Yardena Schwartz is an award-winning freelance journalist and Emmy-nominated producer. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, TIME, among other outlets.

TEL AVIV, Israel — On March 17, Michael Ben Ari, the leader of Israel’s most controversial political party, was doing what politicians here do during an election campaign: rushing to the scene of the latest terror attack. That day, a rabbi and father of 12 was driving in the West Bank when he was shot and killed by a Palestinian gunman.

“Kahane was right,” Ben Ari told me, referring to the late American rabbi Meir Kahane, a Jewish extremist who was assassinated in Manhattan in 1990, and whose political party “Kach” was banned in Israel and labeled a terrorist group in the United States. Ben Ari, who was denied a U.S. visa over ties to a terror group, established “Otzma Yehudit” in 2012. The party’s name literally means Jewish Power and is the reincarnation of Kach, led by some of Kahane’s closest associates and disciples.


Until a few weeks ago, Jewish Power was on the very fringes of Israeli politics. Since its establishment in 2012, it has failed to win enough votes to enter Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. It was bound to meet that fate in the elections coming up in April, with polls projecting it winning just 1 percent of votes (the minimum threshold is 3.25 percent). Enter Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is fighting for his political survival amid an unprecedented challenge from his chief opponent, and possible indictments in three criminal cases.

In late February, in a bid to secure power, Netanyahu did what many deemed unthinkable: He brought Jewish Power into mainstream Israeli politics, orchestrating its merger with two more moderate right-wing parties. To seal the deal, Netanyahu promised the newly merged “Union of Right-Wing Parties” two cabinet posts if he wins reelection. If he does, Netanyahu will replace Israel’s founding leader, David Ben Gurion, as the nation’s longest serving prime minister—having done so by embracing a party that calls openly for the segregation of Jews and Arabs, the imposition of halacha (the Jewish equivalent of Sharia law) and economic incentives to rid Israel of its Arab citizens, who make up 20 percent of the population.

“The time is over for those who think that Jews will not fight back when we are attacked,” is how Ben Ari describes Jewish Power’s ethos.

A few hours after we spoke, Israel’s Supreme Court disqualified Ben Ari from running in the April 9 elections due to his incitement to racism. The 8-1 ruling followed unprecedented criticism from American Jewish organizations, including AIPAC, which rarely criticizes Israel in public. It was the first time in Israeli history the high court had banned an individual candidate from running. The last time a party was disqualified was in 1992. It was also connected to Kahane.

Ben Ari is angry at the American Jewish community, which he believes is meddling where it shouldn’t be. “What is this American Jewish community?” he said. “It’s a dream! Israel is the Jewish community!” American Jews, he adds, should “wake up and come home.” As for their criticism of his party, which AIPAC called “racist and reprehensible,” Ben Ari says, “There is no greater chutzpah than to sit there in America and preach morality to me. When the anti-Semitism in America leads them here to live free as Jews, it will be my sons, IDF combat soldiers, who will protect them.”

As for Netanyahu, the initial outcry over his embrace of Jewish Power has died down, and he has recovered his footing in the polls. And with President Donald Trump’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, he can credibly claim that he has the endorsement of a very powerful sponsor: the United States of America.

“For Netanyahu it is a question of doing whatever it takes with little normative inhibitions in order to ensure his victory,” said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan Israeli think tank.

But any victory may be a Pyrrhic one. Though Ben Ari has been disqualified, one Jewish Power candidate remains on the ballot: Itamar Ben Gvir, an attorney known for defending Israeli extremists accused of Jewish terrorism. Whether or not Ben Gvir ends up in the Knesset, Netanyahu’s embrace of his party has already caused an unprecedented rift with the American Jewish community.

“We are particularly troubled when fringe groups that try to threaten Israel’s founding ideals are brought into the mainstream,” said Avi Mayer, assistant executive director of the American Jewish Committee. This is why, he continues, “we departed from our long-standing practice of refraining from commenting on domestic Israeli politics to express our alarm.”

“I can’t remember a case where AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee all condemned so vigorously an internal Israeli political move,” said Yossi Klein Halevi, a leading American-Israeli journalist and author who grew up in Brooklyn as a member of Kahane’s Jewish Defense League. He has since renounced Kahanism, and believes Netanyahu is now taking the movement mainstream.

“This is legitimizing a phenomenon that was ironically born in the American Jewish community, exported to Israel, and now creating strain between the American Jewish community and Israel,” said Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. “There’s something depressingly circular about this.”

Regardless of the outcome on April 9, many say Netanyahu has crossed a line. “This feels like Israel’s Charlottesville moment,” said Daniel Sokatch, CEO of the San Francisco-based New Israel Fund. “This is the equivalent of welcoming the Klan into Congress.”



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Though the prime minister’s mainstreaming of Jewish Power may represent the breaking point, the rift between Netanyahu and the American Jewish community has been years in the making. In his decade as prime minister, Netanyahu has created the most right-wing government in Israeli history. From his controversial 2015 speech to Congress in which he rebuked President Barack Obama—whom the vast majority of American Jews supported—to his love affair with President Donald Trump—whom a majority of American Jews voted against—Netanyahu has often been at odds with American Jews.

His reelection campaign has only widened that gap: Massive campaign billboards throughout Israel show Trump and Netanyahu shaking hands, and the Golan announcement heightened the sense that the American president was trying to help his Israeli friend. Netanyahu called Trump’s move “a Purim miracle,” adding, “President Trump has just made history … He did it again.”

