahweh on its ruins. So he spoke out on behalf of the most radical far-right positions of the Jewish community. And he was the political, spiritual leader – Democratic DA of Kings County.

Nora Barrows-Friedman: How did that happen?

David Sheen: Right! How would that happen, you would ask? But it happened again and again: he wasn’t an exception to the rule. You also had the person who was above him: if he was the dean of the theological seminary, then you have the dean of the entire university, Herbert Bomzer.

And he also hosted Kahane in his synagogue and hosted also the memorial services after Kahane died. So a huge Kahane supporter, the head of the New York educational institution at Yeshiva University. And consistently, those who are running for high office in New York City would come to him and seek his approval. And then once they got it, once they were able to convince them to support their candidacy, they would publicly announce it, they’d be proud to let other people know: here, this racist rabbi supports my candidacy for mayor, so you should follow your rabbi and vote for me.

So this happens again and again and again. And it’s never challenged. No journalist, even, is speaking out and certainly no opposition – you would expect one of the candidates running against that candidate to bring this up. But mum’s the word: it’s never discussed, it’s never spoken about. So in this way it’s really difficult to measure the effect because these candidates don’t run as Kahanist candidates. Besides Dov Hikind, we don’t have anyone running under the title: I am a Kahanist and I’m going to support Kahanist proposals. We only – it’s the backroom deals that we only learn about now after the fact. But in retrospect we can read their political histories and just imagine how many decisions they had to make, how often their politics played into their votes. And it’s shocking to see the amount of power that they swayed. And this includes, of course, the most powerful political families in the Democratic Party.

Nora Barrows-Friedman: Right. Let’s get more into that. With Israel’s most openly, honestly, genocidal government in power, with Biden – several months ago, there was a “Will he or won’t he invite Netanyahu to the White House?” and there was this very fake sort of struggle in the Biden administration of: “Well, Netanyahu is a step too far, we don’t want it to seem like we’re supporting all of his policies.” Even though the blank checks keep rolling in.

And now we have the inclusion of Israel into the Visa Waiver Program, which is giving Israel the green light to continue its policies of racism and apartheid and discrimination and segregation.

Can you talk a little bit about what that signals in terms of embracing the ideologies that have always been part and parcel of Israel, of Zionism and what it says about the Biden administration right now?

David Sheen: So it’s no secret that Israel’s history is a bloody one and that the Zionist movement committed atrocities against Palestinians. That’s in the historical record. However at the same time, when the guns were silent, when the wars ended and the smoke cleared, it became embarrassing for Israel’s leaders to continue ethnic cleansing when it’s no longer wartime. And that’s because for the most part, for the first three decades at least of its history, Israel’s leaders were – let’s just call them centrist Zionists. But they were certainly secular Zionists, that we can agree on. Meaning they didn’t believe in God, but they believe that God gave them the right over the Land of Israel. But in any case it meant that the regime that they established here was one of ethnocracy in which, even before we get into territories occupied, even for non-Jews who are citizens, they are citizens-minus. The state gives rights and privileges on the basis of ethnicity.

So Israel has always been an ethnocracy. But for the Kahanists and other monarchists, that’s not sufficient. They want Israel to transition and become a monarchy: a religious theocracy that’s headed by a king. That not only has non-Jews in their midst that have a smaller set of rights [who] can be used to do labor that Jews don’t want to do, but that the non-Jews will eventually be ethnically cleansed [from].

Now for many orthodox Jews, even though that is part and parcel of their set of religious beliefs, historically ultra-orthodox Jews have been pacifists. They didn’t actively, for the most part, take part in the Zionist movement of establishing the state, because they want to see a religious state, not a secular state and also because they believe that it should be from God. It shouldn’t be through their hands that they build the state they want to see. That it should be God who makes that change in the world. And so traditionally ultra-orthodox Jews at least did not actively involve themselves in the Zionist movement. But after 1967, after the Six Day War – the second war when Israel tripled its territory and conquered territories from other nations around it (this included the holy sites that we discussed: Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem and also in Hebron: the Ibrahimi Mosque, etc. etc.) at that point it put orthodox Jews into a Messiah mode, you can say, or beast mode, to use a video game term. And what that did was for many of them, they said: Okay well, we were pacifists, up until now because we put off that statecraft for the Messianic Age: God and God’s messenger is supposed to bring that into being. But if Israel is in fact now powerful enough to conquer all its rivals in the region, take over more territory and do as it will without having push-back, then maybe we’re in the Messianic era. After all, that’s what Maimonides says: You don’t need some temple to fall down from the sky to bring the Messianic era into fact, you just need a leader strong enough to expand Israel’s borders and bring the Jews back into the country and that’s sufficient.

