Now, if you find it concerning that someone like Kook ushered in the theological reformation of Judaism toward Zionism in the 20th century, unfortunately Kook is relatively “moderate” in modern Israeli piety. There is another sect of pious Judaism that has strongly affected Israel, and that is Kahanism.
The Arab is a cancer in our midst. And you don't coexist with a cancer. A cancer you either cut out and you throw out, or you die. It is better to have a Jewish State that is hated by the whole world than an Auschwitz loved by it. - Rabbi Meir Kahane
Baruch Goldstein, an American-Israeli Zionist Jew who killed dozens of random Palestinian civilians at a mosque, aka “terrorism”, was a Kahanist. And he is fairly popular in Israeli politics. People regularly visit his grave. A poll conducted in March 2023, before the Hamas attack, showed that a good 43% of Israelis either believe he is a national hero or aren’t sure whether to regard him as a national hero or terrorist. Ambivalence about whether someone is a hero or terrorist suggests to me that a person leans more toward thinking they are a hero. Imagine if someone told you they were ambivalent about whether Dylann Roof, the man who carried out a mass shooting at a [black] Christian church, was a national hero or a terrorist. That’s the attitude almost half of Israeli Jews have about Baruch Goldstein.
The current National Security Minister of Israel Ben Gvir, before joining the Knesset in 2020, had a portrait of Baruch Goldstein up on his living room wall.
“Faced with the fact that the fate of the Jewish people and the land of Israel hang in the balance, I’m declaring that for the sake of unity and a right-wing victory in the elections, I’m removing the photograph in my living room,” Ben Gvir says in his response on Facebook.
And he still openly honors him. Imagine if in the U.S. there were cabinet members who had once hung portraits of Dylan Roof in their living room and only took them down for “the sake of unity and a right-wing victory in the elections” and still spoke at gatherings that venerate him: that is the political environment that exists in Israel. The “right-wing” of Israeli politics is the vast majority of Israeli politics. “Left”, “Right” or “Center” aren’t particularly useful terms in general for politics, but its certainly worthless for Israel. The dissolution of Likud plausibly wouldn’t end the apartheid or even the genocide. Lots of Israelis don’t like Netanyahu, but it’s not primarily because he supports an apartheid or is carrying out a genocide. According to a Pew poll in 2016, 48% of Israeli Jews think Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel. That was of course even before what happened on October 7th 2023.
Ben Gvir loves telling Jews to follow the Torah. In May he was at a large rally where reportedly 50,000 attended and he explained how encouraging “voluntary” emigration, aka starving Gazans and bombing them until they “choose” to leave, is “humane”:
And second, encourage emigration. Encourage the voluntary departure of Gaza’s residents…It is ethical! It is rational! It is right! It is the truth! It is the Torah and it is the only way! And yes, it is humane,”
Ben Gvir is essentially a Kahanist who has learned to be a good politician.
Ben Gvir, of the Religious Zionism-Otzma Yehudit alliance, said that although he admired Kahane, he would not advance legislation to expel all Arabs from Israel and the West Bank or to create a regime of ethnic segregation — as Kahane advocated.
Ben Gvir is the leader of the party Otzma Yehuditm, which is Hebrew for “Jewish Power.” In 2008 he was convicted of supporting a terrorist organization. As National Security Minister, among other things, he now oversees the police; he oversees the people responsible for making sure aid is delivered to Gaza without being hindered by fanatical settlers blocking it. Netanyahu chose him specifically to please his coalition. And of course that above quote about his admiration of Kahane is from 2 years ago; now he is participating in a genocide.
Imagine if a politician today said that he admired Hitler but he wouldn’t advance legislation to expel all Slavs, Jews and Roma from the U.S. — and the audience he was addressing booed the fact that he said he wouldn’t advance that legislation rather than the admiration of Hitler. Imagine if the U.S. had a position that oversaw the police nationally, and the president appointed that politician to that position. And comparing Kahane to Hitler is not an exaggeration — the primary difference is that Hitler acquired a lot more power; their aspirations were analogous. More words from Rabbi Meir Kahane:
When I’m Prime Minister no Arab will be hurt by Jewish Terrorism because there won’t be an Arab left in Israel.
I want to remove the Arabs from Israel because I do not want to kill them every week.
They will come to me, bow to me, lick my feet, and I will be merciful, and will allow them to leave. Whoever does not leave will be slaughtered.
Notice how Kahane formulates his bigoted hatred toward Arabs, a racial category. Sometimes it is ignored, or forgotten, but not all Arabs are Muslims. Some are not particularly religious at all. Some are even Jewish. And some are, for example, Christians. Christians were among those terrorized in the Nakba of 1948. Oftentimes Zionists will point to how bad some Muslim factions were before 1948 or today, but what is totally lost in their arguments is that not all Palestinians belong to those factions or even the religions of those factions. People were essentially targeted because they were not Jews. Innocent Christians are being maliciously attacked along with other civilians in Gaza, regardless of their individual religious or political views.
Samar Anton, 49 a Gaza City church worker, knew there was a risk in helping her mother Nahida, a grandmother in her seventies who was weak from two months of war and little food, to the bathroom.
