카하네주의
카하네주의(כהניזם / Kahanism)는 신시오니즘의 하위 분파 중 하나다. 이들은 이스라엘 전 지역의 모든 아랍인은 유대인의 적이며 이들을 모조리 추방시키고 비유대인은 투표권이 없는 유대인 신정국가를 건설해야 한다고 주장한다. 이스라엘에서도 극우파로 간주된다.
1971년에 이러한 사상을 기반으로 한 국수주의 정당인 카흐당(Kach)이 있었으나 1994년 이스라엘 정부에 의해 강제 해산되어 불법조직이 되었다. 리쿠드 등 수정시오니스트들도 이들과는 선을 긋고 있으며 미국 등 서방 국가 일부에서도 테러단체로 보고 있다.
2022년 말 카하네주의자 이타마르 벤그비르가 국가안보장관이 되었다.
신시오니즘
ניאו-ציונות / Neo-Zionism
6일 전쟁 이후 대두된 시오니즘의 분파 사상으로 팔레스타인인 기독교인, 무슬림들을 모조리 추방하고 유대인을 이주시켜 대이스라엘(Greater Israel)을 건설해야 한다는 사상이다.
6일 전쟁 이후 자신감이 생긴 극우 유대인들은 다윗-솔로몬 왕 시절의 이스라엘 왕국 영토를 회복해 유대 신정 국가를 건설하자고 주장했다. 아랍 무슬림들은 이스마엘의 후손이고 불법체류자이기 때문에 모조리 추방하는 것이 당연하고 예루살렘에 바위의 돔을 박살내고 제3의 성전(The Third Temple)를 건설하자고 주장하고 있다.
이는 대이스라엘주의와 카하네주의로 이어지고 있고 이스라엘 당국도 이들 때문에 이스라엘의 존립 자체가 위험해지고 있기 때문에 리쿠드조차도 이들을 탄압하고 있다.
2022년 말 카하네주의자 이타마르 벤그비르가 국가안보장관이 되었다.
대이스라엘주의
이들은 '잃어버린 땅을 되찾아야만 한다' 고 주장하는데 이들이 말하는 잃어버린 땅은 나일 강과 유프라테스 강 사이의 모든 영역이다.
3000년 전 이스라엘의 전성기였던 다윗-솔로몬 왕 때 유대 왕국의 영토가 그 정도였다고 성경에 언급된다고 한다. 이는 레바논(400만), 시리아(2400만), 요르단(640만) 전 영토와 이라크(2800만) 반절 이상을 합친 범위인데 대충 현재 이스라엘 면적의 25배 정도? 덕분에 1982년 이집트에게 시나이 반도를 반환할 때 반발이 극심했으며 심지어 민병대들이 시나이에 또 다른 이스라엘을 건국하겠다고 개드립을 칠 정도였다. 그러나 이스라엘이 시나이 지역을 돌려준 가장 큰 까닭은 도무지 자기들로선 여길 지배하는 게 어렵기 때문이었다. 이스라엘 내 지식인, 전문가들도 이스라엘 극우들의 엉터리 주장 영토는 설령 전쟁을 통해 차지한다 해도 계속 관리하는 건 불가능하다고 의견을 모은다. 팔레스타인조차 관리하지 못하는 6백만 수준 이스라엘 인구로 현재 인구 6천만이 넘는 저 지역들을 모두 지배한다는 건 절대로 불가능하다.
그럼에도 저게 가능하다고 믿는 광신도들도 있는데 상식적으로 모든 나라를 쳐부수고 정복에 성공한다고 쳐도 아랍계 현지인들을 어떻게 다룰지 문제가 남는다.
이스라엘 동전 음모론
일부 무슬림 및 반유대주의자들은 이스라엘 10아고롯 동전에 새겨진 위 이스라엘 중앙은행 로고가 대이스라엘주의에서 주장하는 강역과 일치한다며 이스라엘 정부가 공식적으로 대이스라엘주의를 인정했다고 주장한다.
하지만 이스라엘이 대이스라엘주의를 "공식적으로 인정했다"는 것은 명백한 거짓이다. 음모론이 사실인지 아닌지는 차치하고도 사실만 두고 보자면 이스라엘과 불구대천의 원수 관계인 팔레스타인의 예서 아라파트 대통령이 그렇다고 주장한 것이 시초이며 당연히 이스라엘은 이를 부인했다. 이스라엘 측의 말로는 안티고노스 2세 마타티아스 치세하의 금화 유물의 외형을 따라 그린 것 뿐이라고 한다.
