Kahanists Plot Weapons Deal
Extremists on the Lam May Retreat to America
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The Forward, March 4, 1994
NEW YORK — A top leader of the radical group Kahane Chai says his organization will redouble its efforts to smuggle weapons to its allies in the territories, now that the Israeli government is cracking down on armed settlers affiliated with the Kahane movement in the wake of the Hebron massacre.
Prime Minister Rabin, who already has some extremist leaders on the run, may in fact be running them all the way to America, the Kahane Chai leader, who asked to be referred to only as Mordechai, told the Forward. Many extremist settler leaders are, like Goldstein, American citizens.
“Obviously, now that they are outlawing Kach the Kahane party, the shift is coming to the U.S.,” he said. “This is a democracy that will allow them to operate.” Ironically, law enforcement officials say that leaders of the Islamic extremist group Hamas, feeling the heat of Israeli security forces, have also turned America into a planning base for their operations.
Baruch Goldstein’s rampage came three months after a leader of the Kach party, Rabbi Avraham Toledano, was arrested at BenGurion airport outside of Tel Aviv on weapons smuggling charges. Police in Israel said that Rabbi Toledano, who heads the Temple Mount Yeshiva, had in his possession bomb-making manuals, gun parts and silencers, and police officials said the weapons were meant to be used against Arab targets.
Domestic Terror Threat
Rabbi Toledano’s affiliation with the Temple Mount Yeshiva — an institution dedicated to seeing the Jewish Temple rebuilt where two Muslim mosques now stand — has given the Shabak, Israel’s equivalent of the FBI, cause for concern, sources in Israel say. Jewish extremists affiliated with Kahane’s various movements have tried before to attack the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aksa mosques, and sources in Israel say they fear that the Temple Mount may once again be a tempting target for extremists emboldened by Goldstein’s rampage and inspired by the damage it caused the peace process.
“Is the Dome of the Rock a hillul HaShem (a sacrilege)?” Mordechai asked. “Of course. Many people believe this, including myself. I would not weep at all if the earth opens up and swallows it.”
The other worry of Jewish officials in New York is that Jewish extremists — who may have been behind the attempted bombings in January of the offices of two leftist Zionist groups in New York — will engage in domestic terror, of the sort used against Soviet targets in the 1970s, only now employing it against Jewish and Arab targets. A Jewish terror network of the sort Israel hasn’t seen in 10 years may be emerging anew in the territories; Goldstein appears to have acted on his own initiative, though many of his neighbors in Kiryat Arba, his hard-line settlement, have participated in violent acts against Palestinians.
Confederation of Extremists
But there is certainly a confederation of Jewish extremists in America — and not only in Brooklyn, as much of the press would have it — ready to supply financial and material support to such a terror network. In Montreal just last month, an Orthodox rabbi and a sometimes member of the Jewish Defense League were arrested on drug-conspiracy and weapons charges, and Montreal police, sources in the Jewish community there say, are investigating whether the JDL member, Andor Galandauer, was planning to ship the weapons to rightists in Israel, though one Montreal Jewish leader said that Galandauer had no ties to extremist settlers.
A New York assemblyman who is a former member of Kahane’s JDL, Dov Hikind, says that only a small percentage of those in America who support the settler movement would support the type of violence perpetrated by Goldstein. “People are demonizing Kiryat Arba,” Mr. Hikind said. “There’s no question there’s a support network for the settlers, but that’s a very different thing than” an underground network, Mr. Hikind said.
Estimates vary about the actual strength of such an incipient underground. Some guesses place in the Kahanist camp between 5% and 10% of the more than 100,000 West Bank settlers, and the far-right groups in America, despite their claims to the contrary, have modest memberships, law-enforcement officials say. One American law-enforcement official estimates that Kahane Chai, the most active radical group whose nominal leader, Rabbi Kahane’s son, Binyamin, lives in the West Bank settlement of Tapuach, has between 50 and 100 hard-core members in America.