So many orthodox Jews began to go from pacifists to activists and thinking that the Messianic era has arrived. And that means we need to bring the Messianic vision. And that of course means no non-Jews in the country. Now Israel, although it had committed ethnic cleansings during the war: 700,000 Palestinian refugees in the first war in ‘48, another 300,000 in the second war in ‘67 and their descendants. But when the war wasn’t on it was just trickling: it was just policies geared to make Palestinians’ lives more miserable, so that eventually they wouldn’t – maybe not fight back, but become so frustrated they decide to leave. That’s the overall effect of half-a-century-plus of colonization with the boot on your neck. But for the messianists it’s not fast enough: even the right-wing Netanyahu government isn’t ethnically cleansing fast enough. They want it to happen as soon as possible. And so they hoped to jump-start the process.

And so Kahane immigrates here from the US after – Rabbi Meir Kahane in the late 1960s starts up his movement, starting with the movement he calls the Jewish Defense League and he’s already committing terrorist attacks in the United States. But after a few years of these, American courts try him and let him know, well if you’re not going to go to jail, then you gotta leave the country, you better move to Israel, or else we’re gonna send you to jail. So he moves here, launches his political career and launches his terrorist career, starts a terrorist movement that murders Palestinians, inspires stochastic terrorism by calling for ethnic cleansing. So on one hand, inciting random strangers to go out and murder Palestinians. But of course he also preaches directly to his close group of followers who follow him from the US and move from New York City to the occupied territories with him and they themselves become Kahanist killers both here in Palestine and some who then head back to the United States to commit more murders back in the US, like the assassination of Alex Odeh in 1985.

So this is the Kahanist movement. For years they’ve been a terrorist group in Israel and the peak of their list of murders occurred in 1994. That’s when a follower of Kahane who’d moved again from the US, Baruch Goldstein, he goes into the Ibrahimi Mosque and he massacres 29 men and boys at prayer during Friday Ramadan services, wounding over 100 more. And at that point, that’s when the Israeli government says okay, the Kahanist movement is a terrorist movement. And also, at that time with the Clinton government in power and the Oslo peace process, for what it’s worth is just starting to try to come together. And that’s what the Goldstein massacre is a response to. And so Clinton – also the American government – calls the Kahanist groups terrorist groups. So they’ve always, at least since then, been acknowledged to be terrorist groups.

And this is what Biden reversed in recent months, now saying even that small effort – and keep in mind that even though the American government did officially declare Kahanists to be terrorists, it never stopped them from fundraising. Even in the months that followed they continued fundraising in New York City and throughout the United States. And it’s because of the monies that they received from millionaires in the United States: it’s not crowdfunding, like $50 here or $50 here, although there were those [too] of course. But it’s the millionaire backers that they were able to funnel these monies to the Kahanist movement and support their terrorist activities and still do to this day. And yet these terrorist funding networks have never been cracked down upon in all those decades. So really when Biden took the Kahanists off the terror group list, it wasn’t a major difference on the ground. But at least at the declarative level, they can’t even say we consider them terrorists any longer.

Ostensibly the reason why he did so, allegedly, is because they’re no longer active. I can tell you that just last week I was in Jerusalem and I walked out of the train station and I saw a young girl, probably a teenager, maybe 15 years old with a Kahane Chai golden necklace around her neck. I said, do you mind if I take a photograph? “Sure, no problem.” So yes, this group is very active. They’re active to the point that they are in government. They’re active to the point where on the streets of Israel, they carry their flag. They’re active to the point where they are calling for their murderers to be released. And they’re in power. And the people in power, some of them actually are former terrorists themselves, or trained by former terrorists. And now the terrorists of their movements who are sitting in jail, or who are arrested, either for having committed murder or being suspected of murder, these Kahanist MKs, you know, lawmakers from the Kahane movement they’re calling for their release, to support these Kahanist killers.

