In this episode—which continues the three-part series of Recall This Book conversations offering insight into Hindu and Israeli ethno-nationalisms—Ajantha and Lori talk with Natasha Roth-Rowland, a writer and researcher at Diaspora Alliance and a former editor at +972 Magazine. Her dissertation and journalism on the history of the Jewish far right illuminates the enduring ideological, political, and material connections between extreme right-wing political actors in Israel and the United States.
A longer version of this interview aired recently on Recall This Book, a podcast partnered with Public Books. You can listen to the interview here or by subscribing to Recall This Book on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Lori Allen (LA): Natasha, you’ve written a really remarkable dissertation that shows how integrated the far right has been in Israeli society and politics nearly since the beginning of the Zionist movement. You show that radical right ideas are not exceptional to Zionism but rather have been a fundamental part of the ideology, personnel, and politics of the Israeli state and its Zionist supporters in the US. Influential figures in Israel’s government have been leaders and members of organizations that can really only be described as radically right wing, if not fascist.
Could you start by introducing listeners briefly to Jabotinsky and the Revisionist movement from the ’30s, the Kahanist movement from the ’60s, and what the goals and ideologies of this extreme right-wing movement throughout Israel’s history have been?
Natasha Roth-Rowland (NRR): The only way to adequately understand the Israeli far right is as a transnational movement. That’s the context it’s born in, and that’s the context in which it lives today.
Vladimir Jabotinsky was born in Odessa in the late 19th century. He lived at the edges of empire in a context where you have the nationalism of small nations bubbling up all around in interwar Europe. He was influenced by the Polish far right and by other far-right movements around him. He draws on these ideas when he is developing his Revisionist movement, which is a reaction to a more “mainstream” Zionism that is, on its face, less militaristic and more about slowly upbuilding settlements in Palestine. The Revisionist movement is “revising” what they consider to be a more “moderate” approach. The sharp end of that is Betar, the youth movement of the Revisionist wing.
This youth movement really took its politics, aesthetics, a lot of its ideology from the far-right nationalist and fascistic movements that surrounded it in interwar Europe. Initially, they’re wearing uniforms of brown shirts and brown ties, though that uniform is abandoned very quickly in the wake of the book burnings in Germany.
Betar builds its movement through the glorification of youth, the glorification of the redemptive power of violence, especially against the context of Jewish history, which is very much presented as one of just pogrom after pogrom—where Jews are considered subordinate, submissive, repressed, persecuted. This violent, militaristic territorial movement is posited as the response to that.
The Revisionist movement persists through World War II. It’s heavily involved in the war that surrounds the creation of the State of Israel. The military wing of the Revisionist movement, called the Irgun, is a Jewish underground terrorist group that was involved in numerous infamous terrorist acts during the years of Mandate Palestine, between 1931 and 1948.
And then when the State of Israel is founded, the far right recedes a little bit. It’s subsumed by the demands of state making, of politics. The state pursued by mainstream Zionists isn’t the one that the far right wanted, because a huge part of their ideology is territorial maximalism, which would mean a Jewish state on both sides of the River Jordan. What is there now is basically just on the west side.
Fast forward to the 1960s, when the occupation starts. There’s a reenergization on the Zionist right of both the desire for maximum territory and the religious imperative that drives it. There’s a new messianic zeal that infuses the far right, which was a little less pronounced in its early iterations.
In the United States, these politics generate a real upswell of Zionist feeling, which was novel because Zionism was by no means a consensus in the kind of postwar and immediate poststate era in the United States. These ideas map onto sociopolitical ruptures in the US as well, which are also influencing how certain Jewish communities perceive themselves.
Amid these geopolitical earthquakes, you have a figure by the name of Meir Kahane come to the fore. He’s living in New York in the 1960s. He has very, very extreme ideas that mirror the kind that Betar espoused decades earlier: about the redemptive power of Jewish violence, about the messianic drive to, as he saw it, redeem all of the land of Israel that was promised to Jews by God.