또 우측과 상단이 많이 갈려나갔지만 좌측 하단의 톱니바퀴 모양으로 난 자국은 이 모양이 동전을 본뜬 것이라는 이스라엘 측의 해명에 무게를 실어준다.
음모론자들이 주장하는 "Greater Israel" 지도의 예 1. 자세히 보면 시나이 반도-이스라엘로 이어지는 지중해 해안선이 맞지도 않으며 홍해를 어중간하게 가르고 있는 모습을 볼 수 있다.
Kahanism is neither Judaism nor Zionism
At one Shabbat, a man approached me and said, “Rabbi, don’t you think it’s time to bring back the JDL? Maybe Meir Kahane was right — ‘every Jew, a .22.'”
My response to him came in the form of a grimace, and then, a sigh.
The sigh: one of the most powerful Jewish memories of my teen years.
It was 1969, 55 years ago this spring. The rabbi of our suburban Long Island synagogue loved presenting provocative programs, but none as provocative as the evening when the late Rabbi Meir Kahane publicly debated a prominent Reform rabbi.
Rabbi Kahane was the founder of the Jewish Defense League (he is the subject of an excellent intellectual biography by Shaul Magid). He had served as a pulpit rabbi in Howard Beach, Queens. (Fun fact: he presided at folksinger Arlo Guthrie’s bar mitzvah ceremony.) Kahane founded the JDL in 1968. Its original goal: to protect elderly Jews from street crime in the changing neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens — Jews whose more affluent relatives and neighbors had abandoned those neighborhoods for Westchester and Long Island.
Kahane opened the conversation. He spoke about the Holocaust and the lack of Jewish resistance. He spoke about Jewish pride and the need for Jews to defend themselves against their oppressors — whomever and wherever they might be. He sneered at ineffectual, weak Jewish men — “nice Irvings,” he called them — lawyers, accountants and dentists. (He was laughing at our fathers and uncles.) He railed against establishment Jewish groups who cared more about propriety and dignity than about Jewish survival.
Meir Kahane’s message thundered to the sanctuary’s ceiling: “Never again!” Never again would Jews go meekly to their own destruction. Never again would Jewish boys and girls be nice. Niceness, Kahane said, had led to Auschwitz. I can still hear him saying: “When Moses encountered the taskmaster who was beating a Jew, he did not form a committee. He did not take out newspaper ads. He did not collect signatures on a petition. He slew him.”
Then, it was time for the other rabbi to speak. He served a congregation in a leafy Connecticut suburb.
An audience member asked him: “How should we respond to antisemitism?”
His answer: “We should picket country clubs that don’t allow Jews to join.” The audience howled with laughter. Jews in the outer New York City boroughs are endangered; Jews in the Middle East and Europe are endangered — and you speak of country clubs?
When the laughter died down, Kahane did an advertisement for the JDL camp in the Catskill mountains that taught self-defense to young Jews. The Catskills! The summer address of American Jewish vulgarity and excess! A skinny kid from my confirmation class, a scion of a family that owned a famous Catskills resort, exclaimed: “That’s it. I’m going!” He was not the only one who went for the sales pitch. For many young Jewish men, tired of being wimps, the JDL was like a Charles Atlas body building program for the psyche.
Needless to say, Kahane won that debate. Within a few years, he would become one of American Jewry’s most prominent rabbis — even meriting an interview in “Playboy” magazine.
The Jewish Defense League began with noble intentions — to protect Jews. As Magid shows, Kahane’s writings from that period were cogent, albeit hot-headed, critiques of American Jewish identity — what he sometimes called “bagels and lox Judaism.” Kahane was a radical — a Jewish version of Malcolm X. The JDL was a Jewish Black Panthers, even mimicking the Panthers in their use of the clenched fist as an emblem.
But soon, the JDL turned to higher forms of mischief and mayhem in support of Jewish causes. In the words of Yossi Klein Halevi, who spent part of his boyhood in its ranks, they had a certain “ecstasy of rage.” That ecstasy of rage appealed to children of Holocaust survivors, especially those working-class Jewish kids in the outer boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. In their support of Soviet Jewry, they would violently disrupt events featuring Russian performers. In 1972, they placed a bomb in the office of the impresario Sol Hurok; when it exploded, it killed a secretary, a young Jewish woman.
