Illustration: The yellow flag of Kach and later Kahane Chai on an Israeli flag.
Martin Baruch Kahane, one of Israel’s most controversial figures, met his end in New York in 1990. The fifty-eight-year-old, black-bearded, firebrand rabbi’s death came speaking at a hotel in Manhatten to a group of sixty to a hundred Orthodox Jews where he was urging them to immigrate from the United States to the state of Israel. One of the Orthodox Jews had suddenly drawn out a .357-caliber revolver and shot Kahane through the neck and chest with two bullets. The assassin in disguise was later found to be El Sayyid A. Nosair, a thirty-five-year-old, Egyptian-American Islamist inspired by Omar Abdel Rahman who was later found to be conspiring to bomb American targets across the United States. Kahane was later pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital and Nosair was arrested and charged with his murder. “This is the final sacrifice,” his cousin said. “He’s been receiving threats since day one.”
Hundreds later flocked to his funeral and the Israeli-American’s coffin was paraded in the synagogue draped in the white and blue flag of the Jewish state. As his coffin was taken away in Brooklyn, many of the mourners raised their fists to the air and shouted in Hebrew: “An eye for an eye” and “Never Again”. They were the main slogans for Kahane’s radical movement known as the Jewish Defense League, a far-right Jewish movement in the United States that had a clenched fist as its symbol. “The death of Meir Kahane will not stop the movement,” said Irv Rubin, then the national chairman of the JDL. “The god of Israel will take vengeance on any Arab terrorist who wants to hurt Jews.”
The former Israeli politician was later flown to Israel where he was buried at Har Hamenuhot cemetery on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, mourned by his followers but scorned as a pariah by many. From an early age, Kahane had been confrontational. The son of a zealous Zionist orthodox rabbi, he was arrested by the British at the age of 15 for throwing rocks at the British foreign minister’s car railing against the Mandate in Palestine. He later joined a youth group affiliated with Revisionist Zionism, a more militant wing under the umbrella of the Zionist movement committed to establishing a Jewish state in historic Palestine.
It was in 1968, against the backdrop of the civil rights movement in America and the Vietnam War that Kahane formed the JDL in response to a racially charged confrontation between African-American parents and a largely Jewish teachers’ union. The JDL, and Kahane, became obsessed with supposed examples of black anti-Semitism and formed the group to fight back against Black Power groups and militant groups such as the Black Panthers. The radical rabbi wanted Jews to use hard “Jewish Power” and facedown threats wherever they emerged.
The movement turned violent quickly as Kahane spearheaded a domestic bombing campaign against the Soviet Union where virulent antisemitism ran rampant. Placed on five years of federal probation, Kahane left the United States with his family to Israel where he quickly entered politics. The far-right activist’s activities including anti-black racism against Black Hebrew Israelis, Israeli Arabs, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank drew the ire of his new countrymen. Kahane’s party, the JDL-Israel (renamed Kach), was reviled by Israel’s political elite for their racist views with the party being eventually banned from participating in elections. His ban stemmed from calling for deporting all ‘Arabs’ from Israel and Palestinian territories under military occupation and creating a segregated state where relationships between Jews and Arabs would be banned.
“The Kahane phenomenon [is] negative, dangerous, and damaging,” said Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and the political elite followed suit, boycotting his speeches and moving to push through anti-racism bills to block Kahane. Kahane was eventually suspended from the Knesset and banned from running for elections entirely after threatening an Israeli-Arab member. After his death, there were feelings of shock but ultimately the majority still rejected his politics and racist rhetoric. This didn’t stop his followers from building on Kahane’s poisonous legacy. In the 1980s, the Shin Bet arrested members affiliated with the rabbi’s Kach party who had been planning to blow up the Al-Aqsa mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites, sitting atop Temple Mount in Jerusalem, an action that would have sparked a war across the Middle East. In 1994, another Kach supporter and Israeli-American, Baruch Goldstein, launched a terrorist attack in Hebron, killing 29 Palestinians at the Ibrahimi Mosque, a move that eventually led to Kahane Chai (Kahane Lives) being added to the United States’ terrorist list in 1997.
