Enemies

"Who traineth my hands for war and my fingers for battle"

Choose your enemies wisely

An insurgent movement frequently defines itself and is shaped by its choice of enemies. Its enemies also shape the means by which it engages them, and these means shape the movement in turn.

It frequently happens that there are several enemies to choose from. Lehi famously made the distinction between the Nazis as sonei Israel, haters of Israel, and the British as oivei Israel, the enemies of Israel. They were initially willing to cooperate with the former against the latter, since they saw the Nazis as opposed to Jewish existence inside Germany and the territories under its control, while the British were irreconcilably opposed to the existence of a Jewish state. Since the establishment of such a state was the Lehi’s purpose for existing, Avraham Stern focused his organization’s efforts on attacking the British, even in the midst of World War 2.

This choice had the effect of cutting off any above-ground fundraising or lobbying efforts in the US, as the latter was allied with Britain, which kept Lehi small. Lehi’s small size further determined the methods it could use against the British, namely, targeted terror attacks. After the British left, Lehi continued in the same vein against the Arabs. Upon the establishment of the State of Israel, Lehi’s leaders were tried and sentenced as criminals, though shortly pardoned, and the group ceased to play a role in Israeli politics. Some of its more talented personnel were recruited into the Mossad where they faithfully served their former enemies in the Zionist establishment using the skills they had gained in espionage, conspiracy, sabotage and assassination.

Given the same choice, Etzel decided to make a marriage of convenience with the British, whose Middle Eastern empire was under an existential threat from the Nazis. It immediately paid the price with the death of its leader, David Raziel, on a special operation in Iraq. Once the British felt their position in the Middle East to be safe, they turned on Etzel, which issued a proclamation of revolt in 1944 and joined Lehi in its struggle. In the interim, however, Etzel had been able to set up a massive lobbying and fundraising apparatus in the US, insert masses of its associates into the British Army where they had access to training, logistics, intelligence and munitions, and recruit from those Jews who came to Palestine with Anders’ Polish Army. The latter included Menachem Begin, who was to lead Etzel through its most critical period. Etzel thus was able to sustain a much larger force structure than Lehi, which enabled it to engage in conventional operations during the War of Independence and later create a relatively mainstream political party which eventually became the Likud and overthrew the Labor Party’s hegemony three decades later.

In short, we see that one’s choice of enemies and timing have crucial consequences.

The enemies of the Kahanist movement

Originally, the Kahanist movement in Israel continued the focus on the Soviet Union which had been a central feature of the Jewish Defense League’s activities in the US. Ironically, Rabbi Kahane was allegedly guided and financed in these activities by former members of Lehi in their later Mossad incarnation. Upon his move to Israel, spurred by a crackdown on the JDL by the highest levels of federal law enforcement, there was a break between the two parties. It was one thing to have the JDL as an American-based cutout for attacks on the USSR and another to have those attacks coming from a base in Israel.

The Kahanist movement needed to change focus. After a few false starts in the 1970s involving the targeting of the Black Hebrew Israelites and Christian missionaries, the movement settled on the enemy which would become its trademark: the Arabs of Israel, both in the 1948 and 1967 borders. This choice was, as it were, made for Rabbi Kahane by the Arabs themselves, through a constant stream of terror attacks and criminal violence against the Jews, culminating in the First Intifada.

Kahanist tactics gradually shifted from low level violence against Arabs and missionaries to demonstrations and other political actions. While the latter were consciously provocative and often resulted in violent confrontations with Arabs, leftists and the Israeli police, they were not designed to inflict terror per se, but rather to provoke a reaction from the Jews. Towards the end of his life, Rabbi Kahane found himself inconvenienced by the actions of some of his followers, who would launch spontaneous attacks on Arabs; they demanded his moral and financial support, which he felt obliged to provide. Privately, he would express irritation with their behavior, which was ineffectual, not thought out properly and at odds with his movement’s trajectory.

This policy stood in stark contrast to that of explicitly terrorist groups such as the contemporary Jewish Underground, which was much more violent and effective in terms of inflicting casualties upon the Arabs, and may have come close to destroying the Dome of the Rock. The Kahanist movement consciously modeled itself after Etzel, which was less focused on the Messianic Kingdom of Israel and more on the immediate sources of Jewish death and suffering; the Jewish Underground saw itself as a continuation of Lehi, adapting its symbolism and goals. There was also a direct connection: Yehuda Etzion, one of the leaders of the Jewish Underground, had been a student of Shabtai Ben Dov, a Lehi fighter and scholar.

