OPINIONS

Wed 15 Mar 2023 9:36 pm - Jerusalem Time

From Kahane to Kahane, the kingdom of Israel is born and established

The Hebrew press witnessed the statement of the Israeli Deputy Minister of Religious Affairs, a member of the "Yamina" party, Knesset member Matan Kahane, which he made last Monday, in front of high school students in the "Efrat" settlement, in which he declared publicly that: "If only there was a button You can press it and hide all the Arabs from here and send them by express train to Switzerland so that they can live an amazing life there. I would have pressed this button.” It is not enough to describe this statement with its horrific racism and rudeness. He, moreover, undoubtedly belongs to the world of fascist thought, and it suffices us to stop at the sight of the trains, which Deputy Minister Kahane proposes, as a means of transporting the Arabs from their homeland and throwing them there in the cold of Europe.


It was satisfied with the few Jews who referred to these statements as “unfortunate” or that they were just a setback that should not have happened. On the other hand, some Arabs interpreted it as “historical normality.” This is what Israel has been since its establishment until our days. While other Arabs challenged her lightly, and the tongue of their condition says: "The highest of your horse, O Matan, ride... We are here, and we will not deviate from our homeland." As for the members of the United Islamic List and their Arab colleagues in the Zionist parties, which support the Bennett-Shaked government, and they are the leaders of the Matan Kahane party, they remained loyal to this government and swallowed those slanders and creeds, just as they swallowed what came before it, and they will swallow what follows it.


In my view, nothing is more dangerous than confronting these and similar statements, which we have begun to hear from several Israeli leadership, official and military bodies, with alarming and dangerous frequency, as if they were natural phenomena that do not require us, the Arab citizens of Israel, a great deal of serious anticipation, and actual action before our columns line up on Station platforms are littered with trains ready to take us to the nearby border, not necessarily to Switzerland.


Deputy Minister Kahane's aforementioned statement may be the most prominent and dangerous thing in his speech to the students, because it reveals what he and his partners are obsessed with achieving their "final solution" and purging the Land of Israel from the Arabs. And while that disclosure remains provocative in itself, it will become more dangerous if we put it within the context of the entire discourse. Then we will verify the extent of its actual seriousness and that it is an indication of the nature of the changes that took place within the new religious Zionist thought. Today, unlike years ago, Israel leads a group of parties and movements whose ideas permeate all aspects of the state and control the policy of Israeli institutions that aim to establish the awaited kingdom and build its great structure, which is no longer the source of the nation’s metaphorical inspiration only, but has become the tree of the end and the embodiment of God’s promise to the people God's chosen one.


Matan Kahane tried to convince the students of the futility of the two-state solution, stressing that "there are those who believe that if we retreat to the 1967 borders, peace will come, and there will be two states living side by side, and everything will be fine," then he added, with a recorded voice and image: "I don't believe it; right-wingers, in general, don't. They kicked us out of here two thousand years ago and waited for the opportunity to come back to our own country; we believe that God gave us this country, and no one has the right to tell us we don't have everything here." ". However, he added, "The Arabs have another story that they tell themselves, and we know that it is just polemics and it is not true.. Therefore, I believe that there is no possibility of peace...". He said it and moved on to borrow the push of a button and transport the Arabs by train to Switzerland.


Many leaders of political parties, movements, and state institutions repeat what Deputy Minister Kahane said. Indeed, we have begun to hear, openly, such words from some leaders of the Israeli occupation army. We talked about what General Uzi Dayan said about a month ago. Today, after the settler militias and right-wing brigades stormed the Jerusalem neighborhoods during the celebrations of the so-called "Israeli Flag Day", the words of Major General Reserve Gershon Hacohen, who, in his response to an assessment of the issue of relative calm that ended with the events of that day, came to my attention on Channel 13. The Israeli: "We are dealing with an internal Israeli issue. The Temple Mount is the source of all the inspiration for the Zionist project." Then he clarified that the issue does not stop at one wall, rather it is what we want from the Temple Mount, which should really move us, “I do not care that we be like the state of Denmark so that we can live another day of calm. There is a minority among us that is what matters to it, and it behaves as if it is a majority. But what should move us is what is the basis of the Zionist project that was put in place for Israel's salvation, and this is more than just a prosperous state."