Polls already show that younger Jewish-Americans feel less connected to Israel than their forebears, and more critical of its policies. Enter Trump, whose approval rating among voters under 30 is just 26 percent. “Young American Jews see that the only Western country whose leader seems to love Donald Trump is Israel,” said Sokatch, “And they think, ‘What do I want to do with this place?’”

Halevi says that for many American Jews, this is a final breaking point with Netanyahu. “Yes, he’s kept Israel safe and prosperous through the most turbulent period in the modern Middle East. With countries all around us disintegrating, terror enclaves on our borders, Iran devouring one Arab country after another, Israel has thrived. But what he’s doing now is undermining those contributions and weakening the most basic fabric of Israeli society.”



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When Rabbi Meir Kahane immigrated to Israel in 1971, he was already a well-known figure, having founded the Jewish Defense League, a Brooklyn-based group that championed the strong, proud “New Jew.” He left the U.S. a fugitive, having led the JDL in a domestic terror campaign of bombings to pressure the Soviet Union to free Soviet Jews. Upon his arrival, Kahane set his sights on Israeli politics, launching Kach in 1971. He called for annexing all territory under Israeli control, banning sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews, and expelling Israel’s Arab population.

Though Kahane was viewed as a pariah by many Israelis and their government, Kach won 1.2 percent of votes in the 1984 elections, earning Kahane a seat in the Knesset (the threshold was lower at the time). Yet his ideas were considered so vile that Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, leader of the right-wing Likud Party, refused to allow Kahane into his coalition, risking his formation of a government. Shamir called Kahane’s ascent “negative, dangerous and damaging.”

The first time Kahane spoke in the Knesset, even right-wing lawmakers walked out. By 1988, he was suspended for threatening an Arab Knesset member with a hangman’s noose. After lawmakers passed an amendment against racist parties, Kach was formally banned from Parliament. In 1990, Kahane was assassinated in midtown Manhattan by an Arab man disguised as an Orthodox Jew.

Yet that wasn’t the end of Meir Kahane. He left thousands of ardent followers in Israel, including Brooklyn-born doctor Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 murdered 29 Muslim worshippers at Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs. In 1994, the Israeli government outlawed Kach as a terrorist organization; the U.S., Canada and the European Union all list Kahanist organizations as terrorist groups. Then in 1995, Yigal Amir, another Kahene follower, assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv over Rabin’s signing of the Oslo Accords, the peace agreement for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Fast forward to the Israel of 2019, and Netanyahu’s Likud Party. Thirty-five years after his predecessors did all they could to ban Kahane from the Israeli Parliament, Netanyahu has paved a political path for Kahane’s offspring.

Jewish Power, which is led by four close associates and students of Kahane, is a modern version of Kach. Each year, its leaders hold memorials for Kahane and Goldstein. Instead of expelling Arabs from Israel, they call for economic incentives for Arabs to leave, and for Israel to revoke the citizenship of Arabs who commit terror attacks. Like Kach, the party’s platform includes full annexation of the West Bank and Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount, the contested holy site that is the bleeding heart of this conflict. According to Halevi, Ben Gvir has a framed photograph of Goldstein in his home.

Jewish-American supporters of Israel see the rise of Kahane as an ominous sign for Israeli democracy, which has always been robust and vibrant, but also fragile and tumultuous.

“Netanyahu’s legitimatization of [Jewish Power] has to be seen in a larger context, which is the prime minister’s war against Israel’s crucial democratic institutions,” said Halevi. “Netanyahu is on an anti-democratic rampage, and legitimating Kahanism is part of his anti-democratic campaign.”

Netanyahu has waged Trumpian battles throughout his reelection campaign, calling his corruption scandals a political witch hunt; claiming the media seeks to overthrow him; and tarring his political rivals as “weak leftists.” In one of the stranger episodes, Netanyahu waged an Instagram feud pitting him against the country’s president, one of its leading actresses, and Gal Gadot, the Israeli actress who plays Wonder Woman. After actress Rotem Sela criticized the Likud party for allegedly vilifying Israel’s Arab citizens, Netanyahu responded, “Israel is not a state of all its citizens,” but rather “the nation-state of the Jewish people alone.”

Netanyahu’s tactics appear to be working. According to a March IDI poll, just 19 percent of Israelis believe Netanyahu’s corruption scandals will influence the election. Another found that 42 percent believe Netanyahu’s allegations that the attorney general—whom the prime minister appointed—capitulated to pressure from the media and the left in announcing his intention to indict him.

While Netanyahu’s party tried to ban an Arab party and a far-left Jewish candidate from running, Israel’s Supreme Court allowed them to run, while disqualifying Jewish Power’s Ben Ari. Yet as part of the merger deal, Jewish Power received the fifth and eighth slots on the Union of Right-Wing Parties’ list. With Ben Ari disqualified, Ben Gvir now moves up from eighth to seventh on the list. If they win 7 percent of votes, Ben Gvir will have a seat in Parliament.

Nevertheless, even those most alarmed by his campaign tactics don’t believe Netanyahu’s elevation of Jewish Power heralds a larger crisis of Israeli democracy. “This is not a reflection of the Israeli electorate being radicalized or racist,” said Plesner, noting that Jewish Power was polling at only 1 percent before Netanyahu stepped in. Rather, he says, it’s the result of Israel’s electoral system “and the incentives it creates to give more political power to fringe parties.”

As for American Jewish leaders, they hope this rift will pass. AJC’s Mayer, for one, is betting that Israeli voters won’t go for unadorned racism. “This party seeks to undermine the principles of democracy, equality and peace enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence,” he said, “and we are confident that the overwhelming majority of the Israeli electorate will reject it.”