The result was a crackdown on both the Kahanist movement and the Jewish Underground. The members of the latter were imprisoned and their organization broken up. The former was put under such heavy Shabak pressure and surveillance that Rabbi Kahane found himself unable to even meet with his operational confidantes at leisure; he was reduced to having one-on-one meetings in synagogues. The Shabak was also not above using agents to entrap insurgent cadres. One instance involved an agent asking a Kahanist operative with whom he was friendly to hold a package for him. Immediately after taking possession of the package, he was arrested. The package turned out to contain explosives. In other instances, Shabak agents were infiltrated into areas considered hotbeds of Jewish insurgency to court and marry girls from families connected to insurgents. The new family men were then used as informants and agents provocateur. Routine prophylactic harassment was employed constantly.

In such conditions, it is difficult to run an insurgent organization, and it is not surprising to see that the Kahanist movement and the Jewish Underground were both completely neutralized.

While you may not be interested in war, war is interested in you

How did the Kahanist movement come to such a dead end? The answer has a lot to do with its choice of enemies.

Like Lehi and Etzel in the 1940s, the Kahanists and the Jewish Underground were faced with a choice between the Arabs,haters of Israel, and the Zionist State, existentially opposed to the Torah state they wished to build. Such a state would operate according to the Torah. Its central political and spiritual nexus would be a rebuilt Temple. It could neither tolerate Muslim residents with political rights and legal equality to its Jewish citizens, nor Christian residents practicing their religion, nor secular Jews living their lives unconstrained by the Commandments, celebrating such achievements of Western culture as popular movies and music, sexual liberation, freedom from dietary restraints and sacred festivals.

Aside from Judaism being viewed as an abomination by the secular Israeli religion, the Israeli elite has very practical reasons to be appalled by the prospect of a Torah state. Such a state would be inimical to the two pillars of the State of Israel as it currently exists: its oligarchy, which has channeled the fruits of all aspects of the national economy into its pockets, and its secular aristocracy, effectively a Levantine franchise of the global American empire. In a Torah state, the present leaders of the Israeli intelligence community, military and secret services might find employment opportunities for their skills, or not. If they did, it would be on terms similar to the voyenspetsy of the USSR, in a permanently precarious and reduced condition. Certainly Israeli jurists, academicians, celebrities, journalists and intelligentsia would find themselves forced to sell furniture in California.

Therefore, Torah-oriented insurgencies were more of an existential threat to the State of Israel than Arab nationalist or Muslim ones. Coexistence and cooperation with a Palestinian state was quite conceivable, and the Zionists explicitly envisioned a potential state as a “security contractor,” doing their dirty work for them in ruling the Arabs. No such coexistence is imaginable between a Jewish state and an Israeli one.

Conversely, it is possible to imagine an Arab population which lives in the framework of a Jewish state. There were significant Arab allies of all three Jewish factions during the War of Independence. The Arab population of Palestine was remarked upon for its irreligiosity and indifference to Islam by 19th century travelers such as Mark Twain, and it is only due to the efforts of the State of Israel that this situation has changed in the last decades (these efforts include hiring Muslim clerics, funding their proselytization activities and sending them to Muslim institutions of higher learning such as Al Azhar University, and even setting up Hamas and helping it arm and train its members). Many local Arabs are, in fact, the descendants of Jews, converted forcibly or otherwise, and have often maintained their Jewish identity unto the present. Rabbi Kahane himself often spoke of the possibility of the Arabs remaining in an Israel rebuilt along Torah lines, so long as they pledged loyalty and forsook political rights.

Ironically, Arab insurgents have been used as a proxy force by the State of Israel in its internal struggle against those Jews who either actively or potentially represent the threat of a Torah state emerging, in a process parallel to the JDF being used as its proxy against the USSR. One aspect of collaboration is discussed by our new Prime Minister, Yair Lapid in his excellent article from 2006 on the expulsion of the Jews from Gaza by the Israelis. He explicitly says that the point of the exercise was teaching those religious Jews with nationalistic ambitions a lesson and shutting their mouths. Another aspect was the training and equipment by the CIA of Arab terrorists who would go on to murder Rabbi Binyamin Zev Kahane, Rabbi Meir Kahane’s son with the blessing and collaboration of the State of Israel.

In such a situation, faced with a strong Israeli enemy backing a weaker Arab one, the response of the Kahanists was to focus on the Arabs.

