Book Views: The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane
by: Stephen Greene
September - October
1990
The Link - Volume 23, Issue 4
The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane: From FBI Informant to Knesset Member
By Robert Friedman
Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1990,
$19.95
My first reaction, when I learned that Robert Friedman was doing a biography of Rabbi Meir Kahane, was puzzlement. Why would a talented young American journalist want to waste months and months of time tracing the sad background of this sick little character on the lunatic fringe of Israeli politics and the American underworld?
Now, having read The False Prophet, I understand. True, the cast of characters immediately around Kahane who people his primary creations, the Kach party in Israel and the earlier Jewish Defense League (JDL) in America, are the incompetent, demented rejects and misfits you would expect in groups which shoot and firebomb those with whom they disagree, frequently killing and maiming innocent bystanders in the process. Blind hate is not terribly complex and ultimately not very interesting.
As with any terrorist group, however, it is not the principals themselves but the environment in which they develop and thrive, the direct and indirect source of support, which get--or should get--our attention. And in this respect, The False Prophet is a well written, worthy effort. It is also repeatedly, purely shocking.
In December 1969, Israeli Knesset member and Gahal Party official Geula Cohen travels to New York to convince Kahane that the focus of JDL’s violence in America should not be blacks and their organizations, but the officials and facilities of the Soviet Union, which represses Jewish activists at home. Over the next two years, a small covert group of Israelis plans, directs and funds a campaign of bombings and shootings in the U.S. and Europe, culminating in the firebombing of concert impresario Sol Hurok’s office in Manhattan, in which a 27-year-old female secretary is killed. The members of the directorate of this operation, who move frequently between Israel and Kahane’s headquarters in New York, include Cohen, Tehiya Party Official Pessach Mor, future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, and several top officers of Mossad.
In May 1973, Kahane, from Israel, writes an associate in New York that... “if we can’t get someone to shoot a Russian diplomat (anyone), we are Jewish pigs and deserve what we get.” In another letter he instructs a high school-aged female and JDL member to arrange for her teacher to invite a Soviet diplomat to her school to speak so that a JDL hit team could assassinate him. She is to phone the press afterward to take credit, “if no innocent person is killed.” The Israeli military intercept these and other similar letters, and Kahane is subsequently arrested and convicted in Israel for conspiring to commit acts of violence in a foreign country. He is released with a suspended sentence. U.S. authorities take the matter more seriously, and revoke Kahane’s probation stemming from an earlier felony conviction for manufacturing fire bombs. Kahane’s attorney produces as character witnesses the chief of the cancer division of a New York hospital, a prominent local rabbi and several persons flown from Israel at the expense of (then) Herut Party chief Menachem Begin.
Friedman names the names in this book, of people who have assisted and continue to assist Kahane’s acts of mindless violence. And they are names you will recognize. They are entertainers who assisted with rallies, the intelligence communities in two countries (in the early days) and American industrialists who have provided Kahane’s various little groups with their operating funds.
Even more surprising are those who violate the canons of their own professions to help Kahane on his way—judges in both Israel and America who continue to issue suspended sentences for conviction after conviction, fellow orthodox rabbis who take no internal action against a self-admitted adulterer, IRS officials who do not revoke the tax-exempt status of front organizations used openly to raise funds for the political campaigns of the Kach Party, and most galling of all to me, newspaper editors (notably the New York Times) who alter the texts of articles to protect the man.
Friedman traces Kahane’s gradual descent into paranoia and his fascination with ever more extreme forms of violence and instruments of political action. By the mid-1980s, Kahane was openly calling for the “liquidation” of liberal Jews in columns written for a New York Jewish publication, and was giving speeches in Israel in which he referred ominously to the need to take care of the Arabs “once and for all.” The JDL had by this time become too tame, too “liberal” for Kahane’s taste. What was needed, he told his inner circle, was a network of small covert cells which were trained in assassination.
But it is not Friedman’s exposure of Kahane’s actions of dementia which have landed him in trouble with many reviewers in the “mainstream” press. It is those names, and that support from that same mainstream, particularly in Israel and in the American Jewish community, so carefully detailed in the book.
One does not complete a reading of The False Prophet without wondering why Kahane is shown such tolerance, and whether, if his cause were American nationalism, or Irish or Puerto Rican or any other than what it is, he would be allowed to walk the streets a free man.
Stephen Green is the author of two books on U.S.-Israeli relations: Taking Sides and Living by the Sword.