Failure
As a movement, Kahanism was prime boomer cringe. The product of 1960s progressive rhetoric and American civil rights tactics, with a Star of David sticker on top. In the US, it had some successes; for instance, attacking the American supply chain of sclerotic Brezhnev’s USSR. Torn up from its American roots and moved to 70s and 80s Israel, it didn’t work at all. Far away from his American sponsors, forced to use a second language as his first, faced with a press which largely ignored him and lied about him when it didn’t, Rabbi Kahane HY’’D had to come up with a new toolbox and strategy, and raise new cadres in order to succeed as a political leader.
Unfortunately, he did not succeed in this. His strategy, a focus on seizing political power through the Knesset, was a dead end, on which he wasted a decade of his and his followers’ efforts. Don’t believe me, hear it from the man himself. Even if his party had not been predictably banned by the Supreme Court, the conventional parties would have made any political initiative coming from Kach a non-starter.
His political toolbox, American civil rights movement-era mass performance art, was useless in an Israeli context-the Israeli media simply didn’t give him the attention that he was able to leverage in the US. The Kahanist legal toolbox also failed in the context of Israel’s judiciary, which is neither bound by a written constitution nor by limitations of convention; guided by a Frankensteinian patchwork of Turkish, British and Israeli law, ruled by secular judges accountable to nobody, it does as it pleases to a much larger degree than its American counterpart (though the gap is closing).
Kahanist extralegal activism was shut down by security services which had cut their teeth dealing with much more serious Arab and Jewish insurgent organizations; some of the leaders of those services were themselves alumni of Jewish insurgencies.
Kahanist attempts to build strongholds in settlements such as Kiryat Arba and Kfar Tapuach failed conclusively. The former is now largely a dump for the refuse of Israeli society, with some yeshiva students and teachers, middle class suburbanites and Religious Zionist grifters mixed in. The latter is a standard sterile Religious Zionist settlement suburb with a handful of former Kahanists.
The most stark shortcoming of Kahanism as a political movement was its failure to attract and grow personnel of quality and ability in any quality whatsoever. The few Kahanists possessed of any organizational competence or intellectual abilities were those who had joined Rabbi Kahane in the US, and whom he had attracted from various competing streams. The people whom he was able to attract to his organization in Israel were generally of a low quality. This was a function both of the lowest common denominator message he chose (“Arabs out!”) and the performance art tactics he retained from his US days. Success attracts the successful, failure and primitive messaging attract losers. As Stalin said, “personnel quality determines everything.”
The above explains the fate of Kahanism after the murder of Rabbi Kahane. His followers variously dropped out or devolved into grift directed at a low-IQ public. Itamar Ben Gvir exemplified the latter. Any number of apostates and retirees exemplify the former. It is a very rare thing to see the children of a Kahanist take their father’s path and ideology seriously as guidestones for their own lives.
Confronted with this unpleasant reality, those Kahanists who have not dropped out generally adapt a line of coping rhetoric, generally along the lines of Rabbi Kahane having been too good for the Jewish people, the time not having been right, Rabbi Kahane’s main effort being directed towards propagating “ideas”, etc. This is transparently disingenuous and typical for the adherents of any failed movement. In the words of a friend of mine, “say what you will about Nazis, but at least they don't resort to handwaving about how 'Hitler didn't really fail, because he was all about spreading ideas’.”
In short, as a political movement, Kahanism failed because it could not do otherwise.
So what?
And yet, Kahanism is unique and important in two ways.
First, in its grand and worthy goals
Kahanism was the first and only Israeli political movement which set as its goals the vision held by Torah Jews for two millennia of exile. While he explicitly stated that he would not try to operate by non-democratic means in order to avoid a civil war, Rabbi Kahane’s desire was to implement a state similar to that described in Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, run according to Halacha, with a Temple, an actual “kingdom of priests, and an holy nation”. No other political movement since 1948 has had similar goals; at best, they acknowledged these values, the true values of the Jewish people, in cynical slogans, and focused on securing their place at the feed trough. Their actual political visions ranged from Israel as a Mediterranean Birobidzhan to Israel as a Mediterranean California. In this sense, Kahanism is our only benchmark for a serious Israeli political vision.