This general, like many others who preceded him in the same sense, did not hide his indifference to achieving calm and peace among the people, nor to Israel being like one of the “boring and dirty” Scandinavian countries. With salvation whose source and engine was the Temple Mount. This is how the generals speak in a time of reconciliations and sorrows, calmly and decisively, and they preach as if they were biblical leaders and inheritors of Joshua and the prophets, and they stand on the hills of Beit-El, Jericho, Hebron, and Jerusalem , with all the Kahanist politicians, and pray for the fulfillment of their dreams and the exaltation of their banners and guns.


It is a dangerous and new scene that we have not experienced before; And to all those who will hasten to open the pages of our history to convince us that we stand at the same edge, I say: Like you, I remember very well all the racists who described Arab citizens as “cockroaches rushing into the neck of a bottle,” or that they were nothing but a “cancer that wreaks havoc in the body of the state,” and so on. Sayings full of obvious racism and fascism. Like you, I do not forget how much our fathers suffered and faced policies of racial oppression and persecution, in circumstances in which we always felt that official Israel did not like our survival on our land, so it continued to lay plans to besiege us, domesticate us, and tighten the screws on us, so that their neighbors did not rule out our displacement. Likewise, I do not forget the atrocities of the occupation against the residents of the territories that were occupied in 1967, and how the brutality of this occupation increased with each passing year.


We did not and will not forget this biography; Despite the screams of pain and the sighing of blood, the differences between the eras must remain visible before us. The idea of getting rid of us as one group has today become accepted by the majority of the Jewish community, and its echoes are heard in all the corridors and corridors of the state.


The Israeli policy produced a number of fierce extremists who raised fascist slogans and tried to harm the Palestinian citizens, inside Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territories, but we also know how some state institutions and large sectors of the people confronted them and fought them to a large extent. It may help us to evoke, in this haste, the story of the “original Kahana,” that bloody, racist rapper, who preceded all the Kahanists and established, before them, the jurisprudence of the “iron fist,” which he adopted as a slogan for the banner of his party, “Kach” (so), because he was convinced that the Arabs do not They only understand the language of force and brutality.
That racist, whose name was also Meir Kahane, preceded Deputy Minister Matan Kahane by three decades; We can, if we go back to reading the history and ideas of his movement, stand on how Israel changed between the ages of these two priests; And how Israel was a racist state with institutions and an army, and it became a rogue entity abounding with its fascist brigades.
The first Kahane, an American Jewish citizen, began his activity in America and then moved to Israel to establish several racist movements that ended in the early seventies with the establishment of a racist party based on the literal teachings of the Torah, which he called "Kach". His party ran in the 1973 Knesset elections, but failed to cross the threshold. He continued his provocations against the Arabs and his attempts to enter the Knesset, where he succeeded in doing so in 1984, and his central slogan at that time was "Give me the strength to teach them/heal them." It is noteworthy that the Central Elections Commission decided to delete his list, but the Israeli Supreme Court authorized it in the name of democracy. Then his bloody incitement campaigns against the Arabs escalated from the Knesset until the 1988 elections came, so the Central Elections Committee decided to delete his list, and likewise the Supreme Court did in a decision describing him as a bloody racist and as sowing discord among the citizens of the one state. Thousands of Jewish and Arab citizens have repeatedly demonstrated against him and stubbornly resisted him; Many have likened his legislative proposals to the Nazi Nuremberg Laws. The era of Meir Kahane came to an end with his murder on November 5, 1990, in New York City, after he was shot while addressing a crowd of Jews to persuade them to emigrate to Israel.


But..
How do the narrators differ on the words of light in a stone? It was the wisdom of our poet, Mahmoud Darwish. But we did not pay attention to it, when a priest was killed, "Israel" did not die, but rather its sky rained down on us with armies of priestesses who multiply among us and fight in the name of everything "my God, biblical and for their salvation that is built on stones and a temple" and because they believe and know that "from a stone of poor light shines wars.

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From Kahane to Kahane, the kingdom of Israel is born and established

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