But far from disappearing, Kahanism has flourished and adapted. Three decades on, Kahanism is back in force. The slogan Kahana Tzedek or ‘Kahane was right’ litters social media sites and one of Kahane’s disciples, Itamar Ben-Gvir now holds one of the most powerful positions in the country as Minister of National Security. Kahane’s legacy of racism and tit-for-tat bloodshed has gone mainstream as war rages in Gaza between the Israeli army and Hamas, sparked by a brutal operation carried out by the Palestinian militant group that left over 1,000 Israelis dead and hundreds held as hostages. The latest war in Gaza, nearly a year old, comes after a decade of profound changes in the country’s politics, one that is reshaping its social fabric in turn.
“There are changes in Israeli society, especially in the army,” said Dr. Ahron Bregman at a lecture in September 2014. “In the infantry units, you can see more and more settlers. That presents a problem because if you want to impose a two-state solution, the army will have to be sent into the settlements to drag (settlers) out. What will happen in the future if you have to send an infantry unit into the settlements and a soldier will have to drag out his father, mother, or sister, it will be an impossible situation. It is an extremely dangerous situation.”
Another problem that is looming large over Israel is militia violence. Israel’s militia problem has lurked beneath the surface for decades with settlers arming themselves to protect themselves from Palestinian incursions and attacks. But in 2014, a report by Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, documented how the state had begun transferring policing and security powers into the hands of settlers living in the West Bank. But over the last decade, distinguishing settlers from soldiers has become more difficult with images and videos have accumulated of soldiers from the Israeli army and settlers in the West Bank operating together as units when targeting Palestinians.
מתנחל רעול פנים במכנסיים צבאיים יורה לעבר פלסטינים כשלצידו חייל, עוריף, 14.5.21
“I have no other way to call it other than militias,” said Kemer Mesharki-Assad, a lawyer from speaking in 2021 for Hekal, a group which represents Palestinians in Israeli military courts. “The cases, in which soldiers enter settlements together with settlers and there is massive shooting by settlers - this is unprecedented.”
A decade on, these potential dangers have exploded into life in the wake of the October 7 attacks. According to the Israel Democracy Institute, over 800 ‘civilian defense squads’ have been set up throughout Israel with local residents either operating under the command of the Israeli army, the Israeli Police or the Border Police. Well-armed and trained, these militias, coined as kitot konnenut in Hebrew, have broad powers to defend their communities during emergencies.
Since October 7, security checks for individuals joining these militias have also been shortened considerably and in the chaos of Hamas’ deadly operation inside Israel, vetting by the police dropped from roughly 1-2 months to less than a day. With the Israeli Police largely coopted by the far-right, its complicity in cracking down on Palestinian civilians, and its dismal track record of investigating settler-sponsored violence against Palestinians, it is likely suspect individuals have slipped through the net. For some that has come as little surprise. Many Israeli analysts have described Israeli police in the West Bank and illegal settlements as a militia.
One of the most infamous Israeli officers, Major Betzalel Taljah, a settler in Hebron on Facebook asking "Why is Beirut still standing? Why is Gaza still standing?" @ytirawi
The situation in the army is equally grim. Some of Israel’s most violent settlers now fill ranks of the army and are exploiting their powers to terrorise Palestinians as the lines once separating the army and the settlers become increasingly blurred. With Israel’s best units on the frontline and overstretched in Gaza and northern Israel, the Israeli army is increasingly turning to reservists to police the West Bank. Most of these reservists running operations at a local level are settlers.
“It is now so symbiotic that it’s not clear anymore where the military starts and ends, and where the civilians start and end,” said Yehuda Shaul, co-founder of an Israeli think tank in an interview with The New Yorker. “What we’re seeing is a significant shift within the Army—a change from the old-school, secular, Labor Party-oriented people to nationalist religious people, and especially to the ultra-Orthodox nationalists. People like the Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.” The fusion between settlers and army has become a recipe for both intensifying bloodshed and settler activism within the army in Gaza and the West Bank.
