Lebensgefahr (2024)

Kamera: Nikon F3 (1989)

Linse: Nikkor-N Auto 24mm f2.8 (1970)

Film: Rollei P&R 640 @ box speed

Kjemi: Rodinal (1:25 / 13:30 min. @ 20°C)

 

Sunday 24 March 2024: During the years when I had UN-affiliated assignments in the occupied West Bank (2007-2011), this was a sign that I saw time and time again; spraypainted all over Palestinian shops in Hebron. This is a sign of hate - this is the sign of the US Jewish Defense League and the American-born Kach organization.

 

So today, I will be presenting some excerpts from ‘The False Prophet’, a book by investigative journalist Robert I. Friedman (1950-2002) published in 1990. In his book, Friedman paints a disturbing portrait of American-born mad 'rabbi' Meir Kahane (1932-1990), his life and deeds, his followers and his religious, racist, fascist ideology - Kahanism.

 

In today's Israel, Kahane's views and ideology have become mainstream and is represented by several political parties in the Israeli government like Otzma Yehudit and the National Religious Party–Religious Zionism, led by extremist settlers turned politicians like Itamar Ben-Gvir (b. 1976), Bezalel Smotrich (b. 1980) and Orit Strook (b. 1960).

 

 

PROLOGUE - THE FALSE PROPHET

 

I first met Rabbi Meir Kahane in December 1979, at his Jerusalem headquarters, a cramped, airless office in an upper-class section of the city. He calls it the Museum of the Potential Holocaust. The “museum” was filled with Nazi flags and anti-Semitic literature that he had clipped from American hate-group publications and pasted on display boards. At the time, Kahane was a political pariah. His followers in Israel consisted of no more than a few dozen teenagers who had belonged to the Jewish Defense League (JDL) in America. “Numbers aren’t important,” Kahane told me. “How many Maccabees fought the Greeks?”

 

While Kahane admitted that his movement in Israel was small, he said that it was growing—especially in Kiryat Arba, the sprawling, ultranationalist Jewish settlement on the West Bank, where he kept a second home, and in the Sephardic slums of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, where he was fast becoming a folk hero to youth who were attracted to his fiercely-held, anti-establishment views, as well as to his uncompromising hatred of the Arabs.

 

It struck me on that first encounter that Kahane was a man obsessed with sex and violence. He chattered incessantly about Arab men sleeping with Jewish women. He claimed, for instance, that English-speaking Arab men often tried to pass themselves off as Jews to unsuspecting American Jewish women studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He had recently spent an entire day, he told me, plastering the university cafeteria and dormitories with flyers that warned coeds to check their dates’ identity cards before jumping into bed with them.

 

As far as Kahane was concerned, no Jew in Israel, man, woman, or child, was safe as long as there was a single Arab in the country. Just that morning, he told me, he had read a report in the Hebrew press about a Jew who had been pulled from a taxicab and beaten up by a gang of West Bank Arabs. He confided that he would stage a “reprisal mission” on the guilty Arabs’ village the next day. He invited me to come along.

 

There were ten of Kahane’s followers on the “mission”—three Israelis of Moroccan origin, two recent Russian immigrants, and five Americans; most were in their late teens or early twenties. “We are going to pay the Arabs back for beating up a Jew here yesterday,” said twenty-eight-year-old, Brooklyn-born Chaim Shimon, as Kahane deftly maneuvered his yellow Ford van through Jerusalem traffic. “Arabs often attack Jews in Israel,” he continued, “but Jews are afraid to fight back. The Israeli superman is a media myth. The country needs us to defend them.”

 

The van stopped in front of an Israeli police roadblock outside Beit Safafa, a prosperous Arab suburb near East Jerusalem. Apparently, the police had been tipped off to Kahane’s plan.

 

“Go and do what you have to do,” Kahane ordered the young men in the van as he jumped from the driver’s seat. “I’ll deal with this!”

 

Kahane strode toward the knot of police in riot gear with a clear look of manifest destiny in his eyes. Dressed in a sun-faded green army parka, gray pants, and combat boots, with a yarmulke pinned to his thinning black hair, he was a vision of a modern-day warrior-priest ready for battle. While Kahane engaged the police in a noisy conversation, his “boys” drove through the suburb to look for Arab prey.

 

After a short drive, the burly young Moroccan driver spotted a lone Arab. The man was perhaps fifty. His face was gnarled and stained copperbrown from years in the sun. The Jews attacked with their fists so swiftly that his black eyes were quiet and unbelieving as he was pummeled to the ground. The group returned quickly to the van.

