Meir Kahane is one of the most polarizing figures in modern Jewish history. His Jewish Defense League was labeled a terrorist group by the FBI. His KACH party was banned from the Knesset for racism. Kahane was assassinated in 1990, but his name and ideas live on.
Kahanist mobs have recently marched through the streets of Israeli cities chanting “Death to Arabs” and attacking random Palestinians. A Kahanist politician was blamed by Israel's police chief for inciting a new intifada. What is Kahanism, who was Meir Kahane, and how did the ideas of such an extremist figure become, in many ways, mainstream?
In this episode, producer Max Freedman speaks to Shaul Magid, professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and author of the forthcoming book, Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical.
Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.
Shaul Magid is Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. Author of many books and essays, his two latest books are The Bible, the Talmud and the New Testament: Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik’s Commentary to the Gospel, and Piety and Rebellion: Essay in Hasidism, both published in 2019. His new book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical will be published with Princeton University Press in October, 2021. He is presently working on a project understanding contemporary Jewish scholarship on antisemitism through the lens of critical race theory.
Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press, 2021)
Josef Federman and Joseph Krauss, “Radical rabbi’s followers rise in Israel amid new violence” (Associated Press, 5/14/2021)
“Police chief said to blame far-right lawmaker Ben Gvir for ‘internal intifada’” (Times of Israel, 5/14/2021)
Spotify playlist: Unsettled essentials, May 2021
TRANSCRIPT
MEIR KAHANE: And I'm here to, first of all, to point out to American Jews that the problem of the West Bank is an insoluble one. If we keep on thinking in terms of coexistence, the Arabs believe it is their country. I understand the Arabs. I respect the Arabs. There's no coexistence possible with them. They have to leave. [00:02:32][21.1]
MUSIC: “The Telling”
MAX FREEDMAN: That’s the voice of Meir Kahane, one of the most polarizing figures in modern Jewish history.
Kahane first became infamous in the United States in the late 1960s for starting a paramilitary organization called the Jewish Defense League. The JDL was later classified by the FBI as a terrorist group.
In the early 1970s, Kahane moved to Israel, where he started a political party called KACH. KACH was eventually banned from the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, for being too racist, and Kahane himself was expelled.
In 1990, Kahane was assassinated in a Manhattan hotel. But his name lived on.
In 1994, a follower of Kahane, Baruch Goldstein, massacred 29 Muslim worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron.
Earlier this year, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who once had a framed photograph of Baruch Goldstein hanging in his home, was elected to the Knesset.
And earlier this month, Itamar Ben-Gvir opened an office in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, as a clear provocation to Palestinians demonstrating against the displacement of several families from their homes.
Since then, Kahanist mobs have marched through the streets of Israeli cities chanting “Death to Arabs,” and attacking random Palestinians and journalists. The Times of Israel reported that Israel’s Police Commissioner blamed Itamar Ben-Gvir for inciting a new intifada.
What is Kahanism, and who was Meir Kahane? What did he believe, and why? How did the ideas of such an extremist figure become, in many ways, mainstream?
This is Max Freedman, and you’re listening to Unsettled.
MUSIC: Unsettled theme
MAX: For this episode, I spoke to Shaul Magid, a professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and the author of a forthcoming book, Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical.
The book is not a conventional biography. As a scholar of Jewish thought, Shaul is most interested in how Kahane’s ideas evolved and informed Jewish culture, politics, and religion in the United States and Israel in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
But I wanted to start our conversation in the present.
MAX: We're talking on Tuesday, May 18th, and we are in the middle of what is arguably the worst escalation of violence in Israel Palestine that we've seen certainly the most widespread since 2014, maybe longer. And for the last couple of years leading up to the moment that we're at now, you've certainly seen a lot of liberal American Jews raising the alarm about the mainstreaming of what are referred to as the Kahanists in Israeli politics and. I'd like to start by asking you who who are the Kahanists, who are we talking about when we talk about the Kahanists in Israel? And what kind of a role do you see them as playing in getting us to this moment and also in what's actually playing out in the streets?