Images and videos of Israeli ‘settler soldiers’ calling for the ethnic cleansing and resettlement of Gaza have multiplied since the assault began while others have called for the flattening of Beirut and Gaza, targeting civilians indiscriminately or bragged about destroying Palestinian villages in the desolated enclave. In January 2024, Israeli soldiers were filmed raising a flag of an illegal settlement in Khan Younis with the words ‘We are returning to Gush Katif’, a bloc of settlements that were dismantled by Ariel Sharon’s government when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Others have hung up flags or worn t-shirts from the movement dedicated to reestablishing settlements.
Many Israeli soldiers are dorn with insignia and army patches calling for the establishment of a ‘Third Jewish Temple’, a reference to the threat of the Israeli far-right to demolish the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and build a Jewish temple atop its ruins. According to Yoav Zitun, a military correspondent at YNET News, an Israeli newspaper, the Third Temple patch is one of the most popular patches for soldiers fighting in Gaza. Others have been seen with flags or graffitiing the symbol throughout the enclave’s ruins.
An Israeli military officer fighting in Gaza, Haya Ben Hemo says that the goal of the war in Gaza is to build the Temple Mount over Al-Aqsa Mosque. @ytirawi
Israeli soliders in Khan Younis holding a flag dedicated to the 3rd Temple group, a hardline Jewish group who want to build the Third Temple on the Al-Aqsa site. @ytirawi
Israeli soldier David Shalita, a rabbi from settlement of Yitzhar in Gaza: @ytirawi
Photo credit: A flag on a Palestinian home in Gaza reads: “Gush Katif we are returning home”. Allegedly hung up by an Israeli soldier from the combat engineering corps hangs on a Gazan home. @ytirawi
The issue goes up the chain of command. The senior commander in the Israeli army dismissed for his involvement in a drone strike that killed seven aid workers in April 2024 was a religious settler. The soldier, Nochi Mandel, came from Gush Etzion, an illegal settlement in the West Bank, and studied at a religious school run by a right-wing Jewish group dedicated to expelling Palestinians from their land in East Jerusalem. Only months before World Central Kitchen’s humanitarian workers were targeted, he had signed a letter published that called on Israel’s government to deprive Gaza of all aid that would cause famine.
As with previous wars in 1947 and 1967 involving Gaza and the West Bank, the army has begun building facts on the ground. According to an investigation by Haaretz, 26 percent of the enclave now lies under its control as the army builds bases and paves roads with the objective of creating a “prolonged occupation”. It is providing a golden opportunity for settlers to return after the ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza and for the new buildings and roads to act as a bulwark against the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children who want to return to their homes. The army has become the cockpit for the likes of Smotrich, Gvir, and Daniella Weiss - one of the key leaders of the settler movement - who wish to ‘Judaize’ Gaza. “Gaza Arabs will not stay in the Gaza Strip,” said Weiss to BBC in an interview in March 2024. “Who will stay? Jews. You can call it ethnic cleansing. If you want to call it cleansing, if you want to call it apartheid, you choose your definition. I choose the way to protect the state of Israel.”
Photo credit: Israeli soldiers pictured in Rafah, Khan Younis and Gaza City waving the flag of Gush Katif, a former illegal settlement in Gaza. @ytirawi
There is no turning back after the war in Gaza. Hamas’s leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Dief, and Ismail Haniyeh committed and supported terrible atrocities on October 7 and are on the International Criminal Court’s wanted list for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Two of those have already met their end after being assassinated by the Israelis while Sinwar, Hamas’s new political leader, remains elusive.
