How the ultra-right Kahanists infiltrated the US Democratic Party

Jewish extremists in both Israel and the US have become extremely influential.

First published by The Electronic Intifada

One of the most extreme, racist governments in the short history of Israel has been driving the ongoing genocide that began on 7 October 2023.

This ultra-right coalition came to power in the November 2022 election to the Knesset. The coalition was led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but shored up by an alliance of smaller, even more fanatical right-wing parties, including the infamous Jewish Power party.

Lawmakers from that alliance were then handed several key roles in Netanyahu’s current government.

These include Itamar Ben-Gvir, the current minister for national security, now in charge of policing and prisons. Another high-profile member of this ultra-racist political force now at almost the highest level of Israeli government is Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister and settler.

Ben-Gvir is notorious, among other things, for idolizing Baruch Goldstein, the American Jewish settler who massacred 29 Palestinian people at the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron in 1994.

The head of America’s Union for Reform Judaism called Netanyahu’s naming of Ben-Gvir as national security minister akin to “appointing David Duke, one of the heads of the KKK, as attorney general.”

Ben-Gvir and Smotrich represent a political trend known as Kahanism, the ultra-rightist followers of Meir Kahane, a extremist Zionist rabbi from New York City who founded the Jewish Defense League, a terrorist group that carried out a nationwide bombing campaign in the US in the 1970s and 1980s.

Kahane later moved to Israel where he founded the Kach party and won a seat in the Israeli parliament on a platform of expelling all Palestinians from the entirety of historic Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

But in the latest episode of The Electronic Intifada Podcast, journalist David Sheen explained how pro-Zionist liberals in both the US and Israel have been directly responsible for the rise of the Kahanists.

Infiltrating the mainstream

Sheen is an investigative journalist and an expert on Kahanism and other forms of Jewish extremism both inside present-day Israel and around the world.

Last year he wrote an important essay on the history of Kahanism, published by The Institute for Palestine Studies.

In this episode of the podcast, Sheen takes us through some of his findings.

He explains the history of Rabbi Kahane and his followers. Sheen explains how the Kahanists have for decades infiltrated local Democratic Party politics in the United States – the topic of the bulk of the essay.

Due to the fact that most American Jews tend to vote Democratic, explains Sheen, “if a politician wanted to so-called ‘Get the Jewish vote,’ then their way to do so is to present themselves as a Democrat. And Kahanists realize this.”

This is the reason Dov Hikind – a former Jewish terrorist with incredibly regressive and bigoted politics – was a Democratic Party lawmaker in the New York State Assembly for 35 years, Sheen explains.

My colleague Nora Barrows-Friedman and I interviewed Sheen a few days before the current genocide began – on 4 October 2023 to be precise.

But we’ve decided to release the interview in full, as the issues it raises are more relevant than ever.

In a new introduction for the episode, filmed recently, Sheen says that “if anything, the thesis of the monograph has been borne true: that the Democratic Party can be even worse in some cases than the Republican Party.”

He said that “what we have in recent months is the culmination of all that: we have the [Democratic Party] president of the United States [Joe Biden] who was the biggest recipient ever of AIPAC aid, supporting genocidal policies, supporting Kahanist policies.”

You can watch the whole interview in the YouTube video above or listen to the audio below.

Article we discussed

• “Kahanism and American Politics: The Democratic Party’s Decades-Long Courtship of Racist Fanatics,” David Sheen, The Institute for Palestine Studies

Video production by Tamara Nassar.

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