 

“It served the bastard right!” Shimon sneered as we drove away. Bearded and wearing a yarmulke, Shimon recalled that he had been riding his bike through Prospect Park in Brooklyn several years earlier when he was jumped by a gang of young Blacks. He was attacked, he said, solely because he was a Jew. A few days later he joined the JDL.

 

“I wanted to feel proud and unafraid,” he told me. “I had heard of Rabbi Kahane and had read some of his work. I decided to get involved with the JDL—like 'riding shotgun’ in predominantly Black neighborhoods to protect the remaining old Jews. But anti-Semitism in America got too intense. I came to Israel to be with the rabbi and to fulfill the Torah’s commandments.”

 

The van lurched as it turned the corner. Although it was winter the sun was warm. The driver wound down the window and called out to a group of middle-aged Arab workers lounging against the peeling, whitewashed wall of a cafe.

 

‘‘Hey, Mohammed,” he barked in Arabic. “I’m horny! Where are all your Arab whores?”

 

Laughter flickered through the van.

 

“Arabs try to sleep with Jewish women whenever they can,” Shimon said. “Like Eldridge Cleaver (1935-1998) said in Soul On Ice, ‘Sleeping with a white woman is the ultimate revolutionary act.’ ”

 

We drove full circle. Kahane was still at the roadblock arguing with the police. We stopped. The rabbi, who was then forty-seven, and small and thin with a darkly handsome face, stepped into the front seat and sat like a stone icon. As we climbed the highway on our way back to Jerusalem, the only sound in the van was the grinding of gears.

 

I visited Kahane again the next day, curious to discover if he had read a story in the morning’s newspapers that said the Jew who had been pulled from the cab and beaten up, the one they had staged their assault for, had not been attacked by Arabs, as previously reported, but was actually the victim of a Jewish gangland assault.

 

Kahane’s eyes twitched. He could barely control what was once a serious childhood stutter.

 

“I told them to stay in the van and to stay out of trouble,” he muttered. “But some of them are a little crazy. It’s important to have crazies in a mass movement, though. They’ll do anything for you, especially when you’re the first to cross the barricades.”

 

“But the Arabs were innocent,” I pointed out.

 

The rabbi was not impressed.

 

“This time the Arabs didn’t do it,’’ he growled. “But there are hundreds of unreported incidents of Arabs attacking and sexually molesting Jews. And who do you think plants bombs here—the American Boy Scouts? I don’t want to live in a state where I have to worry about being blown up in the back of a bus.’’

 

“I don’t blame the Arabs for hating us,’’ the rabbi continued, warming to his subject. “This was their land—once! And no matter what the Israeli Left says, you can’t buy Arab love with indoor toilets and good health care. Israeli Arabs and West Bank Arabs identify with the PLO. And they multiply like rabbits. At their rate of growth they will take over the Knesset in twenty-five years. I am not prepared to sacrifice Zionism to democracy. There is only one solution: the Arabs must leave Israel!’’

 

I squirmed in my seat.

 

“Of course it’s not nice. Did I say it’s nice? Is it nice when Israel bombs the PLO in Lebanon and kills women and children? We have smart bombs, not nice bombs.”

 

“How would you implement these ideas if you were the prime minister of Israel?” I asked.

 

“I’d go to the Arabs and tell them to leave,” he replied. “I’d promise generous compensation. If they refused, I’d forcibly move them out.”

 

“How could you do that?” I asked. “Midnight deportations in cattle cars?”

 

“Yes!” he declared.

 

Thus spoke Meir Kahane—the rabbi who took the concept of the nice Jewish boy and turned it on its head.

 

[…]

 

CHAPTER NINE - THE JEWISH IDEA

 

Meir Kahane had been subject to wild mood swings and crippling bouts of depression since childhood. Now, having been simultaneously rejected by the Israeli electorate and by key JDL members in America, he suffered what some of his closest supporters described as a nervous breakdown. But after briefly disappearing from public view, Kahane reemerged more determined than ever to build a viable political party in Israel.

 

His manic energy combined with his wounded pride never let him rest. He woke each morning at 4 a.m. to study Torah, prayed and studied again. Then he would go to his office at the Museum of the Potential Holocaust in Jerusalem, returning home around 10 p.m. He was seldom in bed before midnight. “I don’t think he even dreamed at night,” recalled Matt Liebowitz, a young American-born Kach supporter. “Everything he did was geared toward achieving his vision. I think he had such total control over his thoughts that he could even control his subconscious. He believed the Apocalypse was coming, so he was willing to do desperate things.”

