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.