SHAUL MAGID: A good question. Well, officially, when people refer to the Kahanists, they're speaking about a small group of people that have coalesced around a new political party called Religious Zionism, which is a kind of a break off from some of the other right wing parties. And there are a number of people, one in particular, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is now a a Knesset member who espouses the kind of ideology of Meir Kahane. But then there are other people that are kind of kind of around him, Bezalel Smotrich and a bunch of others who who don't necessarily identify with being disciples of Meir Kahane, but in many ways espouse very similar, a similar kind of ideology in regard to the relationship between the state and the Arab population. But but I think it's important to note that I mean, I personally find Kahanist ideas really throughout what is the center-right and right of the Israeli political spectrum, even with people who would never identify as being Kahanists because of his reputation and because of of of the very particular kinds of solutions that he was suggesting. But I think that his basic worldview and his understanding of the relationship between the Jewish state of the Arab population, I think that Kahanism, I should say, is much more widespread than the Kahanists per say.
MAX: So how would you define Kahanism, what is that ideology?
SHAUL: Well, it's difficult, it's difficult to pinpoint. I think there are two things. I think one is the ideology of Kahane and the other one are the solutions that Kahanists suggested. And the third thing would be that the tactics Kahane wanted to use in order to achieve his goals. So in terms of the the solutions that Kahane suggested and the tactics, that's something that's limited to a fairly small group of people. Meaning that the relationship between the Jews and the Arabs in Israel is a zero sum game, that Arabs either have to recognize the superiority of the Jews and the special nature of the Jews in the land of Israel or and they could continue to live as second class citizens or they have to leave. So he was one of the people that was espousing this thing that was called the long time ago, this idea of transfer of basically transferring Palestinians out. And, of course, the tactics was very different forms of militarism in order to make it uncomfortable for the Arabs to be there. You see that among the price tag movement, which is a small movement of radical right wing settlers who are bent on destroying Arab property and houses and causing physical damage and so on and so forth and other and other groups as well, like Lehava, which is a group that's not specifically focused on the political reality of the Arabs, but the cultural reality, trying to separate the Arabs from Jews, trying. You know, one of the first things that Kahane did when he came to Israel in nineteen seventy one when his one of his first political acts was trying to trying to promote legislation prohibiting Jewish and Arab dating. Right. So it's not just a political project. That's a much larger cultural project. And Lehava is an organization that is really focused on the separation of Jews and the Arab population. But then you have something different, which is a kind of worldview, which is for Kahane, that Zionism is about power and it's about the power of the Jews and it's about the Jews' right, historical right and theological right, to dwell in all of the land of Israel and that the Arabs really have no right to be there. They live there, but they have no rights to be there. So they only can stay there if they're willing to acknowledge that kind of second class status. And that particular idea, I think expressed in all kinds of different ways is much more widespread than the kind of the solutions or the tactics of Kahanism.
MAX: So how many of the people that you've discussed would actually call themselves disciples of Kahane or have a picture of Kahane?
SHAUL: Well, I think there are some. I mean, Itamar Ben-Gvir is one, right? Another guy named Gopstein is another. And there are groups of people I don't know which really would consider himself a disciple of God. I mean, I think Ben-Gvir has a picture of Kahane in his office. So there are a small group of people within the religious Zionism party that are openly Kahanists. But again, I think I think the I think it's it's it's a mistake to really limit Kahane's influence in terms of worldview just to those small group of people.
MAX: So let's back up a little bit, who was Meir Kahane? How did he become? I mean, I think it's I don't I don't know if you. Is it fair to say that for a few years, in the late 60s and early 70s, he was really maybe the most famous American rabbi, for better or worse? How did that happen?
SHAUL: Well, yeah. I mean, most famous. Most infamous. I'm not really sure. Certainly, he was he was incredibly well known, I think, from probably 1968 when he founded the Jewish Defense League in response to the anti-Semitism that emerged from the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Brooklyn school strike, which was really a tremendous school. I mean, it brought the entire New York City school system to a halt.
