Israeli Officials Seeking to Isolate, Discredit Kahane

JERUSALEM —  Lecturer Alouph Hareven was trying to impress his audience with the need to avoid stereotypes and with the fact that not all Arabs are terrorists.

Hareven, associate director of Jerusalem’s Van Leer Foundation, a social research center, emphasized that of more than 700,000 Arabs who live within Israel’s pre-1967 borders and who are citizens of Israel, “99.9% have never done anything against the security of the state.”

“That’s impossible!” a schoolteacher in her 40s interjected. “It’s against everything that I feel.”

That incident occurred during part of a Ministry of Education program to arm teachers against the anti-Arab message of right-wing Rabbi Meir Kahane. It mirrored both the progress and the problems of Israel’s effort to cope with the politically controversial Kahane.

The ministry’s program is part of a multifaceted national campaign to isolate and discredit Kahane, a campaign that its critics call belated and that Kahane calls unfair. But the government’s effort makes it clear that the Israeli Establishment now takes seriously what it used to dismiss as the “fluke” of Kahane’s political rise.

Already the campaign has all but removed Kahane’s name from the Israeli news media, limited his personal contact with Israeli voters and cast doubt on his political future. His support in opinion polls has tumbled by more than half in the last four months.

At the same time, however, the schoolteacher’s revealing remark shows that the parallel battle to counter the appeal of Kahane’s anti-Arab message--known here as the battle against “Kahanism”--will be more difficult to win.

“Kahane himself is what I’ve described as a self-limiting disease,” Hareven said in an interview. “What is important is that he has set a certain standard that has influenced the whole right-wing spectrum in Israel.”

Kahane’s Kach Party won representation in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, in July, 1984, with 1.2% of the vote. For a year, the party rose consistently in the opinion polls. Its approval rating reached a peak last August, when 11% of those questioned said they would vote for it.

Along the way, the American-born rabbi stirred mostly young Jewish audiences with his taunts against “Arab dogs,” while simultaneously proposing legislation that would outlaw sexual relations between Jews and Arabs, segregate schools and beaches and strip Israel’s Arab citizens of the right to hold government jobs and to live in Jerusalem.

If new elections were held, the August poll suggested, Kahane’s party would emerge as the third largest in the Knesset and would have the kind of political leverage that could lend some credence to his boast that one day he will be defense minister or even prime minister.

‘Pathological’ Campaign

But now, after what Kahane described in an interview as a “pathological” official campaign against him, the polls show Kach getting only 4% or 5% of the vote.

Those in the forefront of the anti-Kahane movement are encouraged by this decline, but they caution that it would be unwise to read too much into the figures. In the past, Israeli political polls have proved to be notoriously poor guides to voting patterns.

“I would very much like to think that it was our activity that did it, but I can’t say that for certain,” Yitzhak Navon, a former president of Israel who is now minister of education, said in an interview. “Maybe it helped a little bit, but I’m not sure.”

In large part, Navon and others said, the decline is probably a result of a calmer national atmosphere.

The August poll was taken immediately after the slaying of two Jewish schoolteachers in northern Israel, allegedly by three Arab youths from the occupied West Bank. The killings followed several other terrorist deaths, and the poll reflected an outburst of fear and anger that provided fertile ground for Kahane’s message.

Summer’s Tension Eased

Although terrorist attacks continue, the pace has slowed, and the tension of the summer had eased by the time of the latest polls.

Not surprisingly, Kahane dismisses the most recent surveys as insignificant.

“We have 10 seats (of the 120 in the Knesset) in our pocket, and they know it,” he said, referring to the Israeli political Establishment. “If they didn’t . . . they wouldn’t be as obsessed with us as they are.”

Despite such a show of confidence, Kahane is clearly on the defensive. Most threatening to his political future has been a series of steps taken by his colleagues in the Knesset.

First, they took the unprecedented step of limiting his parliamentary immunity and freedom of movement. Then, at the end of July, they enacted a law banning racist parties from taking part in national elections. Under consideration is a bill that would make racial incitement a felony.

Blocking a 2nd Term

These steps have sorely limited Kahane’s political activity and, unless he can find some way around them, they will bar him from a second term in the Knesset.

Many Israeli political leaders have publicly denounced Kahane as “a disgrace to the Jewish people.”

Prime Minister Shimon Peres, speaking of the two major political parties that are joined in Israel’s fragile national unity government, told American Jewish leaders in Jerusalem this month that “one of the uniting forces between Labor and Likud is that we agree (Kahane) is a menace.”

An anti-Kahane movement called Response was formed late last summer by activists from 18 different groups, ranging from the leftist United Kibbutz and Peace Now organizations to the rightist Herut faction of the Likud Bloc.