This response had obvious advantages. The vast majority of Israelis, except for a small minority of deranged leftists, dislike Arabs in general. If the cultural gap, the prevalence of violence and crime and general primitivity were not enough, the constant stream of attacks against Jews combined with the occasional pogrom have ensured that every Israeli has friends, family members, neighbors and schoolmates who have been attacked, maimed and killed by Arabs. The majority of Israelis at least sigh wistfully when they hear the slogan “out with the Arabs”. It seemed that all one had to do to capitalize on this sentiment was to present a reasonable roadmap to achieving this goal to the Israelis.

Unfortunately, this proved to be an illusion. Their focus on the Arabs led the Kahanists into a dead end. Their actions did not result in, and could not have resulted in, a single Arab leaving the Land of Israel. The support of the Arab-hating Jewish masses proved illusory and impossible to translate into political power within the framework of the State of Israel. While the Kahanist movement was focused on the Arabs, those Arabs’ Israeli patrons were busy maneuvering themselves to successfully strangle the movement. In short, this was a classical case of charging the matador’s cape.

Lessons learned

Strategically, when faced with a stronger and a weaker enemy, it is a mistake to focus on the weaker one, unless engagement with it weakens the stronger.

A promising strategy, used by the Soviets at Stalingrad and the Americans vis a vis China, is to drive a wedge between the two, eventually breaking the weaker away from the stronger and focusing on the latter. The Jewish Underground’s strategy, and that proposed by Meir Ettinger, Rabbi Kahane’s grandson, owe something to this idea: a successful attack on the Dome of the Rock could possibly trigger mass disorder and civil war among the Arabs, forcing their leaders into open revolt and warfare lest they be trampled. Etzel’s strategy was similar in a sense: temporarily allying with the British against the Germans allowed them to improve their position for the inevitable break.

A less clever course of action is openly declaring war against your primary enemy, as Lehi did. This at least has the advantage of providing clarity and focus, though it risks annihilation such as that faced by Lehi in 1942.

The worst possible course of action is to commit to attacking the weaker enemy and becoming bogged down in a series of inconclusive actions as the stronger one dismantles you at leisure.

Tactically and operationally, deception and subversion are essential to success. The ideal situation is one in which your enemy does not see you as an enemy or a threat until it is too late, if then. It would be preferable to have your enemy see you as a friend and ally, if a misguided one; this is precisely the advantage that allowed the State of Israel itself was able to conceptually neutralize both the Kahanists and the Jewish Underground. Every engagement needs to be carefully planned so that its outcome is that your position is improved and that of your enemy degraded. Even if the advantage gained each time is small, compounding interest is in your favor. Ideally, this results in progressive degradation of the enemy’s cohesion, perception and ability to act, and a corresponding improvement in your own, and a channeling of resources from him to yourself.

One example of such an operation would be a legal aid office. Such an office, staffed by beautiful-souled, progressive Jews, could help Arabs navigate the complexities of American, European and Gulf Arab immigration bureaucracies, free of charge, and aid them in moving to softer lands where life is easier. It could offer follow on services, helping the immigrant with family reunification in his new homeland. Certainly such a humanitarian operation could apply for aid from the Israeli and American governments, as well as various progressive NGOs such as the New Israel Fund. Having established a friendly relationship with their clients, progressive lawyers could introduce those interested in selling some of their land in order to get a nest egg for their new life to organizations interested in helping them do so safely and profitably. Free, high quality legal aid could also be provided to Arab criminals afflicted by the racist Israeli legal system, resulting in a channel of information and a bank of favors which could be called in as necessary.

Another example would be offering members of the Israeli police and security services lucrative and easy moonlighting opportunities. The former are notoriously overworked and underpaid, to the point that a line policeman’s pay approaches that of a day care worker, and that of one working in special units compares to that of a mechanic. Such an arrangement would allow a constant flow of information and favors which could be used directly or bartered to improve your position. Obviously, legalities must be observed; a situation such as that which resulted in the scandalous resignation of Israeli Police Commissioner Moshe Karadi must be avoided.

To reiterate: the enemies an organization chooses to engage, and the manner in which it chooses to engage them, may be the most crucial decisions it can make. They shape its form and trajectory. Working from a position of weakness and disadvantage, an insurgent organization must be able to take a broad view, taking context into account, and think around corners. It is crucial to avoid drawing attention to one’s efforts, and thus they must appear to be something other than what they are, both in their goals and their methods. The ideal situation is one where your enemies see you as a friend or resource until it is too late.