MUSIC: “Clay Pawn Shop”
MAX: Ocean Hill-Brownsville and the teachers’ strike is a huge story. We don’t have time to get into it here, but if you want to learn more, I happen to have produced another podcast called School Colors. And in the first season of School Colors, we spent two episodes on Ocean Hill-Brownsville. (The JDL makes a guest appearance.) You can find a link to School Colors in the show notes.
SHAUL: So from that point, from around May or June 68 until probably late seventy one seventy two. He was a very popular among a certain group of people, infamous, among others, because of his his basic advocacy of militancy and violence to protect Jews. In a certain sense, he was an interesting case of somebody who used the tactics of the radical left at that point. I'm talking about black nationalism, Black Panthers, the SDS, the Weather Underground. But he was using them for the purposes of what we could call the reactionary right. And in particular to foster Jewish pride. So in a certain way, the JDL was a an organization that was in some way, in some way mirrored the Black Panthers, I mean Kahane basically calls the JDL Jewish Panthers. I mean, he wasn't afraid to use that terminology. I mean, he was basically advocating the use of violence to protect Jews. He wasn't promoting violence as something, you know, something independent. But he said that, you know, if Jews are threatened, then Jews should use violence in order to be able to deter that threat. Now, this is all built on the assumption that anti-Semitism is endemic to the American experience and that there's no way for Jews to erase anti-Semitism. The only thing they can do was manage it. And I think this is an interesting case where what Kahane was talking about in terms of anti-Semitism in the 1960s and 1970s, which a lot of American Jews were pushing very strongly against. I mean, American American Jews in the 1960s were still engaged in the kind of accommodationalist assimilationist project of Americanization. And they believe that Americans, liberal, American, liberal society, could, if not erase anti-Semitism completely, certainly diminish it and Kahane's basic attitude was that's not the case. Because for him, anti-Semitism is just endemic to the to the non Jew. I think, interestingly, in 2020, a lot of American Jews basically are espousing those ideas that Kahane was talking about in the 1960s and 1970s. So on the anti-Semitism question and all the discussion about anti-Semitism, I mean, if you go back and read Kahane from the late 60s and the 1970s, he's basically saying the same thing.
MAX: So when did Kahane move to Israel and why did Kahane move to Israel?
SHAUL: The when is easier than the why. He moves to Israel in September 1971. He had just been actually. He was convicted and he was given a parole from a series of arms smuggling charges and he moves to Israel immediately after that. His. The ostensible reason for moving to Israel was to make aliya and that he had finally come to the conclusion that that there was no future for American Jews. That eventually the Vietnam War was going to end. American Jews are going to be blamed. There was there was going to be a spike in anti-Semitism and the Jews were going to be physically endangered. And if they weren't physically endangered, they would be spiritually endangered through tolerance and assimilation and so on and so forth. So he gives up on the American Jewish project, which is kind of interesting, because in the late 60s, he envisioned the Jewish Defense League as a way what he calls to save the American Jewish dream. So he wasn't he was he although he always was a Zionist, he his initial kind of cultural project was really a diasporic one.
MAX: So what became his political and cultural project in Israel?
SHAUL: Well, you know, he comes to Israel and you would think, OK, so he won. He claims to be a Zionist. He's can move to Israel with his family. He's going to spend the first couple of years, you know, in what Israelis called klitat. Right. Absorption to come, become absorbed in the country, to learn the language, to to do all the to all the things that are necessary and that all new immigrants do to become part of the country. But in fact, he moves to Israel in September 71. By October seventy two. He has already spent time in Israeli prisons. He's already been arrested like 60 times. So it's a kind of an interesting case where in a certain sense he goes he goes to Israel in some way to intervene in in its political life in an attempt to kind of overthrow the secular Zionist regime. And that becomes his political program. He writes a book called Am Segulah or it's called in English The Challenge, which is a kind of program of a political future. And then he kind of continues to go on his way writing a lot, but eventually gets elected to the Knesset in nineteen eighty four after two failed tries.
MAX: What does it mean to overthrow the secular Zionist regime and what was the regime he wanted to replace it with?
