He died in a New York hotel lobby, felled by an assassin's bullet in 1990. But Rabbi Meir Kahane didn't stay buried. His ideas—racist, violent, apocalyptic—have crawled out of the ground and now sit in Israel's cabinet. This isn't a history lesson. It's a warning.
The Man Who Was Too Extreme for Israel—Until He Wasn't
Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in the U.S., a vigilante group that the FBI labeled a terrorist organization. He moved to Israel and launched the Kach party, which called for expelling Arabs, abolishing democracy, and establishing a Halachic state. Israel's Knesset banned Kach in 1988, calling it racist. The party was outlawed. Kahane was shunned.
But he planted seeds. And seeds grow.
Today, two of Kahane's ideological heirs sit in government. Itamar Ben-Gvir, a disciple who was once deemed too extreme for military service, is now National Security Minister. He keeps a portrait of Kahane in his office. Another disciple, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, heads a party that wants to annex the West Bank and openly despises the Palestinian Authority. These aren't fringe figures. They're running ministries.
“Kahane was right,” Ben-Gvir said in a 2023 interview. “The problem is that people weren't ready for the truth.”
From the Fringe to the Cabinet
How did we get here? Two words: political survival. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, fighting corruption charges and election fatigue, made a deal with the devil. To build a coalition, he embraced parties that once were beyond the pale. In 2022, his coalition included Religious Zionism, a bloc that now holds six seats—and the keys to the kingdom.
Ben-Gvir's rise is the most dramatic. A former activist convicted of incitement and supporting a terrorist organization (the Kach party itself), he now commands Israel's police force. His policies? Harsher crackdowns on Palestinian protests, more settlements, and a police commissioner who openly admires Kahane. Smotrich, meanwhile, controls West Bank settlement policy—effectively making him a colonial governor.
What Kahane Believed: A Quick, Ugly Tour
Kahane's worldview wasn't subtle. He advocated for the transfer of all Arabs out of Israel and the occupied territories. He called for a theocratic state where non-Jews had no voting rights. He praised Baruch Goldstein, the mass murderer who killed 29 Palestinians in a Hebron mosque in 1994, as a hero. And he believed that democracy was a foreign infection.
Today, those ideas are respectable enough to be debated on prime-time TV. A 2024 poll found that 34% of Israeli Jews support the idea of “transferring” Arabs from the West Bank. That's up from 24% in 2016. Kahane's ghost is winning.
The Cost of Normalizing Hate
This isn't just about Israel. When a country mainstreams extremism, the consequences spill across borders. Violence in the West Bank has escalated. Settler attacks on Palestinian villages have become routine. The international community—the U.S., Europe, the UN—condemns but does nothing. Sanctions are discussed, then shelved. Diplomatic cables are drafted, then ignored.
Meanwhile, the victims count the cost. Sheikh Jarrah, Masafer Yatta, Hebron—these aren't just names on a map. They're communities being crushed. The Israeli left, already weak, is now virtually toothless. The only opposition to the far-right comes from Arab parties, which are themselves marginalized.
And here's the irony: Kahane's ideology is self-defeating. The more Israel annexes and represses, the more isolated it becomes. Boycotts grow. Diaspora Jews feel alienated. The two-state solution—already on life support—flatlines. But the far-right doesn't care. They believe in destiny, not diplomacy.
The Future: More of the Same, or Worse?
Look at the trajectory. In 2024, Ben-Gvir proposed a bill to legalize executions for “terrorists”—a policy that could apply to Palestinian attackers, but also to political prisoners. Smotrich pushed to redraw the West Bank's administrative boundaries, effectively annexing large swaths of land. Netanyahu, ever the pragmatist, gives them rope—hoping they hang themselves politically, but willing to let them hang the Palestinians first.
The real question: Will Israelis themselves push back? There are signs of fatigue. Protests against the judicial overhaul in 2023 drew hundreds of thousands—but the far-right didn't blink. The army, once a liberal bastion, now has religious nationalist soldiers who refuse to evacuate settlements. The center is crumbling.
Kahane understood something that his opponents didn't: he played the long game. He knew that if he could make the unthinkable thinkable, time would do the rest. And time has. His movement didn't win with a majority. It won by being the loudest, most relentless voice in the room.
So here we are, 36 years after his death, with a dead rabbi's fingerprints all over Israeli policy. The question isn't whether he's still relevant. It's whether anyone can stop what he started.
