2025-04-18
46 分钟This is The Guardian.
On the evening of the 5th of November 1990, Mayor Kahana,
the extremist American rabbi, turned far right Israeli politician,
had just finished speaking at the Midtown Manhattan Marriott East Side Hotel,
when a man named El Said Nasser put a bullet through his neck.
Two hours after the shooting, Kahana was pronounced dead.
Kahana believed in the ideology that you shall murder, said Avraham Burg,
then a labor member of the Knesset, and died at the hands of someone who also believed in that ideology.
From the moment he arrived in Israel in 1971,
Kahana preached a shocking mixture of violent,
exterminationist ethno-nationalism and apocalyptic religious fundamentalism.
He claimed that violence was a Jewish value and revenge a divine commandment.
He agitated for the expulsion of Palestinians from all the territories under Israel's control.
The party he founded, Kah, was Israel's first to make the idea its central policy demand.
He envisioned a state of Jewish totality in which all matters would be decided according to his idiosyncratic interpretation of Jewish law.
During his brief tenure as a legislator,
he called for banning marriage between Jews and Arabs, and criminalizing sex between Jews and Gentiles.
He proposed that insulting Judaism be made illegal and Sabbath observance be made compulsory.
He demanded the ethno-religious segregation of the country's institutions, even its public beaches.
Kahana's political career was marked by failure.