Kahane Chai

A Jewish nationalist group banned in Israel, Kahane Chai spreads the anti-Arab ideology of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. Right-wing Jewish people in the West Bank largely support the group, particularly those from Airyat Arba in Hebron. Kahane Chai is listed as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department.

Rabbi Kahane founded the right-wing nationalist Kach Party in Israel in the 1970s and disseminated his violent, anti-Arab ideas until he was assassinated in New York City in 1990. After Kahane's death, the rabbi's son Binyamin gathered together Kach members and Kahane supporters to found the Kahane Chai or “Kahane Lives” group. The group's stated goal is to restore the biblical state of Israel, replacing democracy with theocracy. Its rallying cry is often, “Rabbi Kahane was right!”

Baruch Goldstein, the Brooklyn-born doctor who massacred 29 praying Muslims at a Hebron mosque in February 1994, was a staunch Kahane Chai supporter and close follower of the rabbi. The group was outlawed in Israel after making public statements in support of Goldstein's bloody attack. Under the provisions of the 1948 Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance, the Israeli cabinet banned Kach, Kahane Chai, and any organization following Kahane's teachings. The Israeli government vote also made it a crime to financially or verbally support such groups.

Many members of Kahane Chai are the children of Holocaust survivors. The group is largely based in Israel and the territories, but it maintains a presence in the United States, mainly in Brooklyn, New York. In the mid-1990s, the group ran a summer training camp, called “Camp Meir,” in the Catskill Mountains in New York state.

Kahane Chai often organizes protests against the Israeli government, and its members harass and threaten Palestinians in Hebron and the West Bank. The group has issued many death threats, according to the U.S. State Department. In July 1993, Israeli authorities charged four teenage Kahane Chai members with a grenade attack in the Old City of Jerusalem that killed one Arab merchant and wounded nearly a dozen others. According to press reports, Kahane Chai members have carried out a long list of unsophisticated attacks, such as throwing eggs at the Israeli ambassador in a Queens synagogue, beating Palestinian demonstrators in front of the White House, and punching and kicking a U.S. journalist visiting a settlement in the occupied territories. But the group's members are also capable of more significant harm: In 1995, Yigal Amir, a Kahane sympathizer, assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

On December 31, 2000, Palestinian gunmen assassinated Binyamin Kahane, killing him and his wife in a drive-by shooting. The mid-2000s nonetheless saw an uptick in activity by Kahane Chai as [Page 323]Israel moved to end its occupation of the Gaza Strip in September 2005. Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, in particular the dismantling of Jewish settlements, was unacceptable to Kahane Chai members because it reduced the size of Israel's territory, rather than expanding it to its historical, biblical limits. In 2004, Israeli police detained several Kahane Chai members for making threats against the Israeli political leaders responsible for the withdrawal.

...