Hamas has brought utter ruin to Gaza’s population but for the Israelis, the systemic dehumanisation and butchery in the enclave carry grave implications. Israel is a pariah state. Under the direction of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli army has systematically destroyed Gaza’s healthcare system, bombed refugee camps, manufactured a man-made famine, killed record numbers of UN workers and journalists in a war zone, targeted aid workers and emergency responders, and razed Gaza’s cities to the ground in a campaign marked by ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence. Torture in military bases, de-facto concentration camps, prisons, and detention centres has been rampant with Israel disappearing thousands more. Tens of thousands are missing, including children and conservative estimates suggest over 40,000 are dead, the majority women and children. A recent report published by Lancet indicates the real death toll in Gaza could be as high as 186,000. In the West Bank, land grabs and attacks against Palestinians by settlers have surged with hundreds dead.
The shredding of international law and the wanton slaughter of the Palestinian people in Gaza has had ramifications abroad. The ICJ has concluded that the claim that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza was ‘plausible’ while it has declared that Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is unlawful. The ICC Prosecutor has filed applications for warrants of arrest for Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Sanctions on settlers and army units complicit in human rights violations are being quietly introduced by a string of allies including the US, United Kingdom, France, the EU, and Australia. The UK has reportedly suspended the processing of arms export licenses to Israel following Canada Netherlands, Japan, Spain, and Belgium in suspending arms sales. As with Russia’s war in Ukraine, it remains unclear whether sanctions on settlers and freezing of arms exports will effectively work to deter the Israeli army and Netanyahu’s government from committing further atrocities or finding weapons elsewhere to fuel its war.
Marked by accusations of genocide and ethnic cleansing, Israel’s reputation will be stained for decades while its full embrace of permanent military occupation and apartheid will hasten its isolation. All as it attempts, and fails, to whitewash its crimes in Gaza and rewrite the history books on what took place in the aftermath of Hamas’s offensive.
But as the war rumbles on, an underappreciated danger looms large: the stability of Israel itself. As Gaza burns and the situation in West Bank deteriorates, the brief unity that brought Israeli society together in the wake of Hamas’s military operation on October 7 is swiftly unravelling. Israel was wracked by political instability long before the war in Gaza. Between 2018 and 2022, the country held five elections with several fractious coalitions rising and swiftly falling apart.
In December 2022, Netanyahu’s Likud party was returned to power after forming a coalition that included Gvir’s Jewish Power party and Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party. The government headed by Netanyahu was widely touted as the most extreme in Israeli history and packed to the brim with far-right politicians, segregationists, messianic settlers, and ethnonationalists. Anti-Palestinian, anti-LGBTQ+, and anti-democratic worldviews are rampant in the coalition, and many harbor radical agendas of reshaping Israel into a nakedly theocratic, supremacist society by overriding the power of Israel’s Supreme Court.
At the helm lies Netanyahu, a severely weakened populist facing prison time for corruption and who tried and failed to ‘reform’ the legal system to protect himself from prosecution. It was not long before Israel was wracked by massive protests for months against the judicial reforms proposed by Netanyahu’s extremist coalition. The Israeli army was sucked into the political infighting with many soldiers participating in the protests and hundreds more vowing to not attend training unless the judicial reforms were scrapped. After ten weeks of standoff, the Israeli president Isacc Herzog was sounding the alarm bells. “The last few weeks have been tearing us apart,” he said. “Israel is in the throes of a profound crisis. Anyone who thinks that a real civil war, of human life, is a line that we will not reach has no idea. The abyss is within touching distance.”
Many international media outlets were issuing stark warnings of Israel’s slide into authoritarianism and the end of Israeli democracy. The US President Joe Biden also urged Netanyahu to abandon his controversial plans. “Like many strong supporters of Israel I'm very concerned, and I'm concerned that they get this straight,” he said. “Hopefully, the prime minister will act in a way that he can try to work out some genuine compromise, but that remains to be seen. They cannot continue down this road.”
