Billed as a response to the October 7 Hamas attack, the conflict in Gaza has increasingly become a war to eliminate all Palestinians—a longtime goal of Israel’s homegrown fascists.
By James Bamford Via The Nation
Rabbi Meir Kahane (left) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (right). (Bettmann / Getty Images)
“The next [bullet] will be direct to your belly,” shouted the settler guard in both English and Hebrew. He had just fired a burst from an Uzi submachine gun not far above our heads. It was 1990, and we were in Kiryat Arba, an illegal settlement in Israel’s occupied territory. We were attempting to film the home of Robert Manning, an American citizen wanted for a brutal bombing murder in the United States and a suspect in a number of other bombings targeting Arab Americans.
At the time, I was the Washington investigative producer for ABC News, and with me was my Israeli crew: a videographer and a sound technician. For years, Manning had been hiding out and evading arrest by the US with the active help of the Israeli government, who even put him in the IDF, its army. A few hours earlier, after discovering his location, we had secretly filmed him getting into his car wearing his uniform and carrying what appeared to be another Uzi, and then followed him to a military base.
That incident more than three decades ago has great relevance today. In addition to being a reservist in the IDF, Manning was also a key soldier in Kach—a violent, racist terrorist organization founded by an American Orthodox rabbi, Meir Kahane. Although Kahane himself was assassinated in 1990, and Kach was banned by Israel’s government in 1994, over the years the rabbi’s dedicated followers, known as Kahanists, have grown tremendously in power and strength, to the point where they now play a major role in the Israeli government, including key decisions involving the ongoing war with Hamas. Kahane’s ultimate solution, after all, was the use of force to totally eliminate Palestinians from both Israel and the occupied territories—exactly what the world is witnessing today in Gaza.
“The Kahanist vision,” the Israeli newspaper Haaretz noted, “is one that sees violence and revenge as Jewish religious imperatives, and Israel as not being worthy of existing unless it expunges the non-Jews from its midst.” It added, “With his zero-sum approach to Israel’s ethnic identity, and open call for the state to expel its Arab citizens as well as the Palestinian residents of the occupied territories, Kahane not only earned a reputation for saying what others only dared think, but also for his willingness to act preemptively against Arabs.”
Founded in Brooklyn in 1968, Kahane’s Jewish Defense League brandished flags depicting a clenched fist against a Jewish Star of David. Three years later, Kahane was convicted in New York for conspiracy to manufacture explosives and received a suspended sentence of five years. That same year, after moving to Israel, he cofounded Kach as a political party that advocated the forced removal of the entire Palestinian population, whom Kahane referred to as “dogs,” from both Israel and the occupied territories. Kach was also imported into the United States, but was banned in 1994 as a foreign terrorist organization. By 1984, Kahane’s calls for the violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians had received enough popular support to win him and his Kach party a seat in Israel’s Knesset.
At the same time in the US, Kahane’s JDL continued to grow and quickly transformed into a sort of Jewish version of the Ku Klux Klan, attacking and bombing Arab Americans around the country rather than Blacks. Between 1980 and 1985 alone, the FBI documented 17 bombings by the JDL in the US. Among the key targets was Alex Odeh, a Palestinian born in what is now Israel’s occupied West Bank. At the time, he served as the Southern California regional director at the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), a US group advocating for Palestinian rights.
In October 1985, a bomb was planted at the entrance to the ADC’s headquarters for Southern California, killing Odeh as he opened the door. Hours later, Irv Rubin, the JDL’s national chairman, offered his views. “I have no tears for Mr. Odeh,” he said. “He got exactly what he deserved.” Eventually, the FBI’s suspicions centered on three top JDL members and Kahane associates with long criminal records: Robert Manning, Andy Green, and Keith Fuchs. “The major question is whether Kahane was behind the bombings,” a former FBI agent told me. All the suspects eventually fled to Israel and, despite their violent criminal histories, were immediately granted citizenship under that country’s Law of Return. They then took up residence in settlements located in the occupied territories.
Despite an extensive investigation by determined FBI agents, years went by with no arrests or extraditions—even though Manning and his wife were also key suspects in another brutal murder: the mail-bomb killing of Patricia Wilkerson, a secretary in a small Los Angeles computer company. Manning had been hired by a fellow JDL member to murder Wilkerson’s boss over a financial dispute, but by accident Wilkerson was instead killed by the powerful explosion.
A decade later, however, there was still no action, and it was clear that Israel was deliberately protecting the violent Kahanists. “We consider their response very disingenuous,” a former senior Justice Department source told me at the time, asking that I not use his name. “We say, ‘Excuse me, you have an international obligation. You are in violation of an international agreement by not doing this thing when we ask you.’… They’ve had years to use legal mechanisms in Israel to arrest this guy [Robert Manning] and they have not. So as near as we can tell, they have absolutely no interest in helping us.”
In April 1990, I flew to Israel to try to find Manning and seek an interview. Eventually, our story provoked a strong reaction across the country and apparently motivated the Justice Department to put increased pressure on Israel, which finally extradited Manning. In 1994, he was found guilty at a trial in Los Angeles for the brutal bombing murder of Wilkerson and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years.
