Whenever the far-right politician Meir Kahane got up to speak in the Knesset after winning his Kach party’s only ever seat, in 1984, the rest of the plenum would walk out. Even the hardline prime minister at the time, Yitzhak Shamir, called the rabbi’s anti-Arab movement “negative, dangerous and damaging”. Kach was banned from politics a few years later for inciting racism.
Four decades on, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still raging, and Israel’s political sphere is more rightwing than ever before. The country will hold its fifth election in less than four years next week. Kahane’s disciple Itamar Ben-Gvir is on course to become a powerful mainstream force.
