Summary
Kach, the Israeli movement founded by Meir Kahane after he left the United States in 1971, which in Lustick campaigned on an overtly racist platform to rid the country of its Arab population and won a Knesset seat in 1984 (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 3, lines 3200-3400).
Details
- Kach is one of the three distinct but interrelated carriers of the wave of vigilantism and terror in the West Bank and Jerusalem from 1980 through 1984 that Lustick describes, alongside Temple Mount groups and the Jewish Underground (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 3, lines 3250-3400).
- Two soldiers with links to Kach and to Gush Emunim were the conspirators in the May 1980 plot to blow up the el-Aksa Mosque, whose explosives cache was found on a yeshiva roof in Jerusalem’s Old City (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 3, lines 3300-3450).
- Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, a prominent Gush Emunim activist, was the number two candidate on the Kach list in the 1981 elections (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 3, lines 3300-3450).
- Although Kach established two small West Bank settlements, it received only 3-6 percent of the vote in Gush Emunim settlements in 1984; in 1985 it won two seats on the Kiryat Arba local council and a role in its governing coalition (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 3, lines 3200-3400).
- Parties on explicitly fundamentalist platforms including Kach won together 150,000 votes and eight Knesset seats in 1984 (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Introduction, lines 690-730).
Related pages
For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Meir Kahane, Gush Emunim, Jewish Fundamentalism, Temple Mount