SHAUL: Well, he wanted to replace replace it with a regime of Torah observance. He doesn't call it a monarchy, but he's certainly one of the interesting things about Kahane is that he gives no legitimacy whatsoever to secular Zionism. He basically thinks that secular Zionism is a form of racism and that the only reason that the Jews have to be in the land of Israel is that God gave them the land. If you don't believe that God gave them the land and if you don't believe in God, then you don't believe that God gave them the land, then from Kahanists perspective, there's absolutely no right for secular. There's actually no right for Jews to be there. So when he gets removed from the Knesset because of a racism law that's established in 1986 and then and then that's upheld by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1987, his basic attitude, his response to being called a racist and being removed from the Knesset is that he says, no, it's secular Zionism. That's racism. It's not me that's racism. I'm only here because I believe God gave the land to the Jews. If you don't believe that God gave the land to the Jews and then your then your being here is just racist. So in a certain sense, he's trying to overthrow the secular Zionist project.
SHAUL: He's trying to establish a separatist society, a separatist Jewish society that's built on power, that's against normalization. Remember, the whole Zionist project is about becoming normal. It's about becoming a nation state in the in the family of nations. It's becoming you know, it's trying to shed the abnormality that many people had about the Jews as a people without a land, whereas Kahane's saying, no, Zionism is an abnormal project. It's not about normalization. It's about the opposite. We don't have to abide by the basic principles of other nations. We can live in our society. And and and here it's very important that he was not in favor of Israel being a democratic society. He didn't think being a Jewish and democratic society was possible, which is interesting because when Jewish and Democratic became a part of the Israeli narrative, it wasn't in forty eight. But it became later on the people that were arguing that Jewish and Democratic was impossible were actually the people on the left. Kahane was one of the few people on the right that was saying no Jewish and Democratic was just schizophrenic, can be a Jewish state or it can be a democratic state, but it can't be both.
MAX: So as you already mentioned, what two years after he was elected, the Knesset, the Knesset passed a law against racism specifically to get Kahane and his party out of Knesset.
SHAUL: Correct.
MAX: I don't think I'm overstating it to say that there's a lot of there's a lot of open racism in Israeli politics. So this is sort of hard for me to wrap my head around. How did that happen? Why was he such a threat to the powers that be at the time? And also how did it happen that his ideas went from being essentially excommunicated to coming back into the fold?
SHAUL: Well, it's an interesting back story to that. So he's elected to the Knesset in nineteen eighty four with one mandate, meaning that he's the only one in his party that's a parliamentarian. And that was that that really sent shockwaves around Israel, not only not only around the Israeli left, but also around the Israeli right. I mean, this Kahane was always seen to be an outlier because, as I said, he's basically undermining the entire Zionist project and in a sense is trying to ideologically overthrow the secular Zionist regime. So it was a very it was a big shock moment. But was really more shocking was that in 1985, the year after he was elected, the Knesset, there was a poll taken in Israel by a very reputable polling organization that said that if elections were held today in nineteen eighty five, Kahane's party would get 11 seats. So they recognized something was happening. There was a shift in the society and going from one seat to 11 seats is a pretty big jump. And that seems to be what got the Knesset moving to say. We have to do something to stop this. We have to do something to get him out of the Knesset, because there seems to be this wave of support for Kahane’s ideas for transferring the Arabs out, for separating Jews and Arabs and so on and so forth. And and that seems to be what catapulted the Knesset to basically do this as a way of getting rid of him. I think you're totally right. I think that that law could have been used in numerous times after that, but it never was. And it was very specifically legislated for him and for him alone.
MAX: And who were who were his followers? Where did he find a following?
