Two weeks ago, Bezalel Smotrich, the avowedly ethno-supremacist Israeli finance minister who has spent most of his life trying to eradicate the non-Jewish population of the area he calls “Eretz Israel,” announced that he would be imminently hit with an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. The ICC has thus far said no warrant has been issued, but it is reported to concern the regime of government welfare programs, kickbacks, and bribes that subsidize the relocation costs of diaspora settlers and pay off the juvenile delinquents who terrorize Palestinians into fleeing their ancestral homes/makeshift refugee camps to make way for the next crop of settlers.
Upon learning of his warrant, Smotrich ordered the immediate expulsion of some 4,000 Palestinians living east of Jerusalem. Then he began to make arrangements for a cameo appearance at New York’s Israel Day Parade, an annual lib-owning ritual that drew extra attention this year due to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s preannounced refusal to attend.
The decision of an alleged war criminal to attend Sunday’s parade was a “last minute” one, according to two representatives of the Israeli consulate the Prospect contacted following a graf buried deep in a New York Times article about Mamdani’s decision to skip the parade, which claimed that the finance minister’s name “was not on the official list of attendees that the Israeli consulate sent to The New York Times before the parade.”
That may be true—and technically was, consulate officials say, but only because the press release specifically named only the Knesset members in attendance at the parade—but surely the Israeli government planned on sending one of its war criminals to Manhattan, one of these days, if only for the purpose of trolling Mamdani, who during the campaign repeatedly promised to exhaust every legal option available to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu and anyone else with an ICC arrest warrant, a fairly impossible task given the likelihood of federal preemption and the U.S. failure to recognize the ICC at all.
Instead, however, it was the pillars of New York’s liberal establishment who got trolled. For some reason, high-profile Democrats from Chuck Schumer to Kathy Hochul to Tish James had felt compelled to attend a parade to honor a country whose gratuitous warmongering is rapidly imploding the American empire. And on Monday, they were suddenly forced to issue statements apologizing for marching alongside Smotrich and fellow surprise attendees, including nuking Gaza advocate Amichai Eliyahu and mass infant-smashing proponent Yitzhak Wasserlauf, respectively the Netanyahu government’s ministers of heritage and development of the periphery. Hochul and James issued strong condemnations of Smotrich; Schumer’s staff did not respond to a request for comment. And the Times, which did not mention Smotrich until the 14th paragraph of its original parade coverage, published a predicable follow-up on the predictable “backlash” libs were facing for attending the same event everyone had spent the last two weeks shaming Mamdani for skipping. The icing on the cake: Smotrich stayed in town long enough to speak at the same synagogue “respectable” Zionists were scolding anti-genocide activists for protesting outside last month during a Jewish-only auction of illegally annexed West Bank real estate.
What is most exasperating about this constant cycle of shame-and-be-shamed is that the murderous ideology of Israel’s radical right is not something that sprouted over there while the good Zionists weren’t looking. Its roots are down the road from the parade, in Brooklyn, where a young rabbi’s son named Martin Kahane grew up listening to the musings of a family friend named Vladimir Jabotinsky, an impassioned Zionist who didn’t get along with most others because he loathed the Bolsheviks even more than he hated Hitler. (David Ben-Gurion nicknamed him “Vladimir Hitler”; in Jabotinsky’s defense, he died in 1940.)
Kahane, also an ordained rabbi, was a charismatic speaker who was legendarily popular with teenagers, but he had trouble finding work until he and a childhood friend from Jabotinsky camp named Joseph Churba realized intelligence agencies would pay them handsomely to foment radical anti-communism in the Jewish community. They spent the 1960s infiltrating the John Birch Society, forming pro–Vietnam War front groups for the CIA, writing a book on why Jews needed to support the Vietnam War, and sharing a bachelor pad on the Upper East Side during the week under assumed names. Then in 1968, under considerable direction from Mossad, they founded the Jewish Defense League, a terrorist organization that paired Kahane’s popularity with mentally unstable teenagers with sabotage targets mostly sourced by Israeli intelligence—though a few were conceived in collaboration with the Colombo crime family, with whom the JDL had a well-publicized alliance in the early 1970s.
In 1971, Kahane had changed his name to Meir, and started dividing his time between New York and Israel, depending upon whose law enforcement agencies were closer to indicting him. He bought a pied-à-terre in Kiryat Arba, the ultranationalist settlement where Smotrich (and mosque mass shooter Baruch Goldstein) grew up, and taught theology and karate classes in the lower-class Sephardic neighborhoods of Jerusalem where National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose Kurdish Iraqi-born father had fought in Jabotinsky’s Irgun militia, joined Kahane’s Kach party as a teen, not long before the rabbi’s strange assassination in 1990. After running for the Knesset twice with no luck at all, Kahane scored a seat with just over 1 percent of the vote in 1984 under the platform “Make Israel Jewish Again.” By 1985, a poll of Israeli high school students revealed that an astonishing 40 percent shared his desire to mass-deport all of the Arabs in “Eretz Israel.”
The Labor government legitimately attempted to clamp down on Kahane during the late ’80s and early ’90s. They passed an anti-racism law, banned his party from the 1988 elections, and attempted to restrict the brazen terror attacks and publicity stunts that had won him such an impassioned following among the country’s disenfranchised and disaffected underclass. But he was never imprisoned for any serious length of time, which seems shocking given a staggering trail of death and destruction that is difficult to synthesize into a book, much less a little internet column, but which is capably detailed in the late investigative journalist Robert I. Friedman’s biography The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane From FBI Informant to Knesset Member.