 

Kahane was swept up in a kind of Messianic passion. Jewish destiny, he believed more than ever, was in his hands. Words like apocalypse, redemption, and Messiah took over his political vocabulary. He rationalized his Knesset defeat on the grounds that Jews did not yet understand that he was working from a divine plan. While the JDL in America was supposed to be concerned with helping Jews achieve greater temporal power, in Israel it was rapidly evolving into a fundamentalist cult with Kahane—like some medieval kabbalist—twisting and turning the Torah to explain why expelling the Arabs would usher in the Messiah.

 

Kahane soon discovered that he did not have a monopoly on fundamentalist fervor. As he turned increasingly to Jewish mysticism for salvation, an earthquake on the Israeli Right shattered the political spectrum. The upheaval was set off by Gush Emunim (the Bloc of Faithful)—a mystical-Messianic movement that would not only radically transform Israeli politics, but would have a profound impact on the Arab-Israeli conflict as well.

 

[Note: The present-day successor to the Gush Emunim settlement movement goes by the name Nahala and was founded by Daniella Weiss (b. 1945) together with Moshe Levinger (1935-2015) in 2005. You can see Daniella Weiss' presentation of the Nahala settler movement from 2015 on YouTube]

 

Gush Emunim was based on the teachings of Rav Zvi Yehuda Kook (1891-1982), then the eighty-year-old head of Yeshiva Mercaz Harav in Jerusalem. The son of Rav Avraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), founder of modern Religious Zionism and the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, he had devoted his life to preserving and expounding his father’s teachings—foremost among them that the Jewish return to Israel and the flowering of the land signify the beginning of the Messianic Age. Contending that the Occupied Territories are part of the “holy inheritance” of lands given by God to the Jews as recorded in the Bible, Kook declared that they must be secured and defended at any cost.

 

Rav Kook and his religious school became the nucleus of Gush Emunim, which was born in 1974 following the Yom Kippur War. It was organized by seven middle-aged students from Yeshiva Mercaz HaRav who sought to Judaize the West Bank.

 

Jacob Levine, then a forty-one-year-old, soft-spoken, unemployed Talmud student, and one of the movement’s early leaders, believed Zionism had become sterile and self-destructive during the years of Labor Party rule. Gush Emunim, he said, was created as an antidote.

 

He explained: “There was a lack of clarity in Israel after the ’73 war. The dominant spirit was one of depression. The Labor Party and the country didn’t know what to do about the Arab territories. We stepped into the breach.”

 

So Gush Emunim began what it regarded as its holy crusade to settle and build up Judea and Samaria, the land of the ancient Hebrews now known as the West Bank. Infused with a selfless dedication and an almost cosmic awareness of self and mission similar to Israel’s early pioneers, Gush Emunim captured the imagination of many war weary Israelis.

 

Jaded young Sabras who were born long after the pioneering ethos had died and who had never before identified with political Zionism, émigrés from the corrupt and disintegrating Labor Party who were looking for a more meaningful ideology and lifestyle, and Orthodox Jews who decided to keep the promise flocked to Gush Emunim. A handful of new immigrants, mostly Russian and American, also joined the fold. Though Gush Emunim viewed Arabs as intruders in the land of Israel, it had no systematic program to drive them out. Instead, Gush leaders stated that Arabs who were willing to live without political rights in the Jewish state would enjoy a protected minority status similar to the second-class status that Jews historically held in Islamic countries.

 

Gush Emunim’s West Bank settlement program grew slowly during the years the Labor Party was in power. Labor’s policy was to build settlements in the Jordan Valley for security purposes, while avoiding the occupied areas largely populated by Arabs—these, according to such leaders as Yigal Allon (1918-1980), were to be held as bargaining chips in future peace talks. But as early as 1970, a bitterly divided Labor government allowed a group of ultranationalist Orthodox Jews led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger (1935-2015) to build Kiryat Arba on a hilltop overlooking Hebron, the site of King David’s first throne, and home to 78,000 fiercely nationalist Palestinian Arabs.