SHAUL: Well, that's an interesting question. So his followers originally broke down into a couple of different groups in Israel. First of all, of course, many JDL people from America who had moved to Israel. So and that's a small group of people. He really built his base in the early years with the Mizrahim, with the Jews who had come from Arab lands, who already held a certain kind of animus toward the Arab population from their experiences living in Algeria and Morocco or Iraq or other places. And what he did was he basically portrayed the Labor Party, which was the party in power at that time, from nineteen forty eight until 1977. The Labor Party was always the party in power. He basically portrayed the Labor Party as the kind of Ashkenazi elite who were discriminating against the the Mizrahim. And the truth is that he had a lot to go on there because there was a lot of marginalization of the Mizrahim at that time. In a certain sense, the the Ashkenazi elite, the Ashkenazi liberal elite, which were the ruling party of the government became one of the kind of Israeli version of the liberal American Jewish establishment. In a certain sense and here the question of race is very important. He he tried to use the whiteness of the Ashkenazi elite against the Mizrahi Jews. And to some extent he was successful. To some extent he wasn't successful. For example, in the early 1970s, there was a movement that came out of the Mizrahi world called the Israeli Black Panthers. And the Israeli Black Panthers were in a certain sense modeling themselves after the American Black Panthers on the racism of Israeli society. Kahane thought that he could use the Black Panthers as as part of his base, because in a certain sense, you know, the enemy of the enemy is my friend. But in a certain way, it blew up in its face because many of the Israeli Black Panthers also saw themselves in solidarity with Israeli Arabs. Because they were also being discriminated against because of their color. Right. So you had cases in the early 1970s where Israeli Black Panthers and JDL people were literally like, you know, having street fights in Zion Square in Jerusalem until they kind of called the truce. So I think this was a good example where Kahane's racist view of the world didn't really quite translate into the Israeli scene, which was much more complicated.
MAX: Yeah, I mean, I was struck by the I think the phrase that you used in the introduction to your book, as you called him, a dismal failure in Israel.
SHAUL: Yeah. Yeah.
MAX: How so?
SHAUL: Well, because I think the reason why Kahane was a failure in Israel is that what he tried to do was he tried to transport American cultural racial categories into the Israeli situation, which was very different. And he was never really successful. So he was never taken seriously by by many Israelis because he was really speaking in cultural categories that they really couldn't relate to. What actually is successful in Israel is something that I call in the book, a kind of Neo-Kahanism. And that's where you have Itamar Ben-Gvir and those people. And Neo-Kahanism is really a bringing together of Kahane's ideas of power and militancy with Rav Kook's notion of kind of religious Zionist romanticism. I mean, one of the interesting elements.
MAX: Let me stop you. For a second.
SHAUL: Yeah.
MAX: So who was Rav Kook?
SHAUL: OK, so Rav Kook, Rav Abraham Isaac Kook was the first chief rabbi of Palestine, Mandate Palestine, and he he was an outlier in his ultra-Orthodox world of becoming a Zionist. And he basically developed this kind of romantic ideology, quasi mystical ideology that we're living on the cusp of redemption and that the secular Zionists, unbeknownst to them, are being swept up in this cosmic process. And therefore they should be supported because in a sense, they are creating that which will eventually result in the unfolding of the messianic era. Now, more interesting than Abraham Isaac Kook is his son, Zvi Yehuda Kook, who really became the kind of figurehead of the settler Zionist movement after 1967. The thing about the two of them is that they're both basing their ideas on a certain kind of romantic view of living on the cusp of redemption. Kahane has no interest in them whatsoever. He barely talks about them. He barely mentions them because Kahane was not a romantic in that way. Kahane was really, in a certain sense, a really a materialist. What mattered was in front of him. It was really about power. And all of this kind of romantic messianism, this kind of apocalyptic messianism didn't really speak to him. So the Neo-Kahanists in a way, because the Kookian ideology became so popular, they've kind of brought together Kahane's tactics and Kook's romantic vision of, you know, living on the land of Israel as a necessary prerequisite for the kind of the coming redemption.
SHAUL: And I think one of the interesting things about it is that the Neo-Kahanists do not, by definition, reject the secular Zionist project because they're influenced by that romantic Kookism. Kahane did you know for Kahane someone like Yossi Sarid, who was a secular leftist Zionist, one of the one of the most well known at the time, and people like Geulah Cohen, who was a secular Right-Wing Zionists in a certain sense, he speaks about them in divisive, intrusive ways, as if they're the same, whether you're a right wing secularist or a left wing secularist, if you're a secular Zionist, then you're basically from Kahane's perspective, you're basically a racist.