Yes, they’re active: they’re hella active! To say they’re inactive is a gross distortion. Of course Biden did that for political reasons, because he clearly, like many other Democratic lawmakers over the decades wants the Kahanist vote. I don’t think he’s gonna get the average Kahanist to vote for him, but clearly he doesn’t want to run afoul of them. And most importantly, because they were key to bring Netanyahu back in power. It’s a really sad, sick phenomenon to observe. But that’s the situation. Obviously, the United States government: there’s no shortage of crimes that it can be accused of. But helping to resuscitate the Kahane movement and build it to the point where it has its hands on the steering wheel of the state: that’s an unforgivable crime.

Asa Winstanley: Yeah. I’m glad you’ve explained there some more of the background of who Rabbi Meir Kahane was, because we’ve talked a lot about the Kahanists and there’s a lot of talk about the Kahanists, especially since the Kahanists joined the Israeli coalition government. It’s good to get the background there. It’s worth mentioning and remembering that, as you said, Kahane started his movement in Brooklyn in New York at the very end of the 1960s – is that right?

David Sheen: Yes, that’s correct.

Asa Winstanley: Yeah. Round about 1969. The so-called Jewish Defense League was a Zionist terrorist organization, which was literally bombing. It was carrying out a terror campaign in the United States throughout –

David Sheen: The 1970s, the 1980s.

Asa Winstanley: Yeah. Against Palestinian targets. I believe they targeted the office of Edward Said at one point. Palestinian targets, Arab targets and also Soviet targets, because there was this whole campaign related to Soviet Jewry at the time. And as you said, they then moved. He then moved to Israel, to occupied Palestine in the early 80s. Is that right?

David Sheen: He actually moved here in the 1970s. And he ran for Knesset several times in the ’70s and then only managed to enter the Knesset in 1984. So for that one term from 1984 to 1988, Kahane himself served in the Knesset and close to the end of his term actually, because of the fact that he was up on stage and he had this platform, he managed to draw so much popularity that it was expected if he would run again in the next election, that he would have gotten not one seat but maybe 10 seats or more, which for sure would have made him a minister.

That would have meant that this wave of Kahanism entering government would have been something that we would be dealing with in the late ’80s. At that point even the right wing Likud government that was in power since the late ’70s, even they were put off by Kahane’s overt racism. It wasn’t that there wasn’t anti-Arab racism, but at least they had somewhat of a traditional Likud Party. It was just a step beyond for them. So they themselves led the effort to drum Kahane out of the Knesset by passing a law that said, “Well, if you explicitly overtly incite racism then you can’t be considered a candidate for Knesset.”

Nora Barrows-Friedman: Just be more quiet about it. Yes, subtle: subtlety is key, right?

Asa Winstanley: I’ve got one of Kahane’s books from the ’80s in English [on screen] here. It’s literally called “They Must Go,” and it’s actually – helpfully, you can read it in full on the Internet Archive.

And this is from the inner cover, it’s saying: “In this explosive manifesto Rabbi Kahane sets forth the only plan to save Israel. Israeli Arabs would be given the option of accepting non-citizenship, leaving willingly with compensation, or being forcibly expelled without compensation.”

So he was openly calling for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from all of historic Palestine: the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the 1948 territories. And he was saying openly what other Israeli politicians were trying to do in different ways, in more subtle ways. I suppose he was kind of an embarrassment in that way. I’ve put this up on screen a few times as well.

When I first went to Palestine this was one of the things: this sticker stuck out to me, I saw it all over the place, I saw it in Jerusalem, especially in Hebron, places where there was a lot of Israeli settlements. As you know, it says in Hebrew: “Today, everyone knows Kahane was right.” This Wikipedia photo is from 2010. So this is someone who has been incredibly influential on Israeli politics.

David Sheen: Their idea was just to keep pushing it to the far right, stake out the most far-right positions possible and keep attacking from the far right. And they’ve managed to drag the entire political system in Israel further and further to the far-right extremes. And as you pointed out, there’s no shortage of crimes the government is guilty of, but there’s no question at the same time, that in recent years and decades that what is considered the right has shifted further and further and further to the point where now you have even members of the Likud Party openly calling for another Nakba. And it’s very difficult now to distinguish the rhetoric. If you just read a sentence, it’s almost difficult to say, well, was that made by a Kahanist MP or a Likud MP? Very, very similar.

Asa Winstanley: I think you made the point in one of your articles for EI a few years ago that – this was before the Kahanists reentered the coalition government: there was no need for Kach – that is the Kach Party, Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Israeli political party – there was no need for that party to be unbanned in Israel, because their politics had already entered the Likud Party and the other Israeli parties.