 

Most of the Gush Emunim’s attempts to settle the West Bank during the Labor government era were stopped by the army. Gush members would arrive at a site in a caravan of trailers in the middle of the night without government permission. When the army came to expel the settlers—which it almost invariably did—the right-wing parties would charge the Labor government with betrayal of Israel and compare it to the British Mandate government before Jewish independence. Either way Gush Emunim bested the Labor government.

 

But when Labor was voted out of office in 1977, and Likud’s Menachem Begin (1913-1992) became prime minister, he organized a right-wing coalition government that was strongly influenced by Gush Emunim. Immediately after his election, Begin journeyed to Elon Moreh, a settlement near Nablus that Gush Emunim had tried and failed seven times to settle extralegally before the Labor government finally gave in. Holding a Torah scroll aloft, Begin vowed that he would establish “many more Elon Morehs.”

 

Begin, the former commander of the Irgun, which had called for a Jewish state on both banks of the River Jordan, was true to his word. Between 1977 and 1984, successive Likud governments invested more than $1 billion in Jewish West Bank settlements—a huge sum for an economically hard-pressed nation that depends on more than $3 billion in annual aid from America. Today, Gush Emunim is the spearhead of Israel’s West Bank settlement program, which totals more than 150 settlements comprising some 75,000 settlers.

 

[Note: Number of illegal Israeli settlers in 2024 is more than 800,000!]

 

Gush Emunim currently boasts important enclaves of support in the right-wing Likud and Tehiya parties, as well as in several of the religious parties. Among its most potent supporters is Ariel Sharon (1928-2014), who through a Gush Emunim real estate front, purchased an apartment in the Muslim quarter of East Jerusalem’s Old Walled City. Sharon moved into the apartment on the first day of Passover in 1988, sparking an Arab riot.

 

Gush Emunim had everything that Kahane and his movement lacked, observed Professor Ehud Sprinzak, an expert on extremist groups at Hebrew University. It was a cohesive cultural and social entity; it had a skillful, yet modest, collective leadership, as well as an effective membership. A spiritual movement led by the scion of the founder of religious Zionism, Gush Emunim was fully backed by Israel’s leading rabbinical authorities in addition to being very Israeli in character. In contrast to the rather fringe-like nature of Kahane’s mostly American-born followers, Gush Emunim attracted thousands of well-educated, middle-class supporters and settlers, whose outposts in Judea and Samaria soon obliterated the 1949 armistice line that had separated the modern state of Israel from the core areas of the Biblical Hebrew nation.

 

“In view of the emergence of Gush Emunim and its prestigious and highly publicized activities, Meir Kahane had to reassess his political strategy,’’ said Sprinzak. But in 1974, Kahane was no more capable of joining Gush Emunim than he was Begin’s party or the National Religious Party. So Kahane staked out a position to the right of Gush Emunim. If Gush’s role was to settle and build the land of Israel, then Kahane would concentrate on driving out the Arabs living there. The JDL leader set about subverting Gush Emunim’s declared goal of coexistence with the local Arabs by instigating conflicts between Jewish settlers and the Palestinian Arab population. He purchased an apartment in Kiryat Arba, which became a base for his goon squad’s increasingly violent forays into the Arab West Bank. “They (Gush Emunim) don’t realize what nonsense it is to put a settlement of fifty people in a sea of Arabs,” Kahane told me in 1979. “What do they think they are going to do with those Arabs?”

 

Since Gush Emunim’s philosophy was firmly rooted in Halacha and the normative Zionist tradition, Kahane countered with his own selective quotes from the Torah and Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940). In a book he published in 1974 called The Jewish Idea, Kahane challenged Gush Emunim’s view that redemption could come with Arabs living in the land of Israel.

 

According to Kahane’s view, Arabs are more than just a demographic and physical threat. Their presence pollutes the very essence and spirit of Judaism. Therefore, their expulsion is a necessary precondition for redemption. “Zionism, the establishment of the State of Israel, the return of millions of Jews home, the miraculous victories of the few over the many Arabs, the liberation of Judea-Samaria, Gaza and the Golan, the return of Jewish sovereignty over the Holy City and Temple Mount are all parts of the divine pledge and its fulfillment,” wrote Kahane. He argued that Messianic redemption would have taken place if the Israeli government had expelled the Arabs, destroyed the Dome of the Rock Mosque, which was built on top of the ruins of the Second Temple, and annexed Judea and Samaria. “Had we acted without considering the gentile reaction,” Kahane wrote, “without fear of what he may say or do, the Messiah would have come right through the open door and brought us redemption.”