Rabbi Kahane’s focus on expelling the Arabs was certainly driven by tactical considerations-it was a lowest common denominator with most Israelis, who despise the Arabs and rightly see them as “a snare and a trap, a scourge in your sides and thorns in your eyes.” Even the arsim of Beit Shean, who had no interest in anything more elevated than a falafel and a mortgage, cheered for the slogan of “out with the Arabs!” It was also a great way to troll the “faltzanim,” our local shitlibs, and provoke them into reacting in ways which could be leveraged in political judo. While time has shown the dead end quality of “out with the Arabs” as one’s main political slogan, it has also shown that coexistence is impossible; the Arabs as a whole are determined to avoid living with the Jews in any sort of civilized manner, and probably incapable of it. The daily reality of the state of Israel is one of constant Arab violence, extortion, incompetence, criminal stupidity and corruption, all catered to by the State and sporadically interrupted by pogroms such as those of 2021. More importantly, halachically the Arabs are not allowed to stay in the Land. No political movement in Israel will permit itself to state any of these obvious truths, let alone set the expulsion of the Arabs or at least a serious constriction of their freedoms here as a concrete political goal. In this goal too Kahanism was significant and unique.
Second, in the lessons that can be drawn from its failures
The history of Israel is full of failed parties and political movements. Generally, their failure is pathetic and the lessons which can be drawn from it few.
What can we learn from the moral and political bankruptcy of the Religious Zionist movement, culminating in the fiasco of Gush Katif? Only the general unworthiness of Religious Zionist rabbis as leaders. What can we learn from the bankruptcy of Ariel Sharon’s Kadima party, culminating in that same fiasco? Only the unworthiness of Israeli generals as leaders.
What can we learn from the humiliating continuing existence of our Haredi parties, which exist in order to transform the holy communities of Torah Jews in the Land of Israel into vote banks with which to extract measly bribes from a degenerate secular state? Nothing.
In contrast, Kahanism and its grand plans failed in so many dimensions that we can learn many interesting lessons from those failures.
Postkahanism
To summarize: the goals of Kahanism were sweeping and noble. Their implementation was poor and inevitably failed. As aircraft engineers learn by examining air disasters, we may be able to understand whether there are alternate means to achieve these goals by dispassionately discussing the precise means by which Kahanism failed. It is possible that the conclusion will be that there are, at present, no such means possible, which in itself would be a valuable thing to know, insofar as it would allow us to direct our efforts to more productive channels. That is the purpose of this Substack.
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Never been a Kahanist, but I like your style so I'll be your first commentator. I think the answer is that there are no possible means to achieve the two goals you laid out. Even if you somehow got a Kahanist dictator in power, he would probably fall short of both, for the following reasons:
Maimonidean Halakhic state – a system like this can’t be imposed (even by force) without a critical mass of the people to buy in ideologically, 30-40% at minimum. It can’t work with a population that is half hilonim and where most of the rest are either galuti hareidim or mesortim/datiim that are basically total hellenists by kahanist standards.
So you would need a massive kiruv/reeducation effort to get enough people to both become frum and also adopt the right Torah ideas. If you try to do this as an open “extremist” you are going to scare off most of your potential audience. If you try to put on a friendlier face and sell people a watered down version, you will be indistinguishable from the Tzohars of the world and run into the same failures.
Not sure what the path forward here can possibly be.
Kicking out the Arabs - you have to admit that actually doing this runs at least some risk of getting South Africa-style sanctions. I’ve never heard a good Kahanist plan for this scenario - from what I can tell Rav Kahane always just said it wouldn’t happen. But since he died, the “international community” has massively sanctioned Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Burma and now Russia, and apartheid in South Africa itself collapsed under sanctions. All bigger economies than Israel. There is zero reason to think they won’t do it to us too if we do actual ethnic cleansing.
And unlike those countries, we aren’t built for sanctions. We don’t have significant natural resources and hardly produce any of our own food, steel, fuel. We usually start to run low on bombs after a month of limited operations in Gaza. If we are cut off from the international economy, how long would it be before we are out of everything and unable to fight a war?
Maybe you’ll say we can import from Russia and China if the West cuts us off. But they can just as easily side with Iran and Syria, why wouldn’t they?
Whatever problems we have with the Arabs, this scenario would be worse. Without a good plan to deal with the worst case, no rational leader will take the risk. So I don't see it happening, no matter who is in power, without some massive global geopolitical and economic changes that are way beyond our control.
Maybe you have good responses to these challenges, I’ll be interested to read them. But if you don’t, you are basically an engineer analyzing why an airliner failed to reach the moon.
As for your objection about the religious community being corrupted - that is correct. If Moshiach appeared tomorrow most Rabbis would be upset because they would lose their comfortable positions of prominence in the Diaspora, etc. Hypocrisy needs to be called out and changes made in religious leadership. This is every bit as important, and more so, as changes in political leadership.