Israeli minister Ben Gvir visits far-right figurehead Meir Kahane’s grave

Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has visited the grave of far-right figurehead Meir Kahane to commemorate the anniversary of the US-born rabbi’s death.

Ben Gvir was pictured on Tuesday with a number of other Israelis reading religious passages over Kahane’s grave at the Har HaMenuchot cemetery in Jerusalem.

Kahane was the founder of the political party Kach and the militant Jewish Defence League, which have both been banned as terrorist organisations in a number of countries, including Israel and the US.

Kahane promoted a violent, anti-Arab ideology that advocated the transformation of Israel into a theocracy in which non-Jews would either be expelled or accept no civil and voting rights.

Kach was banned from participating in elections in Israel in 1988 over its racist policies, before being banned outright in 1994 following the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre in which a Kahane supporter shot dead 29 Palestinian worshippers in Hebron.

Kahane himself would later be assassinated in 1990 in New York.

For decades there was a cordon sanitaire around Kahane supporters in Israeli politics – this ended in 2022 when Ben Gvir joined Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

Although Ben Gvir’s support for Kahane was no secret, he had at times attempted to distance himself from some of the rabbi’s more radical policies, provoking boos from a room of Kahanists in 2022 after saying he did not want to expel all Palestinians from Israel.

A number of people criticised Ben Gvir’s visit to the grave on social media, saying it was proof that he was no longer even playing down his connection to the rabbi.

“Ben Gvir’s mouth may say he left his Kahanist days behind him, but his actions, as always, say otherwise,” wrote Shira Silkoff, a journalist at the Times of Israel.

Noam Gidron, a social scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said it indicated the increasing normalisation of the far right.

“The real danger to democracy, here and overseas, does not come from politicians on the extreme right,” he wrote on X, “but from their gray collaborators in the mainstream, who in order to be re-elected to the Knesset and stay on the wheel allowed the extremists to come to power.”

Memorial event

On Tuesday, a group of Kahane supporters hosted a separate memorial event for the rabbi in Jerusalem.

The event was advertised with the slogan: “Today everyone knows Rabbi Kahane was right!”

Among politicians from Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, a number of MPs from other Israeli parties were present.

Moshe Feiglin, a former member of Netanyahu’s Likud party and now head of the Zehut party, wrote ahead of the event that Kahane had been proved right since his death.

“Those who did not listen to Rabbi Kahane in the USA received the twin disaster attack on 9/11 and those who fought the truth and silenced it here in Israel brought upon all of us the Simchat Torah massacre on October 7,” he wrote on X, referring to the Hamas attacks in southern Israel in October 2023.

“There was someone who warned and told the truth – and was persecuted for it up to the neck – until he was murdered.”

Feiglin has previously advocated encouraging Palestinian citizens of Israel to leave the country and has questioned their right to vote in the country’s elections.

In 2008, Feiglin was banned from entering the UK with the government deciding it “would not be conducive to the public good.”