“They're right, the villains - Kahane does live. He is the foreign minister today and the cabinet speaks and breathes from his mouth” (http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/lieberman-is-the-new-kahane-1.336296)
Haaretz.com, the voice of the Israeli left-wing, got it wrong. Avigdor Lieberman, foreign minister of Israel, is not the “new Kahane”. I know Lieberman, like Kahane, is outspoken, openly calls for Israeli-Arab transfer, and sounds more like Middle-Eastern dictator than he does the foreign representative of a Modern-thinking Democracy. However the political motivations driving Lieberman could not be more different than the complicated ideologies that lay at the heart of Meir Kahane’s religious Zionist movement.
Lieberman is the child of the mass waives of Russian immigrants who poured out of the former Soviet Union. They unlike their Western, Oriental, and Arab Israeli hosts were used to and advocated for un-western-Putin-like politics. Lieberman has captured that public sentiment and has made a career out of responding to rhetoric with rhetoric -like a Russian politician. In his way of thinking, the Arabs living within Israeli borders need to either swear loyalty to Israel or leave. Lieberman would run a war against Hamas like Russia has led its war on Chechen rebels –unapologetic, ambitious, and ruthless.
Conversely Kahane philosophy was
“that Israel's democracy be replaced by a state modeled on Jewish religious law, and promoting the idea of a Greater Israel in which Israel would annex the West Bank and Gaza strip…[to prevent Arabs from] becoming a numerical majority in Israel, he proposed a plan allowing Arabs to voluntarily leave Israel and receive compensation for their property, and forcibly removing Arabs who refused” (Wikipedia).
For Lieberman it was simply a matter of POLITICAL fidelity on the part of the Arabs and they could stay. Not especially extreme, many nations follow this system, especially Russia. For Kahane the land was HOLY and was meant only for Jews and for it to be safe Arabs had to leave. Now THAT is extreme.
Haaretz and the Israeli-Left are so predictable. They don’t like Lieberman’s methods and belief’s, and are doing what they can to stem Lieberman’s meteoric rise to political power. This includes, but is not confined to, comparing him to Meir Kahane. But just because Lieberman is as outspoken as Kahane was does not mean that Lieberman is the new Kahane.
Lieberman is a political opportunist Kahane was an ideological politician.
Haaretz and subjective journalism at its best.
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