Divisions, apparent on the eve of Hamas’s attack, are turning increasingly ugly as Israel’s already toxic political landscape has fused with the fallout of the attacks and the war in Gaza. The initial unity created in the aftermath of October 7 quickly gave way to anger. Many blamed Netanyahu’s government for dividing the country in the build-up to the war and giving Hamas the opportunity to exploit political instability. Others are furious that he has refused to take responsibility for the disastrous security and intelligence failures on the eve of the attack. Protests have continued throughout the war against his deliberate attempts to sabotage a deal to return the remaining hostages.
Netanyahu is hostage to his extreme coalition and by extending the war in Gaza and in northern Israel and southern Lebanon with Hizbollah, he remains in power. A ceasefire and returning the hostages would mean the end of his political career and prison as he shores up his position through regional assassinations, placating the atrocities mounting in Gaza and engaging in an escalating conflict with Iran, Hizbollah, and other paramilitaries across the Middle East.
But as Netanyahu’s ruthless ambitions consume Israeli politics, Gaza’s war has also put pressure on Israel’s internal conflicts. Echoes of Putinism stalk Israel. Hundreds of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship have been arrested. Ordinary citizens are reporting colleagues, neighbors, classmates, schoolteachers, and professors who dare to criticise the conduct of the war in Gaza and sympathise with the plight of the Palestinians. The police have cracked down and clashed with protesters involved in the hostage crisis even arresting the relatives of hostages.
Israeli activists have received death threats or been attacked for anti-war demonstrations. Conscientious objectors or sarvanim, a tiny minority who have refused to serve in the Israeli army, have faced multiple imprisonments, alienation and been branded as “traitors”. “Many reservists are saying they will not serve in the army because they are afraid of living under a dictatorship,” said Yuval Dag, an Israeli who refused to enlist. The award-winning Israeli filmmaker and journalist, Yuval Abraham, received death threats after slamming the military occupation in his acceptance speech during a film festival in Berlin. A right-wing mob descended on his family home. Foreign and Israeli media outlets that don’t toe the line on the Israeli narrative of the war have come under pressure or been shut down while journalists and activists on social media have been bombarded with hate speech and propaganda. Jews who have spoken out against Israel’s brutal war, anti-Zionist Jews, and anti-Kahanists are often slandered as “self-hating Jews”, a method of demeaning and delegitimising their views.
Ben-Gvir has put a stamp on the Israeli police. While the national security minister has run the police incompetently, the number of investigations by police into settler violence against Palestinians has halved while requests by the Shin Bet to take action against Israeli “targets” have largely fallen on deaf ears. Aid bound for Gaza has been left unguarded by police officers and as a consequence ransacked by far-right Israeli activists. In these toxic currents, darker forces are threatening to emerge. ‘One day the war will end,’ writes Orly Noy, a journalist at Local Call. ‘Israeli society will emerge more violent, more nationalist, more militaristic, and more openly fascist. It’s impossible to ignore how Israel has adopted a new national ethos under the auspices of this war — one that completely abandons any lip service to the idea of democracy.’
The rule of the gun and a sense of impunity that has fuelled the settler project in the West Bank and the war in Gaza present a serious threat to a deeply polarised and traumatised Israeli society. The storming of Israeli military bases by the far-right has showcased that splits in the army could eventually prove deadly for Israel as divides along ideological lines intensify in the army and security forces. The divisions in this incident came to the surface when the advocate general ordered an inquiry “following suspected substantial abuse of a detainee” from Gaza. Nine soldiers were allegedly involved in the torture and rape of a Palestinian prisoner. The Israeli military police entered the Sde Teiman compound to detain the reservists involved in the case and soldiers (many masked) on the scene were videoed resisting the arrests.
Protestors, including far-right politicians in Netanyahu’s coalition (some from Likud and Jewish Power), rallied to demand the release of the reservists, breaking into the military bases with the encouragement of Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and other Israeli politicians and lawmakers on social media. Not dissimilar to the many masked settlers in uniform captured in images and videos rampaging through the West Bank, many of the protestors were IDF soldiers in uniform, pictured carrying rifles and balaclavas to hide their identity. The riot was eventually put down but not after Gvir deliberately stalled on sending police to respond to the far-right mob inside the camp.