Threat to Public Order

Response organized a series of counterdemonstrations that overwhelmed the last several pro-Kahane rallies in terms of size and noise. Now, Kahane said, the police have begun refusing him permits for outdoor rallies on grounds that they could jeopardize public order.

Last month, virtually the entire staff of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, signed a public letter expressing “shock and abhorrence at the racial incitement being expounded by Rabbi Meir Kahane.”

“Because of our daily work,” the letter went on, “we know the nature of the threat contained in these slogans and ideological theories. This despicable ideology . . . brought about the greatest tragedy ever to befall humanity and our people.”

The Israeli press has imposed an unofficial boycott on Kahane, and a spokeswoman for the Israeli Broadcast Authority said that state radio and television directors have been ordered to screen out any material that would turn the airwaves into “a stage for incitements against citizens.”

Anti-Racist Messages

In an unprecedented action, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith has begun producing a series of anti-racist public service announcements for Israel television.

“We’ve always stayed out of the Israeli domestic scene,” Harry Wall, director of the ADL’s Jerusalem office, told a reporter, but he added, “We can’t afford to allow Kahane to be any more than he was, a blip on the screen of the long line of false messiahs that have passed through Israel.”

What appeared to shock the Israeli Establishment most was Kahane’s appeal to young people. A widely quoted study of 600 senior high school students, conducted for the Van Leer Foundation and made public last spring, found that 42% of the students supported Kahane’s views and that 11% would vote for him. Among religious youths and those studying in vocational schools, support for Kahane neared 67%.

An Orgy of Comment

The study touched off an orgy of public comment on racist and anti-democratic tendencies among Israeli youth. A columnist for the conservative newspaper Maariv observed, “This is hardly the youth the founding fathers anticipated.”

Education Minister Navon countered: “They’re not racist, and they’re not fascist. They’re anti-Arab. They’re anti-Arab as a reaction to the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) and to the terrorist attacks and this miserable situation.”

Nevertheless, much of the anti-Kahane message is being directed at young people.

The army has stepped up its educational effort, using mottos like “How to Live Together.” Under universal conscription, virtually all of Israel’s young men and nearly half of its young women serve in the military; most of those not on active duty are obliged to serve in the reserve.

Focus Is on Schools

But most of the effort is going into the schools, where Navon’s ministry has launched a campaign to teach democracy and tolerance from nursery school upward.

“What we are trying to bring home to our many students is the real essence of democracy, the deep meaning of democracy, which is respect for the human being, whoever he may be,” Navon said. “This is the dividing line between democracies and dictatorships in the world--what you can do in a dictatorship to the human being you can’t do in a democracy.”

Above all, Navon noted, a child is not a product of the schools alone but “a product of his home, of the street and the school.”

The effort began in the summer, with courses for about 5,000 of Israel’s 70,000 teachers. Budget restrictions prevented the program from including more instructors, Navon said.

Hareven, whose foundation is involved in this phase of the program, said, “I would have hoped for greater momentum, and this is now a matter of contention between us and the ministry.”

Least of the Problems

Budget restrictions may be the least of the ministry’s problems. Ultra-Orthodox Israelis have balked at religious students taking part in a series of planned exchange days between Arab and Jewish schools.

Many teachers harbor anti-Arab prejudices that are even deeper than those they are supposed to help eradicate among their students. After one of his lectures on the need for differentiation, Hareven recalled, a 60-year-old teacher got up and read off a list of friends and relatives killed by Arabs in uprisings in the 1920s and 1930s and others killed in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973.

“Tell me!” the teacher demanded. “After all this, how can I change myself?”

For all the talk about cooperation against racism, the anti-Kahane consensus quickly breaks down when the discussion turns to the reasons behind his rise.

“Kahane is not an E.T. who landed here from another planet or a bastard without a lineage, as representatives of the right prefer to depict him,” columnist Lili Galili said last month in the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz.

The Israeli left sees Kahane as a product of 18 years of military occupation of the West Bank and the annexationist views propagated by the religious and nationalistic right.

Genuine Israeli Quandary

Even some of Kahane’s severest critics concede that, as much as they despise his tactics, he has uncovered a genuine Israeli quandary.

“Kahane is on to something--the fundamental conflict between the concepts of a Jewish state and democracy,” the Anti-Defamation League’s Wall said.

It is this conflict, Kahane said, that he will force Israel to face. He said that his party will produce a new platform before the next election, based strictly on the language of the Bible and the Talmud. In order to ban him, he said, the courts will have to “declare Judaism is racism. . . . We can’t lose on this.”

What if he is somehow forced out of political life anyway?

“If the worst happens,” he said, “I’ll go home, let the state fall apart, as it will, and let the people come to me--like De Gaulle.”