 

Kahane insists that redemption is guaranteed simply because God picked Jews as his Chosen People. “We are different,” said an article in a JDL publication also called the Jewish Idea. “We are a Chosen One and a Special One; selected for purity and holiness, and to rise above all others and to teach them the truth for purity and holiness that we have been taught. There is no reason or purpose to being a Jew unless there is something intrinsically different about it. No. We are not equal to the Gentiles. We are different. We are higher.”

 

Gush Emunim also is disdainful of gentiles. Its leaders maintain that Israel will become “a light unto the nations” only after it has attained complete political and spiritual isolation from the rest of mankind. Then, they prophesy, Israel will build its moral and military strength until it is powerful enough to destroy Arab opposition. “We must overcome the goys and dominate the spiritual world,” said Gush activist Jacob Levine as we sat in his apartment with its spectacular eighth-floor view ofJerusalem’s magical countryside.

 

But even the mystics of Gush Emunim have hard-headed political priorities. Their primary goal has been to confiscate Arab land a dunam at a time—and to build settlements stone by holy stone. They believed that this “divine process” would be far easier to accomplish without deliberately inflaming the local Arabs (not to mention the Zionist Left), who in any case would never be reconciled to their presence in Judea and Samaria.

 

In response to Gush Emunim’s more pragmatic brand of Messianism, Kahane stepped up his attacks on Arabs, ignoring government pleas that he was undermining Israel’s democratic image.

 

“The irrational Jew is the rational one,” Kahane once told me. “Democracy and Western humanistic values are foreign implants, which are meaningless to authentic Judaism. The Jewish people didn’t survive for two thousand years by being rational. Had we been rational we would have been done for. We survive because there is a clear promise that the Jewish people will never be destroyed.” So long as Jews fulfill their covenant with God their destiny is assured, said Kahane. Therefore, it makes no difference if America breaks diplomatic relations with Israel for deporting the Arabs. God, not Uncle Sam, will provide, he declared.

 

If, as a child, Kahane daydreamed about becoming the saviour of his people, he now openly presented himself as a modern day prophet. He claimed to hold the authentic Jewish spark, which had fractured into a million pieces at the Creation. Like his great grandfather who was a kabbalist from Safed, Kahane preached that it is man’s task to recover these sparks and make the world whole again. Kahane claimed that the divine spark was within him and that he could find it in others.

 

Kahane’s militant Messianism began to affect his relationship with his followers in America. He warned them that American Jews faced the twin perils of assimilation and annihilation if they did not return to Israel. Those who do not melt in America’s melting pot would ultimately melt in America’s ovens, he predicted. He compared the United States to the Weimar Republic, declaring that American Jewry was as blind to its fate as were the German Jews before Hitler took power.

 

Much of Kahane’s Messianic fury was aimed at America’s 400,000 Orthodox Jews, who, according to Kahane, are worse than blind—they are hypocrites. “The tragedy is that most observant Jews in America are practitioners of Jewish ritual and folklore,” Kahane once told me. “A religious Jew is one who does the really hard mitzvab (commandment), and that’s settling the land. My purpose in life, therefore, is to say the things that no other Jewish leader is saying—that the fate of the Jewish people in the Galut (exile) and in Israel rests upon their being Jewish again. This can only be done in Israel. Only then will God shine his light on Zion.”

 

He insisted that, just as there cannot be a Jewish state in the Messianic sense unless the Jews return to the land of Israel, a Messianic Jewish state cannot exist with an Arab minority. Jews must be alone in the land to rebuild their moral fiber—which is another reason for this emphasis on Arab deportation, he says.

 

“I’m not a racist,” he declared. “A racist is a Jew who says Arabs can be equal citizens in a Jewish state.”

 

[…]

 

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN - PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG FANATIC

 

On a fog-shrouded road between Jerusalem and Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, two young American supporters of Rabbi Meir Kahane put on their prayer shawls to daven (pray), then pulled ski masks over their faces, slipped on black leather gloves, and loaded a U.S.-made M-16 automatic rifle.

 

Around 5:30 on that chilly March morning in 1984, the men watched an Arab bus wind around a steep curve. As it approached, they jumped from a ditch that ran parallel to the road and opened fire on the driver’s window and the bus’s right side. The volley lasted three to four seconds. While nine Arabs lay wounded inside the blood-spattered vehicle, the Jews ran a quarter of a mile to a prearranged spot, where a friend from New York City waited in a Hertz rental car. When the youths were later arrested by the Israeli police, Kahane told a press conference that his followers were “good Jewish boys” and that the machine-gunning was “sanctified by God.”

