Robert Friedman

The Palestinian riots that have rocked the Jewish state in recent months are a major political victory for Israel’s, radical right–a powerful religious-nationalist movement whose goal is to annex the occupied territories and to expel Israel’s Arabs. Fueled by a blend of biblical prophecy and politics, the radical right contends that God gave the Land of Israel, which includes the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, to the Jewish people. It characterizes the Arabs of Israel as “resident strangers” or descendants of Amalek, the Biblical tribe destroyed by the ancient Hebrews. These hard-line views are gaining ground, according to a recent Israeli poll that found that the Arab riots have strengthened the radical right at the expense of Likud. the large right wing party that is part of the ruling coalition with the Labor Party. Prominent Israeli pollster Hanoch Smith says the small ultra-nationalist parties on the far right now control about 12% of the votes, up sharply from last year. Smith’s latest poll, which was conducted during the second week of the Arab riots

On a fog-shrouded road between Jerusalem and Ramallah on the Israeli occupied West Bank, two young American supporters of Rabbi Meir Kahane put on their prayer shawls to daven (pray), then pulled ski masks over their faces, slipped into black leather gloves and loaded a U. S.-made, M-16 automatic rifle. Around 5:30 a.m. on that chilly March morning in 1984, the men watched an Arab bus wind around a steep curve. As it approached, they jumped from a ditch that ran parallel to the road and one man opened fire on the driver’s window and the bus’ right side. The volley lasted three to four seconds. While nine Arabs lay wounded inside the blood-spattered vehicle, the Jews ran a quarter of a mile to a prearranged spot where a friend from New York waited in a Hertz rental car. When the youths were later arrested by the Israeli police, Kahane told a press conference that his followers were “good Jewish boys,” and that the machine-gunning was “sanctified by God.” The bus attack is part of

At daybreak on April 1, 1987, a dozen FBI agents pulled up in front of the sprawling East Meadow, New York home of’ Murray Young, a 59-year-old member of the Jewish Defense League. Acting on an informant’s tip, federal agents seized 17 firearms in Young’s home, including several rifles, an Uzi submachine gun, stun guns, as well as JDL bank records and membership lists, and detailed notes about JDL bombings directed at organizations affiliated with the Soviet Union. Last month, Young pleaded guilty to federal charges connected to a New York string of bombings between 1984 and 1986, including an attack on Avery Fisher Hall on Oct. 20, 1986, just before the Moscow State Symphony was to appear. The same day that Young was arrested on a federal weapons violation charge, JDL founder Rabbi Meir Kahane was soliciting donations at his cousin’s synagogue, the West Side Jewish Community Center on 34thStreet in Manhattan. Kahane did not tell the overflow crowd of enthusiastic supporters that Murray Young–his trusted lieutenant and the man who organizes his security

EAST JERUSALEM: On a cold, steel-grey morning last November, three West Bank Arab teenagers lunged from the shadows of an alleyway in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City and stabbed to death a Jewish Yeshiva student as he walked to religious school. The Palestinian youths had been rumored to be working as collaborators with Israeli security, and so to prove their nationalist credentials, they killed a Jew. The murder ignited the worst wave of anti-Arab riots in Jerusalem since Israel captured the West bank from the invading Jordanian army in the 1967 Six Day War. Hundreds of Jews armed with submachine guns and Molotov cocktails swooped down on the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s old walled city, burning and looting Arab shops and homes, crying “death to the Arabs!” Israel TV captured the terrible image of club-wielding Jewish rioters, many dressed in the long black coats and hats of ultra-Orthodoxy, chasing terrified Arabs through the Old City. At the height of the riots, rabble-rousing Rabbi Meir Kahane, who has a seat in Israel’s Knesset, held