Israel is no stranger to violence in its politics but the erosion of discipline in the Israeli army should be cause for alarm further down the line. Where Kahane’s anti-Palestinian racism and Jewish supremacist ideology were once rejected by the majority of Israelis and the old elites, his ideology now permeates the government of Israel, parts of its society, and, crucially, parts of the army, the bedrock that underpinned Israel’s creation in 1947. Ben-Gvir is a supporter of Kahane and had a picture of Benjamin Goldstein in his home, which he refused to take down until reaching the top of Israeli politics. “It seems to me that ultimately Rabbi Kahane was about love,” Ben-Gvir said at a commemoration event in 2022. “Love for Israel without compromise, without any other consideration.” When he publicly rejected some of Kahane’s most extreme beliefs including expelling all Palestinians and Israeli Arabs from Israel and the West Bank or creating a regime of ethnic segregation, he was booed by many present.
For over two decades, the United States and the European states have paid lip service to the mirage of a ‘two-state solution’ and ignored the choice it had to make on which Israel it needed to support: a state committed to a serious peace process and regional stability or a chauvinist, ethnonationalist movement dedicated to pushing an agenda of military occupation, apartheid and a permanent state of war. Today, that choice has come and gone. The ethnonationalists, Kahanists, and messianic settler movement have now penetrated every level of the Israeli army, the police, and the government. They are slowly changing the institutions to fit their increasingly anti-democratic, authoritarian, and theocratic worldviews. Their blueprint for ruling Israel and the Middle East should frighten us all.
As the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the peace process of the 1990s illustrated, the messianic settler movement, the Kahanists and their global supporters (of which many are unwitting) will resort to any means, including violence, to destroy those who threaten their ideological convictions. Over the course of his three decades in Israeli politics, one of Netanyahu’s greatest crimes as prime minister has been to breathe life into this unfettered Jewish supremacism and tap into it for political gains, opportunism, and now survival. In doing so, it has gone mainstream and this toxic force now threatens the foundations of the state and the key institutions that hold Israel together.
An masked reservist soldier demands that Defense Minister Yoav Gallant quit and threatens to defy orders if the government doesn’t pursue "complete victory" over Hamas.
Israel is a ticking time bomb. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, an organisation that tracks violence across the world has warned that a civil war cannot be ruled out between settlers and the Israeli government were the latter to table a peace deal with the Palestinians in the future or to pledge a withdrawal from the West Bank. As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has reached its most violent levels since the war began in the early 20th century, the international community has turned a blind eye to the one that endangers everyone in the Holy Land and broader Middle East; the threat of an Israeli civil war. Militias have multiplied, the army’s ideological base is both fracturing and deepening and the police have been captured by the far-right, all while the country’s politics has become increasingly fragmented and toxic. Some commentators have warned that Israel faces a future not dissimilar to Lebanon where violence, state dysfunction, and corruption are chronic. Splits in the army could turn violent and Israel’s melting pot could turn into a nightmare akin to the Yugoslav Wars or Northern Ireland’s civil war.
Israel is not there yet. It may take generations for such a conflict to occur but the country is increasingly proving that it is not impervious to the radical currents sweeping the region which has seen religious and ideological extremism run amok and where civil wars, revolutions, and terrorism have burned the region including international conflicts in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. The protests against judicial reform, the events of October 7, and the ensuing war in Gaza and the West Bank have pulled Israel into the vortex that consumed the rest of the Middle East years ago.
But while the Israeli army’s genocidal war on Gaza has taken the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into unchartered waters which diplomats have barely contained from igniting a full-blown regional war, the international community is more unprepared for the potential crises and conflagration an unstable Kahanist Israel will generate. The world cannot ignore the path on which Netanyahu’s extremist government has set Israel. A Jewish state molded in the image of Kahane is being disgorged from the ashes of Gaza and it will arrive soon.