Then, the JDL moved, along with its leader, to Israel. Like many new immigrants, it changed its name. The JDL became Kach International. Kach: a cold monosyllable — from the Hebrew word meaning “thus it is.”
There, Kahane developed an ideology that blended ultra-nationalism with fundamentalism. Even today, his ideological admirers scrawl on walls in Israel: Kahana tzadak — “Kahana was right!” Right about what? That Israel should forcibly expel Arabs from the land of Israel, especially the West Bank.
In 1990, an Arab terrorist, El Sayyid Nosair, assassinated Kahane. But, his ideology would survive him. Kahanism influenced Baruch Goldstein to murder Muslims at prayer in Hebron on Purim, 1994. Kahanism was so dangerous that Israel banned Kach from membership in the Knesset.
But that ideology has been resilient. It influenced several of Israel’s current coalition members — in particular, Itamar Ben-Gvir. That ideology haunts the long article in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about militant settlers in the West Bank who have committed acts of violence against Palestinians.
But, let me get back to my interlocutor at the synagogue — the one who thought Kahane had been right and we might need to revive the JDL, as it existed circa 1968.
My responses to him had been a sigh and a grimace.
The grimace: I sympathize — no, I empathize — with Jews who are afraid. The lessons of history are clear: there is every reason to believe campus protests will devolve into violence.
So what gives me pause? Because I don’t want to live in that version of America, of armed tribal battalions and vigilantism.
You might disagree with me, and such disagreement would be legitimate. Anecdotally, I have heard of a number of Jews who have shocked themselves by winding up at a shooting range — just in case.
The question: How should American Jews think about Kahanism and the acts of settler violence The New York Times has reported?
Jews defending themselves against aggression? Absolutely.
But when that devolves into aggression itself and xenophobia — no.
Am I just being a typical Jewish liberal?
Also, no.
How does the Torah itself understand this issue?
The non-Jew in the land of Israel is the ger, “the stranger within our gates.” We had to provide for the welfare of the stranger, who was often an impoverished laborer or artisan — “because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
In the words of the late biblical scholar Nechama Leibowitz, “A history of alienation and slavery, the memory of your own humiliation is by itself no guarantee that you will not oppress the stranger in your own country once you have gained independence and left it all behind you.”
The Torah mandates, no less than 36 times, that Jews are responsible for treating the stranger with love and justice.
In that sense, Kahanism violates both the letter and the spirit of Jewish teaching. Fans of the comic Superman will remember Bizarro Superman, a distorted doppelganger of the superhero.
Kahanism is Bizarro Judaism and Bizarro Zionism — because it bases itself not on a love of Zion or of the Jewish people. Rather, it bases itself on a debased hatred of Arabs, Palestinians and Muslims.
I have learned from my friend, Gil Troy:
I believe in a Zionism that faces facts, that exercises power with restraint, that sees the Jewish past as a lesson, not as a mystical imperative or as an insidious nightmare; that sees the Palestinian Arabs as Palestinian Arabs, not as the camouflaged reincarnation of the ancient tribes of Canaan or as a shapeless mass of humanity waiting for us to form it as we see fit; a Zionism also capable of seeing itself as others may see it; and finally, a Zionism that recognizes both the spiritual implications and the political consequences of the fact that this small tract of land is the homeland of two peoples fated to live facing each other.
Two final quotes.
I think of Judge Jack B. Weinstein, who was a United States district judge in New York and one of this past generation’s most distinguished jurists.
These are the words of his decision in U.S. v. Kahane, 1971, in which members of the JDL were sentenced on bomb-making charges: “In this country, at this time, it is not permissible to substitute the bomb for the book as a symbol of Jewish manhood.”
And, I think of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. In an address to the Knesset, he spoke of the followers of Kahane and Baruch Goldstein, as quoted in The New York Times Magazine:
“You are not part of the community of Israel. You are not partners in the Zionist enterprise. You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out. You placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law.”
Yes, for many, Meir Kahane speaks from the grave.
So does Yitzhak Rabin.
I prefer his voice. I hope most Jews, and most Israelis, would prefer that voice as well.