 

Kach supporter Matt Liebowitz, a bearded, disarmingly soft- spoken twenty-four-year-old who served twenty-six months in an Israeli prison for the bus attack, epitomizes the kind of American kids who joined the JDL after Kahane wrested control of the organization from Bonnie Pechter.

 

Liebowitz’s career in “Jewish activism,” which began in Chicago, where he was raised, and led to New York and later to the West Bank of the River Jordan, is similar to the path taken by many young American Jews who get hooked on Meir Kahane’s sinister vision of ridding Israel of its Arabs. “Violence is a tool,” Liebowitz told me during a 1987 interview at a yeshiva in Far Rockaway, Queens where he sometimes studies. “Kahane says violence is not a nice thing, but that it’s sometimes necessary. For me and for others there was a certain mystical attachment to blood and violence. This was the violence that drew us to the JDL and bonded us together in the struggle. . . . Kahane taught us that what we were doing was true and correct according to the Torah.”

 

Liebowitz was not always interested in the “Jewish struggle.” He was raised in an assimilated, middle-class Jewish home where Judaism had more ritual than meaning. Like many future JDL members, he was embarrassed by his religion. “I had no connection to Judaism,” Liebowitz told me. “When I was a kid I used to hang out in the inner city and saw old Jews harassed by Black gangs. I had a very bad image ofJews—that they were weak, that they were worms.”

 

Matt was thirteen when his parents divorced. He moved in with his mother, then later with his father, a family therapist in Chicago. Eventually, he returned to his mother’s house because he did not get along with his stepmother. Matt became, according to his mother, “a street child.” Uninterested in school, he began to hang out with white street gangs, she recalled, until he discovered the JDL and found religion. “He just looked for some authority, someone who would tell him how to live, who would tell him what to do, someone who would decide for him what was good and what was bad,” she told the Israeli publication Koteret Rashit when she was in Jerusalem for her son’s trial.

 

“He was very restless.”

 

Matt says that he discovered Kahane and the JDL when he read Kahane’s militant manifesto, Never Again. The book’s title, which became the JDL’s rallying cry, was a warning that Jews will never again be led like sheep to the slaughter. The message was meant as much for passive, liberal-minded Jews as it was for gentiles. “I read Never Again and it hit me right in the heart,” said Matt. “I found what I was looking for.” His first illegal act inspired by Kahane’s philosophy, he said, was to place a home-made bomb under the car of Arthur Butz (b. 1933), an engineering professor at Northwestern University. Butz had written a book in 1978 claiming that the Holocaust was the hoax of the twentieth century. “The bomb never went off,” recalled Liebowitz. “I learned how to make it from a book by Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989).”

 

Liebowitz was soon studying in a yeshiva and working out with members of the small but violent JDL chapter in Chicago. “I started training with sticks, knives, hand-to-hand combat. We were trained by a guy who was a Navy SEAL. ... It was cool for a fourteen-year-old high-school freshman to see Jews do this stuff. Even though most of the JDL members weren’t religious, they put on kippos (skullcaps) whenever they fought anti-Semites. I hung out in neighborhoods where everyone was fighting, so it took a lot to impress me. The JDL really impressed me!”

 

But Kahane impressed Liebowitz even more than the street fighting. The Pied Piper of confused Jewish youth, Kahane has a knack for convincing youngsters that violence in the name of Greater Israel or Soviet Jewry is heroic in the tradition of the Bible. “I got to know Kahane when he came to Chicago in 1979. I thought he was it. He had unbelievable charisma. I came to him for advice and guidance, and depending on his answer I would have switched schools or made major changes in my life.”

 

Shortly after meeting Kahane, Matt moved to Israel to be with the fiery rabbi. At the time, Kahane was a political pariah in Israel with no more than a few dozen young followers from the United States. Like many American Jews who arrived in Israel for the first time, Liebowitz was shocked that Israeli Jews bore so little cultural resemblance to the Jews he had left behind. This fast-paced, chaotic, and intense new world on the Mediterranean was both strange and a little frightening. “I am at an ulpan (an intensive, Hebrew-language training institute),” he wrote to his mother soon after arriving in Israel. “ We sing Chanukah songs. . . . I had to leave the room because the songs reminded me of you and I long for you so much. ... I did not realize it would be so difficult.”