MAX: And just finish that thought, so that's different from the. So then how do the Neo-Kahanists…
SHAUL: So the Neo-Kahanists have been educated in the in the religious Zionist system, which is very influenced by Kook, which gives legitimacy to the secular Zionist project as being part of this larger religious Zionist project that is kind of dialectically interwoven between the secular and the religious. Right. So in a certain sense, the religious Zionists narrative is not a rejection, an outright rejection of the secular Zionist project. The secular Zionist project simply becomes instrumental to the religious Zionist ideas. I think I think that's where you see the Neo-Kahanists as different from Kahane himself.
MUSIC: “Slow Dial”
MAX: I want to end by bringing it back home, I suppose. You argue pretty powerfully that Kahane's greater impact in some ways is in the United States. And. I'm going to quote you for a second.
SHAUL: OK.
MAX: You know, Kahane is is is basically a bad word in American Jewish life. And what you write is "I argue that by marginalizing or ignoring Kahane, we have not seen the way he has in some way hypnotized us. That is, we have absorbed more of his world view than we think." How so?
SHAUL: Well for a number of reasons. Remember, Kahane leaves America in the 70s and he's really not a part of what becomes neo conservatism later on in the 1980s. But in some way, he was espousing a particular kind of kind of ideas from a Jewish perspective that later become very, very neo conservative ideas. So I'll give you an example again. Neo conservatism is a complicated political position that has many different facets to it and moving parts. But the idea of perennial anti-Semitism. That is so pervasive in the American Jewish conversation today from groups on the right side of the spectrum to groups that claim to be nonpartisan like the ADL, who speak about the anti-Semitism and specifically the anti-Semitism on the left. Now, interestingly, in the 1960s. Most Jews were worried about the anti-Semitism on the right, whether it was the Ku Klux Klan or whether it was other kinds of politicians on the right. There was, of course, worry about anti-Semitism on the left with the black nationalist movement and so on. But most Jews, Jewish attention was really focused on the anti-Semitism of the right. Kahanists said that the anti-Semitism of the left is worse. And it's it's deeper and it's more dangerous. And I think that if you take some of the reactions that American Jews have had to Black Lives Matter, for example, you see that in a way they're espousing that that particular idea of anti-Semitism on the left is really worse than antisemitism on the right for all kinds of reasons. So I think that in a way, the precarious way in which American Jews see themselves within American society today, the quest, the issue of marginalization, the ideas that emerge out of a feeling of anti-Semitism is something that Kahane thought was endemic to American democracy. And that as as much as Kahane writes in his book, Time to Go Home, that America was better to the Jews than any other. Society in history, in the history of the West, and that in America is the bet is is by far the best democracy that has ever been created, even that will not prevent anti-Semitism. And and that's the reason he feels like the American project will be a failure for American Jews. And I think American Jews, you know, more and more I wouldn't say obviously not a majority, but they're they're they're beginning to entertain those ideas.
SHAUL: And I also think that the question of what Kahane called Jewish survival, right. So nowadays we don't really use that language of survival, although more people are beginning to revive the language of survival. But for a long time, we called it Jewish continuity. But Jewish continuity is really Jewish survival by another name and in 1974, when not many American Jews were really that concerned with intermarriage. I mean, intermarriage rates were still pretty low, but they were rising. Kahane writes a book called Why Be Jewish, which is a book about intermarriage. In 1974. When nobody was writing about intermarriage. And he's saying that this is going to be the big problem in the coming decades. And we see now that, you know, with the Pew poll 2013, another Pew poll, twenty twenty one, that intermarriage has become one of the primary issues for American Jews to grapple with.
SHAUL: As I said in the book, I think we ignore Kahane to our own peril. It's very easy to create, to create kind of figures that we can dump everything that we don't like on. I mean, I think I mean, my view is that's that's that's my critique of the left vis a vis Netanyahu. It's like, oh, it's all Netanyahu's fault that we got rid of Netanyahu. Everything would be better. And I think that we see that with Kahane, like everything that's bad becomes Kahanist. But of course, we're not that. And I think we really need to see how his influence has really has really, in a certain sense, become much more a part of the consciousness and the conscience of of American Jewry and Israeli Jewry than we think. Even those who would never. Who who would who would be who would be aghast to be identified with him.