He went on to found a far-right group in New York called the Jewish Defense League. It’s mostly advertised as a self-defense outfit that’s there to protect vulnerable Jews against other minority communities in New York. There are a lot of tensions with this group throughout the civil rights era.
The group eventually gets more involved in terrorism. They start bombing Soviet targets in response to the oppression of Jews in the Soviet Union.
These activities get Kahane in trouble with the law. In order to escape his legal troubles, he immigrates to Israel in the early 1970s and founds his political party, Kach.
Kach is essentially a fascist party. It has a fascist platform. It preaches racial segregation, sexual segregation. It preaches violence. It wants total war against Palestinians across Israel-Palestine, and it wants the expulsion of Palestinians from across Israel-Palestine. Initially, Kach has limited parliamentary success. After multiple attempts, it wins one seat in the Israeli parliament in 1984 that is filled by Kahane.
The party is then expelled from Israeli politics; or rather, it’s banned from running for the Knesset in 1988. This is ostensibly because of its racist platform, but actually largely because the rest of the Israeli far right saw it as a threat. They worried that Kach was going to siphon off votes because of polls throughout the ’80s that indicated the party’s growing popularity.
Then, in 1990, Kahane is murdered in New York by an Egyptian man who shoots him at the end of one of his events. And again, the movement fragments a little bit. It becomes a bit rudderless.
But it’s still there. The sentiment is still there. There are still atrocities being committed in the name of Jewish supremacism and in the name of territorial maximalism, probably most notably a 1994 massacre with 29 fatalities perpetrated in Hebron by Baruch Goldstein, one of Kahane’s followers.
Then fast-forward to the present day: you have a Kahanist party in the Knesset, which now has the largest seat haul the movement has ever drawn. And now we’re in the current conflagration.
Ajantha Subramanian (AS): I’m wondering whether this vision of greater Israel, was it initially a fringe perspective or did expansionism define the full spectrum of Zionist thought?
I was especially struck in your dissertation by your analysis of the Six-Day War, which you say produced this sharp increase in American Jewish support for Israel even though support for the far right was still pretty low and was still marginal in the US. So I’m wondering what this means.
Does this mean that the territorial ambitions of the far right were actually much more widely shared? And if so, how would you distinguish these religious and secular variants of territorial maximalism?
NRR: In terms of the maximalism, I don’t want to suggest for a moment that this is something that is entirely unique to the far right. There is the old Zionist maxim that goes: maximum land, minimum Arabs. That is not a slogan that belongs to the Jewish or Israeli far right alone by any means. It’s actually fairly widespread as an idea.
Maximalism was always at the heart of the Revisionist ideology. The logo for the Revisionist movement was the outline of a map of “greater” Israel on both sides of the River Jordan. This was one of the things that distinguished it from other Zionist movements, because it was a top priority.
So it was at the center of the ideology. It was one of the things that distinguished that part of the movement. It wasn’t unique to the movement, if that makes sense.
What distinguishes the religious and secular modes of that ideology, is really motivation and approach. To some extent, Zionism is an anomaly in nationalist ideology. The religious component can never be entirely extracted, because Zionists use religious justification to contend that the land belongs to Jews alone.
For religious Zionists, the land and the Jewish community are part of a single entity. To redeem the Jewish people, you have to redeem the land as well.
You will hear religious Zionist leaders talking about dismemberment when they talk about the West Bank, or what they would call Judea and Samaria. When they talk about the fact that the land of Israel is not whole, it’s seen as spiritual dismemberment akin to physical dismemberment.
When socialism is only intended for one ethnic group, it is not a safeguard against other, more discriminatory, violent, or exclusionary policies, ideologies, or modes of government.
AS: Is there a way in which the far right is able to both be state and nonstate? And does that ability to straddle that boundary actually help it in furthering its ambitions?
NRR: The far right seemed to disappear a little bit in the first couple of decades of the state.
What you’ve had since then is far-right actors bubbling up in response to some event, whether it’s an exchange of land for peace with one neighboring country or another, or a perceived deterioration in security for settlers and settlements in the West Bank.
