From the March-April 2019 issue of News & Letters

Israel’s reactionary Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party faces serious opposition in upcoming elections in April. He is also facing legal peril over charges of fraud, bribery, and breach of trust over trading political favors.

In response, he has allied with the fascist Jewish Strength party, disciples of Meir Kahane. Kahane followers included mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Arabs at the Mosque of the Patriarch in 1994, and Yigal Amir, assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. This alliance has crossed a line for many former supporters.

Read today, horrifyingly, Kahane’s 1981 racist anti-Arab manifesto They Must Go, where he wrote “a man needs to dwell in his own land…where the state represents his national and cultural aspirations,” fits pretty easily into bourgeois politics today. It could be Trump, Modi, Putin, Salvini, Bolsonaro or Xi Jinping speaking.

—Gerry Emmett