Guardian tries linking Meir Kahane to Menachem Begin

Late last month, we prompted a correction to a Guardian long-read by Joshua Leifer, (“Kahane’s ghost: how a long-dead extremist rabbi continues to haunt Israel’s politics“, March 20), which initially claimed that Hamas’s first suicide bombing was launched as an act of retribution following Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of Muslims in 1994.

In fact, as the new language in Leifer’s piece now notes, Hamas first suicide bombing took place in 1993, ten months prior to Goldstein’s attack. This of course undermines Leifer’s desired narrative suggesting that Israeli extremism incited Hamas to engage in the barbaric act suicide bombing.

However, there was another claim by Leifer in the piece, in service of his broader thesis that Meir Kahane’s political extremism had embedded itself in Israeli political mainstream in the 1980s:

Yet Kahanism had not emerged from out of nowhere but from within the precincts of the Revisionist right. When he was merely a US rabble-rouser and anti-Soviet activist in New York, the then prime minister, Menachem Begin, and Yitzhak Shamir, who succeeded Begin as Likud leader, had encouraged his activities. Begin…offered Kahane a seat on the rightwing Revisionist Herut party’s list. Kahane refused both.

This seemed extraordinarily unlikely, as Menachem Begin (and Yitzhak Shamir) openly despised Meir Kahane. Begin called him a “crazy” and “dangerous” man, and even, as prime minister in 1980, initially supported an administrative detention order against Kahane, due to intelligence indicating that he and his followers were planning to bomb buses in Hebron.

So, we checked with the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, and a researcher at the center told us that it was, in fact, Kahane who asked Begin if his Kach party could become part of Begin’s Herut Party (which would later become part of Likud). Begin refused Kahane’s request. So, Leifer’s claim that it was Begin who offered Kahane a seat in his party is the opposite of the truth.

We’ve complained to the Guardian asking for a correction.

h/t Yisrael Medad

Editor’s Note: We revised this post on May 20th, deleting a sentence denying the Guardian article’s claim that Kahane wrote an introduction to an edition of one of Menachem Begin’s book after finding evidence of the edition in question.