It required crossing a palm-tree-lined courtyard that in any other year a week before Christmas would have been crowned with a towering tree and packed with children singing Christmas songs.
Now it was exposed.
A sniper bullet cracked through the air and into Samar’s head. Another hit Nahida, a grandmother of 15, in the stomach.
Ben Gvir admires Rabbi Kahane. And Ben Gvir is who Netanyahu chose to appoint to manage the security of Israel. And Netanyahu is the head of the Israeli government, which the U.S. government chooses to fund.
Ben Gvir once demonstrated his political evolution from Kahane and how to express murderous racial sentiment with political correctness:
When you shout “Death to Arabs!” you can say “Death to terrorists!” “Death to terrorists” is legal, with an official stamp.
After the IDF bombed the World Central Kitchen convoy, some people were quick to believe it was an accident. But, given the depravity of some Likud officials and IDF soldiers, it isn’t implausible it was done intentionally and knowingly. When the majority of Israeli citizens think humanitarian aid should be restricted from Gaza and police are assisting the citizens who are trying to block the already insufficient aid that is being let in, it wouldn’t be implausible that someone like Baruch Goldstein, who once served in the IDF, felt like sending a message to people meddling with the plan to starve Palestinian civilians. Apparently, while working as a physician in the IDF, he at times allegedly refused to treat non-Jews.
A recent Human Rights Watch article reports there have been 8, eight, strikes on aid workers’ convoys and premises since October 2023:
Israeli forces have carried out at least eight strikes on aid workers’ convoys and premises in Gaza since October 2023, even though aid groups had provided their coordinates to the Israeli authorities to ensure their protection, Human Rights Watch said today. Israeli authorities did not issue advance warnings to any of the aid organizations before the strikes, which killed or injured at least 31 aid workers and those with them. More than 250 aid workers have been killed in Gaza since the October 7 assault in Israel, according to the UN.
Given the pattern, I’d argue it isn’t only plausible that an attack on an aid workers’ convoy is intentional — it is likely. And the U.S. government should certainly be assuming it is intentional until there is extraordinary evidence provided to the contrary.
Unfortunately, it is the “Jewish Power” faction in the Israeli government that seems to be inspiring current Israeli policy. The genocidal references by politicians and soldiers, the wanton bombing and massacre of civilians, and the systematic starvation of the Gazan population resemble the horrifying and sinister machinations of Rabbi Kahane — and let us not forget: Moses.
When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you— and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods, and the Lord’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession. Deuteronomy 7:1
After Kahane was assassinated in Brooklyn in 1990, a mourner at his eulogy described him as the second Moses:
“He was the second Moshe Rabbeinu — Moses took the Jews out of Egypt and Kahane took the Jews out of anti-Semitic countries,” said Bernard Berkowitz, 58, a mourner at the funeral.
Based on the atrocities that followed Moses’ commands and the atrocities being carried today by Israel that match the vision of Kahane, the description appears pretty accurate.
One of America’s “founding fathers”, Thomas Paine, the writer of “Common Sense”, the pamphlet that inspired the American Revolution, happened to be an ardent critic of Moses. He wrote the “Age of Reason” after America’s successful revolution against the British Crown. In it, he states:
Besides, the character of Moses, as stated in the Bible, is the most horrid that can be imagined. If those accounts be true, he was the wretch that first began and carried on wars on the score or on the pretence of religion; and under that mask, or that infatuation, committed the most unexampled atrocities that are to be found in the history of any nation, of which I will state only one instance.
When the Jewish army returned from one of their plundering and murdering excursions, the account goes on as follows: Numbers, chap. xxxi., ver. 13:
"And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and all the princes of the congregation, went forth to meet them without the camp; and Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, with the captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from the battle; and Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive? behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the ñ thous ands, and captai commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord. Now, therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him; but all the women-children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves."
Among the detestable villains that in any period of the world have disgraced the name of man, it is impossible to find a greater than Moses, if this account be true.
…People in general know not what wickedness there is in this pretended word of God. Brought up in habits of superstition, they take it for granted that the Bible is true, and that it is good; they permit themselves not to doubt of it, and they carry the ideas they form of the benevolence of the Almighty to the book which they have been taught to believe was written by his authority. Good heavens! it is quite another thing, it is a book of lies, wickedness, and blasphemy; for what can be greater blasphemy, than to ascribe the wickedness of man to the orders of the Almighty!
After writing the Age of Reason, most of America shunned him, despite all that he had done for the newborn nation. Apparently after he died only six people attended his funeral. At the time, most Americans, who were primarily Christians, didn’t like a deist (he believed in a god, just not Yahweh) disparaging their genocidal heroes or the “book of lies, wickedness, and blasphemy” they cherished. Remember, the books of the Tanakh are also commonly revered by Christians as the “Old Testament.” Perhaps one day most of America will catch up to the man whose religious sentiments were far ahead of his time but who still managed to seed the country with a love for liberty from unjust power — something that is foreign to the slaver morality of the Torah, the fictional god of Moses, and to Israel.