Kahane may be the single most exemplary embodiment of a multigenerational effort to build a Jewish right every bit as reactionary and philosophically malleable as the Christian one, and every bit as violent as ISIS. And he succeeded in great part because his movement was so consistently downplayed by the left-leaning secular media. When a moderate Palestinian mayor whom Kahane’s gangs had been terrorizing got his legs blown off in a 1980 bombing, The New York Times reported that “no evidence” had been found that Kahane or his followers were involved, and never published reports that appeared in European newspapers linking Kahane to 750 pounds of TNT found hidden near the Al-Aqsa Mosque. When Ha’aretz published a wild report detailing a JDL-operated blackmail ring that extorted religious students at Bar-Ilan University—who were too scared to report their abusers to police and sought out help from Meyer Lansky instead—the Western media didn’t cover it at all. When radical Kahanist Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians and wounded an additional 125 praying at a mosque during Ramadan 1994, it was widely reported to be the “first” Jewish terrorist attack in the country in recent memory.
By that point, Kahane was not only dead but a martyr, allegedly killed by Egyptian-born militant El Sayyid Nosair, though his family refused to allow an autopsy and a jury didn’t buy the story and acquitted Nosair of the murder charges. (He’s serving a life sentence anyway; both right- and left-wing conspiracy theories speculate that Nosair, who spent the trial sketching pictures of Princess Diana, was a patsy for a larger organization.) Within two hours of Kahane’s murder, an unidentified Kahanist had gunned down two elderly Palestinians in Nablus, an act of vengeance a Kach spokesman said “could not be prevented.” Although the Anti-Defamation League lists the JDL as a hate group, its longtime president Abe Foxman attended Kahane’s funeral, as did the then-chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Jewish Organizations Seymour Reich; he boasts his own page on the official website of the 9/11 Memorial.
Kahane was enabled and protected by an extremely powerful network of stealth donors and collaborators, from the CIA and Mossad, to the Unification Church and Häagen-Dazs founder Reuben Mattus, to, when the occasion called for it, The New York Times, as Friedman’s book details in a jaw-dropping passage on the newspaper’s first profile of the rabbi-terrorist in 1971.
The assignment paired a metro reporter named Michael Kaufman with an investigative reporter named Richard Severo. Kahane’s JDL was at the time embroiled in a campaign of bombings, arsons, invasions, and even one incident involving a quart of human blood poured over the head of targets associated with the Soviet Union. Perhaps due in part to the Cold War anti-communism that still ensconced most institutions of the age, “we received a lot of support [from establishment leaders who] would swear today it’s absolutely untrue,” the longtime JDL leader and former New York assemblyman Dov Hikind told Friedman.
But Kahane also had a tendency to leave a trail of disenchanted former colleagues (and paramours) wherever he went, and one advised Kaufman to scrutinize a foundation he ran that was accused by a former officer of spending at least part of the $200,000 it had raised on the personal expenses of Kahane and his best friend and serial business partner Joseph Churba. The charity was called the Estelle Donna Evans Foundation, supposedly named after a secretary who had died suddenly and tragically.
In reality, “Estelle Donna Evans” was Gloria Jean D’Argenio, a struggling model who’d gotten engaged to a man named “Michael King” whom she had met at an Upper East Side bar in June 1966. They were scheduled to get married in August—she was pregnant—but a couple of days before the wedding, he had written her a letter breaking off the engagement because, it turned out, he already had a wife, and kids, and an Orthodox synagogue full of followers back in Brooklyn. Sobbing hysterically, she jumped off the Queensboro Bridge and died. After Severo tracked down her parents and confirmed that “Michael King” and Kahane were indeed the same person, the two reporters flew to the Alabama Air Force Base where Churba was teaching a course in Middle Eastern studies. After he confirmed the story, the two cornered Kahane at a television studio, who confessed he had “never known such passion” as he’d enjoyed with D’Argenio and that his sex life with his own wife was simply unsatisfactory, which he blamed on “the strictures of Orthodoxy.”
The revelations, Severo and Kaufmann were certain, would destroy Kahane’s reputation with the deeply religious, judgy outer-borough Orthodox families that comprised his base. But the Times did not want to publish them. As Severo recalled to Friedman, metro editor Arthur Gelb and managing editor Abe Rosenthal “argued that emphasizing the affair ‘would generate anti-Semitism.’” Kaufman blamed himself. After he wrote an original draft of the story that began with a scene of Kahane placing roses on his dead lover’s grave, the rabbi showed up to the Times office to attempt to talk him out of publishing the story, at one point promising to disappear from public life if he complied.
“I said that’s not my role,” Kaufman later told Friedman. “You’re the one who put the ad in the JDL paper for the Estelle Donna Evans Foundation. He said, ‘Yes I know, but my mother has cancer, my wife is innocent, and I have four children.’ And then ensued a lot of soulsearching on my part, and a lot of conversations with my editors.”
Whatever the case, the affair with the tragic shiksa was 86’d, and Kahane spent the next two decades swindling donors, masterminding terror attacks, and radicalizing youth on two continents. Severo told Friedman the newspaper had made an unforgivable ethical blunder, because Kahane surely would have lost considerable support from his family-oriented donor base “if they knew the man was a charlatan … We could have changed the history of Israel.”
But for whatever reason, the bosses didn’t want to.
