Prof. Paul Eidelberg
Rabbi Meir Kahane (z”l) was the most intellectually honest as well as the most courageous member of Israel’s Knesset. But it is a gross oversimplification to say he was “right,” as his followers have dogmatically proclaimed since the latest Arab uprising.
First of all, Kahane’s calling for the expulsion of Arabs not only resulted in his being unjustly maligned as a racist and a fascist. What is more, his name was used by the Left to delegitimize anyone who opposed the suicidal policy of “territory for peace.” This silenced many who otherwise sympathized with Kahane’s cause.
Kahane’s error consisted in his using the “direct” approach vis-a-vis Israel’s pusillanimous government. As I once responded to his simplistic policy: “if the government had the courage to expel the Arabs, their expulsion would not be necessary!” The Arabs would behave and they would gradually leave of their own free will, for they would realize that Zionism was firmly in the hearts of Israel’s leaders.
Brilliant as he was, Kahane did not have an adequate understanding of how Israel’s parliamentary electoral system (unwittingly) served the Arab cause. Because the entire country constitutes a single electoral district in which parties compete for Knesset seats on the basis of proportional representation, virtually every party seeks to gain as many Arab votes as possible—for it could mean one or more mandates. The Arab vote therefore corrupts the Jewish parties, secular as well as religious. But this is a consequence of the parliamentary electoral system.
If, however, Israel were divided, say, into 48 electoral districts, the Arab vote might influence this or that district, but hardly more than a few. Moreover, Jewish Knesset Members would be directly accountable to the voters, hence more responsive to their concerns and convictions. Most Jews are not at all happy about Arab MKs influencing the laws and even the borders of the supposed-to-be Jewish state.
Had Kahane adopted the “indirect” approach to solving the Arab demographic problem, he might have become the leading force in this country. The indirect approach, which is the approach of the Yamin Israel Party, works within the framework of existing law on the one hand, and calls for institutional reform on the other, to accomplishing the goal of preserving Israel as a Jewish state.
For example, Yamin Israel insists on enforcement of the 1952 Citizenship Law, which mandates revocation of the citizenship of any Israel national that commits “an act of disloyalty to the State.” To be sure, the term “act of disloyalty” is judicially vague, so Yamin Israel has drawn up certain amendments to make the law judicially acceptable. Also, Yamin Israel advocates “Personalized Proportional Representation,” an electoral system used in Denmark, Sweden, and Germany. This system would diminish the power of the parties and increase the effective power of the people, whose convictions have always been to the right of the government.
In fact, making the Knesset Members accountable to the people in regional elections would not only increase the power of individual MKs vis-a-vis their party leaders. It would restore the Knesset’s power, which has been encroached upon by Israel’s activist and post-Zionist Supreme Court!
Rabbi Kahane was right insofar as his ultimate goal was right: making Israel an authentic Jewish state. But his conception of the means required to achieve this goal was simplistic. No doubt his calling for Arab expulsion won many Israelis to his cause. But even after the recent barbarism in Ramallah lynching and the outbreak of racist violence by Israel’s Arab citizens, were Kahane alive today he would not win a commanding number of Knesset seats. Virtually all the parties in the Knesset would combine against him, and they would sooner eliminate him than seditious Arabs from that intellectually and morally bankrupt assembly.
What Kahane’s followers do not fully appreciate is the need to radically reconstruct Israel’s corrupt political and judicial institutions, and to do this we need more than a Kahane-inspired party. We need a coalition of traditionally oriented extra-parliamentary groups with a broad electoral base, which of course should include those who identify with Rabbi Kahane’s ends, but employ a more sophisticated set of means.