The Kahanists learned lessons from that battle over the Sinai and put them to use a decade later when Israel’s second peace treaty (this time with the PLO) was drafted in 1993. Just months after the Oslo Accords were signed in Washington, DC on the White House lawn, a former candidate for Knesset in Kahane’s Kach party, Baruch Goldstein, committed the largest mass murder by a single person in Israeli history, shooting dead 29 Palestinians and wounding over 100 more at a mosque in Hebron <https://www.haaretz.com/1.5034290>. During the protests that followed, the Israeli Defense Forces killed <https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2014/2/24/remembering-the-ibrahimi-mosque-massacre> perhaps two dozen more Palestinians. Exactly 40 days later, at the end of the traditional Muslim mourning period, Hamas began its retaliatory campaign of suicide bombings. Over the next three years this campaign would claim over 100 Israeli lives <https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%25D7%25A4%25D7%2599%25D7%2592%25D7%2595%25D7%25A2%25D7%2599_%25D7%2594%25D7%25AA%25D7%2590%25D7%2591%25D7%2593%25D7%2595%25D7%25AA_%25D7%2591%25D7%2599%25D7%25A9%25D7%25A8%25D7%2590%25D7%259C> and harden many Jewish hearts against the prospect of peace with Palestinians. Today, Kahanists can convincingly claim credit for crippling the fragile peace process while it was still in its infancy.
Hebron, the most populous Palestinian city in the West Bank, provides a test case to chart the influence of the Kahane movement on Israeli politics, which has increased steadily over time. In Hebron in 1983, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, Kahanist Israel Fuchs sprayed a passing Palestinian car with bullets. In response, Israel’s defense minister ordered Fuchs’s Kahanist settlement razed <https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/03/07/Israeli-Defense-Minister-Moshe-Arens-Monday-ordered-the-dismantlement/4168415861200/> to the ground. A decade later in 1994, when Goldstein carried out his massacre, also on Purim, Israel’s defense minister put Hebron’s Palestinian residents under curfew and ordered the local Palestinian commercial district locked and bolted. The market has been shuttered <https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/the-shame-of-shuhada-street-hebron/372639/> ever since. Last year, Israel’s defense minister announced that the market would be refurbished <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-plans-new-jewish-neighborhood-in-hebron-s-abandoned-arab-market-1.8201992> and repopulated—by Jewish residents. On the same day, the state renovated <https://twitter.com/BtSIsrael/status/1201454346275303424> nearby Kahane Park, where Goldstein is entombed, and where Kahanists gather <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdbC6N0a90w&t=171> every year to celebrate Purim and the carnage Goldstein wrought. https://merip.org/2021/02/three-decades-after-his-death-kahanes-message-of-hate-is-more-popular-than-ever/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#6049): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/6049 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/80326620/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