David Sheen: Yes. One of the things that I point out in the monograph is that this was a plan that was hatched by the Kahane movement in New York City decades ago. And it was all there if anyone cared – if any New York City journalist, Jewish or non-Jewish, had done their due diligence and had just attended the meetings of the Kahanists, because they openly say: every year they have memorial services to honor Kahane and his legacy. So if anyone with a critical opinion had attended these – which they could have and then exposed them – we would have known about these racist figures in the Democratic Party and their plots decades earlier. But what happened was they said openly at that time: we are now trying to do a corporate takeover of the ruling Likud Party. We are now signing up to be members of the Likud Party – Kahanists are starting to be members of the Likud Party – and now we are increasing the size of our bloc in the party.

The point is to create the largest independent bloc in the Likud so that eventually we will have another point of gravity so that other Likud lawmakers or those who aspire to become Likud lawmakers would gravitate towards our way of thinking and will need to seek our approval in order to become candidates for the Knesset. And they did that. They were extremely explicit in their plan and they carried out their plan.

The first member of Knesset that they fielded became the speaker of the Knesset: Moshe Feiglin. And Moshe Feiglin over the years has called for ethnic cleansing, called for kicking out all in the Palestinians in Gaza and bringing Jews back to Gaza. And demolishing the mosques and Haram al-Sharif and building this abattoir there etc. etc. He’s always staked out these extreme positions, but he had never really worn the Kahanist logo on his lapel. But of course, all these decades later, once the Kahane revolution has swept over the Likud and now that Ben-Gvir is accepted in the halls of the Likud Party and embraced and in fact more popular there than any of the Likud leaders themselves. Now it’s cool to say you’re a Kahanist, so now he comes out of the closet as a Kahanist. Now Feiglin publicly attends their meetings, openly, unabashedly praising Kahane: Yes, Kahane was at my wedding and we studied Torah together and blah blah blah and of course he’s right, he was always right.

And so there’s a lot of mask dropping now. But still, even after the fact, no one’s really reporting on it sadly. But yeah, this was a plan that was hatched in New York on to Palestine. And it really also shows not only how the American political system has become so infiltrated by Kahanists but it also shows how the mainstream media in the United States has become so toothless that even when you have the biggest racists of the Jewish community, there’s no effort to shine a light on them and ask questions about: is it appropriate that they have this much political power?

Nora Barrows-Friedman: Right. David you tweeted about this a couple days ago. Haaretz ran an article about yet another sexual predator in Hollywood finding refuge in Israel. This time it’s director Brett Ratner, who didn’t just move to Israel, but he was a special guest of Netanyahu during the UN General Assembly. Tell us why this is significant. And how it ties into what Israel is and has always been.

David Sheen: Well it’s interesting that we’re talking about this. Just to bring it back to the Kahanists specifically for a moment, then we’ll widen out to talk about Netanyahu and the Likud Party and Israel in general. So it has to be said that one of the aspects of the Kahanists – we’ve already talked about the damage it does to Palestinians on the ground. But also one of the other victims of the Kahane movement have been women, because they are enthusiastic supporters of the men’s rights movement. And here in Israel, the Kahanists have been some of the most ardent supporters of the biggest sex criminals.

We can’t say that rape culture is specific to Israel: of course not. Rape culture is a problem everywhere in the world. So every country has to combat rape culture. But that’s on the leaders of the country. What we have here in this country to begin with, even before we get the Kahanists into the mix, is one in which Netanyahu has consistently – remember he’s the longest serving Israeli prime minister, he’s been in power for most of the last quarter century. And during his time in office he has consistently [had] all these sex criminals [coming] from his camp – from his office. You have directors of his office coming up on sex charges, being convicted of sex crimes and then being thrown out of office, because it’s embarrassing once it comes out that they’re sex criminals. And then they are brought back into Netanhahu’s office again. Once the public isn’t noticing, the sex criminals are brought back into working in Netanyahu’s office. And then they’re accused of sex crimes once again. It’s directors of his office, it’s his spokespeople, it’s his drivers.