MUSIC: “Slow Dial”
MAX: So I guess I do actually have one more question, which is that to really bring it back to where we started. I wanted to talk to you this week specifically because I thought that. In order to understand what's happening right now in Israel Palestine, it was important to talk about Kahane. Do you agree? And I mean, and as somebody who's been studying Kahane for the better part of a decade, how how have you been watching what's been happening?
SHAUL: Yeah, I mean, yes and no. I mean, I think the situation is is very, very complicated for. As as everybody says right. And then and then everybody critiques people that say that it's complicated. Right. I understand that. And a lot of it doesn't have anything to do with Kahane. But I'll tell you what I think does have to do with Kahane. And that is what I see is the new element in all this, because, OK, Israel does something provocative. Hamas fires rockets for a couple of weeks. Then they stop. Then there's another provocation. I mean, we've seen that so many times, right? I mean, this is just what we're watching the same we're watching the same thing again and again. The only thing that's different is the year. But the dif the new element here are the are the Arab riots in Israel itself. And I think that actually. Speaks to Kahane because Kahane was basically. Kahane was very, very concerned that the Arab Israelis will come back to haunt Israel. And that they they are not an integrated community, they shouldn't be an integrated community, they can't be an integrated community and they can't be an integrated community because this is a Jewish country. And and that eventually this project of integrating the Arabs into Israel proper was going to fail. And Kahane said that in the 70s, and I think that he's on that point, he's actually proven to be correct. So when Ahmad Tibi, who is an Arab Arab-Israeli parliamentarian, says, well, how can how can our community become integrated into a society whose national anthem not only ignores us, but arguably denies our existence? And Kahane would say, yes, that's correct. Right? That is correct, because it's a Jewish country. And you have to either recognize that or leave. And I think the inability of Israel to. Seriously confront the you know what was called back in the early Zionists days, the Arab question, that is, who are the Arabs in a Jewish state? I think that we're seeing the fruits of the inability to really confront that. And I think that's actually very frightening because, OK, you know, the Palestinians in the West Bank, that's one thing. Hamas in Gaza, that's another thing. But when you're when your citizens start to rebel. What are you supposed to do? You're supposed to send the army in against your own citizens?
MAX: But it's not you know, it's not just the Palestinians in Israel who are rebelling, it's also Jews who are I mean, I've seen videos of Jews marching around to Palestinian homes in different cities and trying to. You know, basically invade homes and attacking people in the streets, I mean, the riots, so to speak, go both ways.
SHAUL: Right, of course. So what's what gets set up is that so you'll have a riot in Lod and then you have know settlers from Yitzhar getting bused in to to go. And then you have this kind of very, very weird kind of Israeli West Side story scenario. But in a certain sense, the settlers, this is fine for them. This is what they want. Right. They want that confrontation because they see it. And I think this is Kahane's view, too. They see it as a zero sum game. Right? It's it's one side is going to win and one side is going to lose. And coexistence is not only impossible. For for many of these people, coexistence is not at all what is even aspirational. So in a way, you're absolutely right. So the Arabs will riot and then the settlers will riot and then, you know, but but then you then you really have a kind of complicated civil war scenario.
MUSIC: “The Telling”
SHAUL: We have no answer to that. And and I think that this is a question that has to be seriously addressed. And Kahane saw that. He saw that even in the 70s.
MAX: Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Ilana Levinson, and me, Max Freedman. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.
With everything that’s happening right now in Israel-Palestine, a lot of new people are finding the show. If you’re listening to Unsettled for the first time, welcome: we’ve been producing interviews and documentaries since 2017. We put together a Spotify playlist of past episodes that can help you better understand this moment. You can find a link to that playlist in the show notes. And I hope you’ll share it with anyone else in your life who’s looking for information.
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