Kach’s Numbers Are Small, but Impact Could Be Huge : Extremism: Zealots are called ‘a danger to the Jewish soul.’ They scoff at government attempts to rein them in.
JERUSALEM — Inside a drab stone house on a quiet street here Monday, the phone rang again and again in three rooms plastered with bloodthirsty bumper stickers, treatises on the Bible and photographs of Jewish martyrs.
The fugitives of Kach, the small right-wing extremist group that the Israeli government has vowed to crush, were checking in with home base.
“The government wants to kill Kach,†said Michael Delhorin, 46, who lives in the Golan Heights but was calling from “somewhere near Hebron.†Speaking quickly, he added, “We are in a fight now.â€
The extremists of Kach and several other smaller Israeli groups claiming a scriptural basis for violence against Palestinians may be an insignificant political force in Israel. But even as the Middle East lurches toward a historic peace, these extremists have the weapons and the will to touch off even more bloodshed in occupied West Bank territories boiling with Palestinian anger.
Members of Kach, which counted the man who massacred 48 Palestinians in a West Bank mosque last week as one of its own, “are even more dangerous than Arab terrorists, because they are a danger to the Jewish soul,†said Immigration Minister Yair Tsaban. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin called the extremists “a foreign implant, an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits (them) out.â€
Kach and its radical kin have no more than a few hundred members, “but they have a culture totally different from any other group, even from the more militant Jewish settlers,†said Ehud Sprinzak, a political scientist at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and an expert on the right. “It’s almost a quasi-fascist culture, glorifying violence and not feeling ashamed of it. These people can cause enormous damage to the peace process.â€
Recognizing that danger, Israel has taken the unprecedented step of unleashing security measures once reserved mostly for Palestinians on “radical elements among Israeli residents.†On Monday, the Israeli army scoured the countryside for leaders of Kach and other radical groups, promising to detain them or disarm them.
The government said that it is considering a ban on Kach, something that 66% of Israelis would support, according to a poll conducted this week by the country’s largest Hebrew-language newspaper.
At the Kach office in Jerusalem, though, the government crackdown was laughed off by the faithful who stopped by or telephoned from new lives on the lam. “Do you know how many times we’ve been arrested and let go?†asked the group’s secretary. “If they really wanted to catch us, they would have by now.â€
Joe Alster, another Kach member, added, “They can put us in prison from now until doomsday and we won’t change.†Alster, a 71-year-old retired American salesman, was wearing a yellow cap with the words Kach Movement written in Hebrew on the front. He said the massacre of Muslim worshipers by another U.S.-born Kach member, Baruch Goldstein, “has had a tremendous effect on the movement. We applaud it.â€
Kach’s name means, literally, “in this way,†and its symbol is accompanied by a fist holding the Israeli flag. The group is an Israeli offshoot of the Jewish Defense League, founded in the United States by Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was assassinated in 1990 in New York.
An entire room of Kach headquarters here is devoted to Kahane’s memory. A large painting of him hangs on one wall between two eternal candles; his many theological books and bound collections of speeches are arrayed on a purple velvet ledge below. A television shows videos of Kahane’s speeches.
The U.S. background of many Kach members prompted Tsaban on Monday to propose restrictions on Jewish anti-Arab extremists seeking entry. Israel, which traditionally opens its doors to all Jews, has used laws barring citizenship to security threats only once, against the U.S. gangster Meyer Lansky.
Americans in extremist Jewish groups differ from other Israeli immigrants, many of whom have moved here to escape religious persecution. Those Americans came to Israel out of an ideological conviction that Jews have a birthright to all the biblical Land of Israel, and they want to expel all Arabs from the region.
“This is not America. This is not a melting pot,†said Baruch Ben-Yosef, the U.S.-born leader of the Yeshiva of the Temple Mount. His small band of 15 extremists, based in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, makes daily pilgrimages to the Temple Mount, which is now occupied by a mosque, to demand that it be returned to Jews.
“The Arabs claim this land is theirs, and we claim it is ours,†Ben-Yosef said Monday as the Muslim call to prayers echoed through the Old City. “And we can’t live together. Period.â€
The government has ordered the arrest of five leaders of Kach and Kahane Chai (Kahane Lives), the two groups that were created in a dispute over leadership after Kahane’s death. So far, one man has been detained. The others have appeared on Israeli television and made telephone calls to the local radio stations, but they have yet to be apprehended.
The government has not agreed to demands from some quarters that it disarm all 130,000 of the often heavily armed Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank. But it did decide to disarm 20 extremists and restrict the movements of 15 others.
Israel’s radical right has been in a period of decline for several years, and the massacre is unlikely to result in any permanent increase in its size, analysts say.
But a television poll of the gunman’s town, a traditional hotbed of militancy, indicated that a third of the Israelis there supported the massacre while another third opposed it and the remainder had no opinion.
Political experts say the killings and their aftermath indicate increasing desperation.
“We saw on Friday what a single individual could do,†said Sprinzak, the Hebrew University professor. “So, in terms of their destabilizing potential, we are talking about a sizable number of people.
“We’ve not seen the end of this cycle of violence,†Sprinzak said. “I would not be surprised if Palestinian counterstrikes are dealt. And under those circumstances it could get out of control, because Jews get very nervous when Jews are killed.â€
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