 

There was little time, however, for reflection when one’s days and nights were devoted to Kahane. There were almost daily vigilante attacks against Arabs, Christian missionaries, Black Hebrews, and U.S. diplomats whose cars were firebombed. Once Matt and a compatriot, laden with satchels of explosives, even scaled a wall that encircled the Dome of the Rock Mosque, intending to “purify” the Temple Mount. But the two scurried away when they heard an approaching Israeli army patrol.

 

Not surprisingly, Matt gained a reputation inside the JDL as one of Kahane’s most dedicated “crazies.” “Kahane was asked by a reporter why he had so many crazies around him,” Liebowitz recalled. “He replied that he needed crazies because they were the first to cross the barricades. Everybody in the JDL joked that I was the crazy Kahane was talking about.”

 

In 1980, burned out from the frantic militant activity, Liebowitz borrowed money from his mother and returned to Chicago. He jumped from yeshiva to yeshiva before he moved to New York City, where Kahane had reasserted control of the JDL, after successfully crushing Bonnie Pechter. The JDL, which had claimed as many as ten thousand members in 1970, was now a shell of its former self. Without Kahane’s constant guidance and charismatic presence, it foundered, breaking into small, competing factions. Kahane continued to milk the organization for publicity and money for his affiliated party in Israel. By the time Matt arrived in New York, the JDL had just a few dozen hardcore activists in New York and Los Angeles.

 

During a brief revival in 1981, however, the JDL began a paramilitary training camp in the Catskills, similar to the one that it had run during its heyday a decade earlier. Matt was one of some fifty youths who spent the summer training with automatic weapons and in martial arts. “Matt was a sweet, good- hearted kid,” recalled Gary Moskowitz, a New York City policeman who was the JDL camp karate instructor. “He loved training. He used to run ten miles a day. But he was easily manipulated and extremely prone to violence.”

 

Liebowitz rose to become the head of JDL security during a period when the organization was implicated in a number of terrorist attacks, including the bombings of Soviet and Arab diplomatic missions in New York and the firebombing of an Arab-owned restaurant in Brooklyn in which a woman was killed. During the summer of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, armed JDL militants raided the Manhattan offices of the November 29th Coalition, a pro-PLO group. A week later, the JDL training loft at the intersection of West 34th Street and Broadway in Manhattan was bombed. A JDL security guard asleep inside narrowly avoided injury. “It was a crazy summer,” Liebowitz recalled.

 

“The camp produced fifty good, dedicated JDL people who would prowl the streets of New York at night in search of Arab or Russian victims. That summer there were twelve to fifteen bombings. We had an underground bomb lab in a house in Borough Park crammed with explosives, Tommy guns, Uzis. . . . We knew a grand jury was investigating us and that federal indictments were coming down. Then one of our people was arrested in Israel for shooting a West Bank Arab and was convicted and went to prison. We were very bummed out by that.”

 

As a federal grand jury weighed indictments against a number of JDL militants, about forty suspects, including Liebowitz, suddenly moved to Israel in the winter of 1983. According to a federal law enforcement agent involved in the JDL probe, that effectively stymied the investigation. Weary of police investigations, Liebowitz tried to keep away from Kahane and his followers in Israel. He moved to a military base in the Negev to work as a volunteer. “It is wonderful to be in my country,” he wrote his mother. “There is some poetic justice in this scene of lighting the Chanukah candles in a military base in the Negev. It is a dramatic scene. The sun shines softly and religious soldiers light a large menorah and say prayers. I am home. I have never felt better in my whole life in any other place.”

 

A few weeks after Liebowitz wrote to his mother, a bomb planted by the PLO in the back of a bus in Jerusalem exploded, killing several passengers, including two young Jewish girls. “I feel as if I had lost my own sister,” he wrote in another letter home. “I can’t stand this. . . . I am very upset. . . .Jews are dying here only because they want to live here. . . . I must see Rabbi Kahane.”

 

But Liebowitz got mixed signals from Kahane. On one hand, he says, Kahane told him not to do anything illegal and risk going to jail. However, he said Kahane also constantly preached that vengeance is holy. “The bombing of the Jewish bus was like a sign,” Liebowitz told me. “I knew what road I had to take. I swore I was going to avenge Jewish blood.” He says he met four other Kach Party members from the United States who, like him, itched to strike back at the Arabs. Craig Leitner, whose father is a top official with the New York City Board of Education, was responsible for co-planning the attack. Liebowitz went to Kahane for money to finance the operation without telling him what they were planning. “I said, ‘We need money fast,’ ” Liebowitz recalled. “Kahane took $600 from his pocket and gave it to me without asking any questions.”

