The Logic of the Israeli Hard Right. Artwork

StocktonAfterClass

Ron Stockton was a professor of political science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn for 48 years. His specialty was non-western politics and political change. He taught classes on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Religion and Politics, the Politics of Revolution, Non-Western politics, and American politics. He also taught in the Honors Program, focusing upon foundational readings from the 18th and 19th centuries. He has an interest in religion and politics and in the role of religio-ethnic groups in the political system. The listener can anticipate talks on Arab-Americans, Jews, African-Americans, the Scots-Irish, and Evangelicals. He has lectured and written on American politics, public opinion, and voting behavior and on the role of religious organizations and ideologies in the political system. There will be occasional discussions of books and films that address serious issues. And he has lectured and published and even taught a class on gravestones, especially those of different ethnic and religious groups such as Muslims, African-Americans, Jews, and Native Americans. The goal of the podcast series is to provide analysis and commentary by a political scientist to explain and make accessible political, historical, and cultural developments in the United States and around the world, and to give the listener analytical tools to understand those developments. It is also to entertain the listener.

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StocktonAfterClass

The Logic of the Israeli Hard Right.

August 17, 2025 • Ronald Stockton

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There are extremist groups in Israel that trace their origins to Rabbi Meir Kahane. Today they control the balance of power in the Israeli cabinet. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are the most prominent personalities. Both are extremely violent and are determined to complete the conquest of what they see as their homeland. And the removal of what they see as alien populations. Smotrich just announced that there will be 3,400 housing units in the E-1 bloc, the last remaining empty space in the zone surrounding Jerusalem. As he said, correctly, this will mean the end of the idea of a Palestinian state.

Kahane was born in Brooklyn but moved to Israel and was elected to the Knesset. Polls showed him increasing to four seats in the coming election. But he was assassinated during a fund-raiser rally in New York.

I heard Kahane speak twice in the Detroit area in the early 1980s. I also read two of his books, Time to Go Home and They Must Go! They were chilling I also read quite a few essays by him. Kahane believed that the Palestinians must be kicked out, and that the American Jews must flee before the American Holocaust starts. It is not a matter of if, but when, that occurs. He said that the only reason for a Jew to be in America was to help other Jews to leave. It is no surprise that those two things -- remove the Palestinians, replace them with Jews -- were linked.

Kahane believed that anything is justified to bring the new age and to save the Jews. I thought of the accusations by radical Iraqi Jews that the 1952 bombings of synagogues were done by Zionist commandos in an effort to panic Iraqi Jews to flee to Israel. I have no way to know if those accusations are correct but such a thing would surely be justified by Kahane. He was filled with hatred of Arabs, Americans and secular Jews. He believed in his cause and would do anything to achieve it. He had a definite support base in the American Jewish community, although certainly not nearly as great as those who were hostile to him. I don’t want to be inflammatory but I wrote in my notes back in the 1980s that I felt I was in a Munich beer hall in 1924 listening to Hitler polish up a speech. I have never heard anyone quite like him.

And today his followers are prominent members of the Israeli cabinet.