October 5: The Assassination of Meir Kahane

Rabbi Meir Kahane (Martin David Kahane), founder of the Jewish Defense League and the Kach Party in Israel, was assassinated in New York on this date in 1990 by El Sayyid Nosair. Nosair was acquitted of the murder (his defense team was led by William Kunstler) but was later convicted for involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in a conspiracy trial that also found him guilty of Kahane’s murder, to which he confessed. Kahane made his name in the Soviet Jewish emigration movement before gaining a Knesset seat in 1984 — but his right-wing, theocratic politics and racist denunciations of Arabs led to his Kach Party being outlawed in Israel on this date in 1988. (Kahane himself advocated that Israeli elections “be limited only to those who understand that the Arabs are the deadly enemy of the Jewish state, who would bring on us a slow Auschwitz — not with gas, but with knives and hatchets.”) Eventually, Kach and its offshoots were defined as terrorist organizations by both Israel and the U.S. Nevertheless, many of Kahane’s views about transfer of Israel’s Arab population and about Jewish power and violence have been echoed in contemporary Israel, notably by members of the settler movement and by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who briefly belonged to Kahane’s movement after his arrival in Israel from the USSR in 1979 (according to Ha’aretz).

“He’s a really sincere guy. He’s really put it all together.” —Bob Dylan, 1971