I’m not saying it’s him himself, but it starts to become suspicious when all around you, people feel like they can rape willy nilly. And the only time that he ever notices that rape culture is an endemic problem in society and needs to be combatted for the sake of all women in society: Jewish, Palestinian and [everyone] else: the one time is when he suspects that a rape was Arab-on-Jew: when a Palestinian has been accused of raping a Jewish woman. This came to the fore a few years ago, when there was an incident that this happened and it was reported in the news: finally Netanyahu speaks out about, “Oh my God, this is disgusting. How dare they do this?” And then a couple days later, it turns out the entire story had been manufactured. I’m not saying that never happens. But in this specific case, when Netanyahu spoke out about it, the only time he speaks out about rape, it turns out it was a false claim to frame a Palestinian. I guess the woman’s parents were embarrassed that she was dating a Palestinian. So to “protect her honor” they smeared him as a rapist. In any case, this is the Netanyahu government. But in recent weeks, what we’ve seen is the passage of a new law in Israel which increases the punishments for rape if you’re Palestinian.

So what that does is essentially gives a gift to Jewish rapists. If you’re going to rape, don’t worry about it because your punishment will be less than a non-Jewish rapist. This is the kinds of messaging that comes from the top. Sickeningly, there’s no concrete effort to, across society, acknowledge that sexual harassment is a problem and we need to combat it. No: it’s only a problem when they’re “after our women,” right? But of course, that’s a subset of the generalized fear of Jews and non-Jews connecting and forging social relationships and romantic relationships. But this government and all previous governments have funneled money into anti-miscegenation groups that work to recolonize so called mixed cities, the handful of cities in the country where Jews and Palestinians live side by side: not perfectly, but in some measure of living together.

So the efforts of these missionary groups, of moving from the settlements back from the West Bank occupied territories, back into ‘48 territories to these mixed towns and to try to sow divisions and to break up mixed couples and they’ll harass and harangue mixed couples and parade through the streets looking for examples of this, attacking non-Jews to drive them out of the areas, say the downtown areas where young people tend to congregate at night and where teenagers flirt and fall in love. So the idea is to clear those public spaces of non-Jews. And if there are non-Jews in them, attack them, beat them, put the fear of death in them, so that they won’t occupy those areas anymore. And thereby completely remove the possibility that there will be any social interaction or certainly sexual interaction between Jews and non-Jews. So it’s not that they’re afraid of Arab-on-Jew rape: they’re afraid of Arab-on-Jew love. And that’s what their efforts are geared towards crushing.

Asa Winstanley: It’s very reminiscent, what you’re talking about, of the Jim Crow South in the United States, where Black men would quite often be falsely accused of raping white women, or even just killed for – or attacked for just flirting with white women. The most infamous case of course being Emmett Till.

David Sheen: You’re absolutely right. And as I pointed out, we had our own Emmett Till just a few years ago, it wasn’t a Palestinian in this specific case. It happened to be an African refugee, but the same logic. There was a man who was a person of color: easily identified, because in that town there were no Black – let’s just say it was obvious, you can kind of sometimes tell. It was obvious based on his clothing that he was a non-Jewish African man. He was seen talking to some Jewish women and this occurred right outside the city hall of Petah Tikva, which is a suburb of Tel Aviv that is twinned with Chicago, of all places. So right outside City Hall, the CCTV cameras of City Hall film this Black man walking up, these women talking to them for 10 seconds and walking away and then a group of Jews jump on him and beat him to death for over an hour. Beat him, stomp on him, murder him because he talked to a white woman. So in this specific case, it was a not a Palestinian but a non-Jewish African refugee. But the same logic: their hatred of non-Jewish – and of interracial relationships has filtered down to the dregs of society to the point where you just say it, and they’ll do it, they’ll carry it out. And that’s what we see. That’s what we see on the streets today.

Nora Barrows-Friedman: Well finally David, after researching and documenting and publishing this piece for the Institute for Palestine Studies: where where does this leave Palestinians in terms of the apartheid government of Israel entrenching, solidifying, claiming more and more power and deeper alliances with American politicians on both sides of the ostensible aisle – as though there is one of these days – what are your deepest fears about the continuation of this trend, where Kahanists are rehabilitated?

Just in the last couple of weeks, we saw in your home country of Canada, the rehabilitation of Nazi SS officers in parliament: standing ovations given because of Canada’s support of – it just revealed Canada’s longtime support for the last 80 years of Nazis. So you talked about the mask-off situation, how this is really revealing so much about what Israel has always been. About what the US and Canada has always been. About who they’re willing to support in order to prop up political aims and hegemonic aims in other countries. Can you talk about where you think this goes from here?