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Comments
9 responses to “Israel’s Far Right Finally Gets the War It Has Always Wanted”
What charming, innocent people ….so misunderstood for the last 2000 years…
I’d imagine you don’t consider every Italian a mafia mobster, Mike.
Likewise, not all Jews are rabid Zionist idiots.
Nor do I consider all AmeriKKKans Klansmen, or responsible for Hiroshima and Vietnam.
Mind your words…antisemitism feeds Zionism, the fulfilment of Adolf&Co’s dream of rendering Europe judenrein. Netanyahu has made a career of promoting it as justification for his parasitic power plays.
Prometheus, I don’t think the mafia analogy very valid for the simple reason that we can identify an ethos with some groups of people. With Judaism, there’s a very strong ethos, and we all know it. We know how they self-identify, and that identification has very clear characteristics. Very few Italians have the ethos of the Mafiosi.
It’s true that it took decades for Zionism to rise within Judaism enough for this identification, so you would be correct in your views for the early period. But starting after 1900, especially with the Balfour letter and the San Remo conference, and finally, after the Holocaust, the vast majority of Jews became completely supportive of Israel and that’s reflected in the common arguments of today’s Jewish Narrative, which is an attempt to justify the horrible crimes of the Jews before and after the birth of Israel. (In those earlier days, the conflict was called the Arab-Jew conflict. Now, it’s deceptively called the Arab-Israeli conflict, and you fall for it.)
Those crimes are an outcome of the common Jewish ethos we all know, and thus, Judaism can be categorically held responsible for them. Similarly, the Germans of Germany were held responsible for the crimes the German Nazis committed. Symbolically, Nazi Germany = Zionist Judaism. A perfectly true and acceptable statement.
“Horrible crimes of the Jews” is a vast overstatement. The writer was writing about some Zionists, not “the Jews,” which implies all Jews.
For sure it goes without saying that not all governments are fascist, all Germany wasn’t Nazi in WWII, all the US isn’t Zionist, all Catholics don’t eat fish in Friday and not all Jews are not genocidal maniacs.
“We all know it” —–> said with the certainty inherent with racists. “These people, blah-blah-blah ——we all know it”
Lotsa mumbo-jumbo about “ethos” to conflate Judaism with Zionism.
This article distorts the fact that this war is only the latest installment of the Zionist goal of stealing all of the land of Eretz Yisrael for a Jewish state, founded on Zionism.
Israel’s far right fulfills that more by degree than by quality. The far-right are just more aggressive and impatient. All of Zionism, as supported categorically by Judaism, is working towards this outcome, as a slow-burn rather than a holocaust. Especially the US Jewish community via their US Jewish Lobby.
Netanyahu removed the fig leaf, and yes, it’s not a pretty sight. But even entirely clothed, the Israeli Jews are abominably lethal. Jews are murdering Palestinians because Palestinians are not Jews.
Zionism is not supported “categorically by all Jews.” That is a vast overstatement. When the Zionist movement began in the nineteenth century, there were a great many Jews that did not support it. It is not at all an essential part of Judaism. There are a great many Jews even today who are not strong supporters of Israel and all of its policies. Most Jews, remembering the Holocaust and many centuries of antisemitism, believe the Jews deserve a homeland. At the same time, there are also a great many Jews, probably a majority, who strongly oppose the policies of the right wing Likud Party, which has ruled Israel for close to thirty years. And they also oppose the rest of Israel’s far right. The Jewish Left, which includes large numbers, favors equal rights for Palestinians. Large numbers of those Jews live in the Diaspora, many in the U.S. and U.K., and Israel also has a Left. It is always wrong to make generalizations about what “the Jews” think or support. Both observant and secular Jews include large numbers who are strong supporters of Palestinians. They generally believe that is a part of human rights.
A better statement is, Zionism is broadly supported by Judaism. Judaism refers to all Jewish people and their values. One of their values is overwhelming political support for Zionism and Israel. We can truthfully say that the US Jewish community – as a group – supports Zionism and Israel. That’s the meaning of “categorically.” It doesn’t mean individually. Even though you might find exceptions, we can still say, for instance, Republicans are in favor of reducing taxes.
Here’s the data that support those statements, a list of over 250 US Jewish political organizations funded to the billion dollar level, the leaders of which make up the Jewish Lobby. It’s deception to call this the “Israel Lobby.”
https://articlebiz.com/article/1052218096-the-jewish-lobby
I challenge anyone to cite a more connected and more powerful political arm of a cultural/religious/ethnic group such as what Judaism has. This is the data. These are the facts that no one can deny or censor.
Why does Judaism have such a large political presence, funded to the billions of dollars a year? Because of the charitable, and other helpful social aspects of the Jewish Tribe, we must not turn a blind eye to the ferocious political activity it also conducts. What would you expect, now that this Lobby activity has now resulted in Western governments willingly assisting in the genocide committed by Israel Jews? Without the political support of the Jewish Lobby documented here, Israeli Jews could never get away with their atrocities.
Do you own research and see that no other ethnic group – including Blacks, Asians, Muslims, Hispanics, etc – has a political lobby that comes anywhere near such enormity of size. Why do Jews require such high political maintenance?