 

[Note: These days Craig Leitner goes by the name Aviel Leitner; he is a lawyer and former terrorist member of the JDL and Kach who served 30 months in jail for firebombing the Palestinian newspaper Al-Fajar and being involved in the shooting at an arab bus in Ramallah in 1984, injuring 6-7 Palestinians. Together with his lawyer wife Nitsana Darshan-Leitner (b. 1973) in the Shurat HaDin lawfare organization he is mostly involved with legal matters defending terrorists like for instance Yigal Amir (b. 1970); the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin (1922-1995), and Jonathan Pollard (b. 1954); an American-Israeli civilian-employed US Military intelligence analyst who in 1986 was sentenced to life in imprisonment for spying on the United States of America for the State of Israel.]

 

Prior to the attack, Leitner wrote to Randy Medoff, the JDL boss in New York, instructing him that when he received a collect phone call from a “Mr. Gray,” it would be a signal to phone the Israeli media with the news that a Jewish terrorist organization had machine-gunned an Arab bus. The Kach kids were arrested minutes after Leitner placed the call to Medoff. Liebowitz claims that he learned during police interrogation that Shin Bet had them under surveillance for twenty-four hours prior to the shooting.

 

Craig Leitner, who turned state’s witness, not only documented the close links between terrorism, the Kach Party, and Rabbi Kahane, but also told Shin Bet a chilling tale of Ku Klux Klan-style violence. In a signed confession, he told Israeli officials:

 

One day, toward the end of July 1984, (we) agreed to take some action against the Arabs. About midnight we saw an Arab in his early twenties walking along the Hebron road. . . . I left the car and gave the Arab a blow with my fist and kicked him. . . . He escaped into the night. . . . We drove to Hebron and decided to set fire to Arab cars. We had two plastic bottles filled with gasoline. (We) took the fuel and poured it under a number of cars. We set them on fire, but we didn’t wait to see what happened. There were many dogs around and I was afraid they might wake up the neighbors, or they might bite us and we would get rabies.

 

Several days later in Jerusalem, according to his confession, ‘‘We took some empty bottles and rags, then we went to the Kach office because I knew that Rabbi Kahane had left his car there and a fuel tank was in the back of the car. We made Molotov cocktails and drove to an Arab neighborhood. We threw two Molotovs at one of the Arab houses chosen at random.”

 

Leitner then contacted an American friend from Kach who lived in the West Bank settlement Beit El. “I knew he spoke Hebrew (Leitner could not) and could be relied upon not to inform the police. I asked him to phone the news media and inform them that the attack in East Jerusalem was carried out by TNT (the name for the Kach terrorist underground in Israel).”

 

Kahane hired an attorney for his young machine gunners and occasionally visited them in prison. He appointed one of the youths imprisoned with Liebowitz, Yehuda Richter, from Beverly Hills, to be his chief deputy in Kach. Leitner, who somehow managed to flee from Israel, was later arrested by U.S. marshals at the White Plains, New York campus of Pace University Law School, where he was studying. He returned to Israel after lengthy legal maneuvering, served a year in prison, and is once again a law student at Touro College in Manhattan.

 

Liebowitz now says the machine-gun bus attack was a cathartic experience and that he is grateful that confinement in prison gave him the personal discipline he lacked. After spending more than two years in prison, he returned to the United States in 1986 to promote aliya (immigration to Israel) as an emissary of the Eretz Yisrael Movement, which is affiliated with Gush Emunim. He is currently working for a Manhattan-based security firm. He told me he helped install a security system for the Albanian Mission to the United Nations.

 

Matt says as soon as he saves enough money he will move to Israel permanently. His wife, Judy, a twenty-three-year-old nurse, would like to live in a quiet Jerusalem neighborhood and raise a family. Matt wants to move to the fiercely nationalist Palestinian West Bank city of Hebron, where ultranationalist Jews have carved a foothold in the heart of the city’s squalid, fly-blown Casbah.

 

A young man who still values violence, Liebowitz says Kahane’s radical philosophy continues to guide him. “I think the Arabs should be moved out of Israel,” he said, echoing Kahane. “My parents can’t believe that the bus attack had anything to do with ideology. They still think it happened because they got a divorce,” he said, laughing softly.

 

Done