David Sheen: Well certainly I’ve been warning about this for years. It feels like we’ve got a race to the bottom, because Israel can now always point to another country. Every country can point to another country. The more Israel gets further to the far right, the more racist it gets, the more countries run to it and clamor to purchase its weapons. And so instead of people taking a step back, just the opposite is happening. And when one country commits a crime, when Israel commits a crime, it gives license to others. And when others do that, it gives license to Israel to do that. So we’ve got a race to the bottom. Sadly, sickeningly. It seems like that’s happening globally. It’s cold comfort to see that.

I’m going to mention something that is not often mentioned. I thought I might give it some prominence, sadly, because there’s no focus on it. But right here in Haifa, okay. So the reason why I bring this up is because people speak of the city as some model of coexistence. You know: come up here it proves that Jews and Arabs get along. Of course that’s true: we don’t need the city to prove that: we’ve got hundreds of years of coexistence. But in this city, if we accept the premise for a brief moment that Palestinians here, speak Arabic openly on the street in certain areas, because they feel comfortable enough in the Arab identity, so it’s like a little bubble of safety, part of the reason that I live here in this city. But here even in the so-called coexistence capital of Haifa. What’s happening? We see the Hebronization of Haifa.

So just down the street here, on the top of Mount Carmel, is a monastery: a Christian Carmelite monastery, called Stella Maris. It’s been here, they’ve got 1,000-year history in this city. I should point out that they were the first to build a structure on the Mount Carmel. Before that there wasn’t that there was a Jewish synagogue there or a Jewish monument there and then Christians came after, which sometimes is the case – you know, over the course of the centuries that one religion builds on top of the temple of another and the church becomes a mosque and the mosque becomes a church etc. That has happened but not here on Mount Carmel.

This is has been a Christian monastery going back 1,000 years. And now what do you see? Ultra-orthodox Jews coming and entering the monastery and praying there in the Jewish manner. And the objective is they’re claiming that there was a Jewish sage buried there and so therefore they’re trying to take over the site just as they managed to take over half of the Ibrahimi Mosque, the Cave of the Patriarchs. And just as they want to do step-by-step on Haram al-Sharif. So even here in Haifa, you have this exclusively Christian site – and I might point out, just further down the hill there like literally a stone’s throw away, there is a Jewish site, the Cave of Elijah, originally it was a holy site to Jews, Christians, Muslims and Druze. But once ‘48 happened, Israel took over the site, it’s now exclusively a Jewish site. So there’s an exclusively Jewish religious site literally a few meters down the hill but, no: they’ve got to take over this Christian site. And what I’m most saddened by: where are the so called lefty liberals of Haifa? There hasn’t been any solidarity with the Christian community: well actually that’s not true, I saw some Druze folks driving through and coming out to support their Christian brothers and sisters here, but I haven’t seen any Jewish liberals come out to support the Christians here.

Now this is of course just one small story and we’re kind of veering off from the focus. But the point is to show that there is no sign of hope. It’s not that: okay everything’s bad, but at least – no: the trajectory is going downhill. And it’s getting steeper and steeper. And I don’t see any positive signs on the horizon, that there’s going to be any rollback or pushback, even from the people you’d expect to be loyal allies. Sadly I think that Palestinians and those in solidarity with them are looking at a very dark future in the coming months and years.

Nora Barrows-Friedman: Well, we are as always just really privileged to be in connection with you and to have your work featured on The Electronic Intifada. Sometimes we are here to give platforms to prophets of doom.

Asa Winstanley: Your work gives me hope David.

Nora Barrows-Friedman: That’s right. Yeah, because you’re doing the work of documenting this. It’s not lost to history. It can’t be rewritten and we’re very indebted to your work over the years. That is the voice and image of David Sheen. He’s an investigative journalist. His newest piece is for the Institute for Palestine Studies. It’s called “Kahanism and American politics: The Democratic Party’s decades-long courtship of racist fanatics.” We’ll have a link to that and to your previous articles here on The Electronic Intifada on the podcast post that accompanies this broadcast. David Sheen: thank you so much for all that you do and for being with us on The Electronic Intifada Podcast.

Asa Winstanley: Thank you.

David Sheen: Thank you both for the work that you do. Thanks for having me on today.