The deputy speaker of the Knesset has said that Meir Kahane, an ultranationalist rabbi who called for the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel and whose Kach movement is still banned as a terrorist organisation, was right.
Nissim Vaturi, a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, made the remarks during a parliamentary debate on Wednesday in which he also criticised former Likud leaders for refusing to engage with Kahane.
Challenged by other MPs that Kahane was a terrorist, and asked if he supported “Jewish terror”, Vaturi replied: “I support it. Believe me, Kahane was right in many ways where we were wrong, where the people of Israel were wrong.”
Likud leaders of the past had been wrong to exclude Kahane, Vaturi continued: “They should have examined the matters and understood one thing: Arabs on our border, terrorists on our border.”
US-born Kahane was himself elected to the Knesset in 1984 after Kach won a single seat in that year’s elections, but found himself ostracised and reviled by his fellow MPs and in wider Israeli political circles.