A far-right movement bubbles up, launches protests against the government, and then the government shifts and coopts that movement. Then you have representatives of that movement or their ideological descendants emerging somewhere mostly within the mainstream of the government. We continue to be able to say that they’re within the mainstream of the government because what is mainstream shifts to the right every generation. Members of the settler elite from the 1970s and eighties who were carrying out terrorist attacks against Palestinians and plotting to blow up the Dome of the Rock are integrated either as party members, elected party members or aides, or people who just have the ear of powerful ministers.
For example, we now have the Kahane movement in the Knesset, and now there are members of the so-called Hilltop Youth, who are the latest vanguard of the extreme right, and who were initially antigovernment, almost anarchist, in the Knesset. You’ve had a couple of other right-wing figures who have been aides to Knesset members. So you see that continually, space is made within the Israeli government for the most extreme aspects of the far-right movements that are initially protesting against it.
LA: It’s been a slow but steady creep rightward from what was already, at its base, a fascistic or at least ultranationalist movement.
One of the questions we wanted to ask was about the role of violence in this move rightward. There’s always been a link between violence and militarism within the Zionist ideology and at the heart of Israeli nationalism. Can you see any change in the significance of these values in Zionist ideology?
NRR: I don’t see that they’ve shifted at all. Violence and militarism sit at the heart of Zionism. Violence as a means of capturing the state—capturing the territory, and then maintaining military rule over Palestinians—whether that’s inside the Green Line until 1966 or within the occupied territories after 1967.
This is a country that has had conscription since its inception. It’s a country that has had prime ministers who are former members of terrorist organizations. It’s a country that sees militarism as the only way to ensure its perpetuation and to secure its own ethno-nationalist group within its undefined borders.
Violence and militarism have become more deeply entrenched.
AS: I was struck by the contrast that you draw between the aesthetics and rhetoric of Kahane versus Netanyahu. In contrast to Kahane, Netanyahu made fascism palatable.
You talk about the 1980s as this really pivotal moment. What is it about the 1980s, the Reagan revolution, and this increasing embrace of neoliberal policies that enables this shift? How does that fit into the picture?
NRR: We now call megadonors who are far-right billionaires, who are very emotionally invested in the right-wing Israeli projects and in the settlement project.
From the 1980s onward, that wealth is pumped into the settlement projects in the West Bank and Gaza. There are vast sums of money being transferred to NGOs, to nonprofit organizations, and to activist organizations that are settling different parts of the West Bank and of East Jerusalem. So that’s the transnational context in which a lot of money from the US funds right-wing projects in Israel.
Also in the 1980s, Israel formally adopts neoliberalism, and it begins slashing public funding, public personnel, public resources.
As happens anywhere that applies this neoliberal model, a lot of space is created for private actors to step in. In Israel, nonprofit organizations receiving huge sums of money from the United States begin to buy up buildings in East Jerusalem, to evict Palestinians from buildings in East Jerusalem, to hire private security to ensure that those evictions are permanent, and so on.
And not only that (and this is something that scholar Arie Krampf argues in his book), because Israel adopts this neoliberal model, it actually insulates the country from global pressure because it makes its own economy more sustainable. It is less reliant on outside funding to prop it up, because so many of its functions have anyway been slashed and integrated into the global economy. There are fewer avenues of economic pressure that other countries can levy on Israel to compel it to change course—whether related to the occupation, or its discriminatory policies against Palestinians, or anything else.
So we’re still seeing the effects of this multistranded phenomenon today. It had its originary point in the 1980s but really snowballed in the 1990s.
AS: One of the things that I found striking was the convenience of the Diaspora. You talk in your dissertation about how moments of horrific violence, for instance Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 Hebron massacre, were labeled “American” as a means of diminishing Israeli culpability. In other words, there was a way that this violence that had clear ties to a far-right Zionist political project could be made to seem exceptional or externalized to the United States.
I’m wondering about whether that’s still even necessary to do today.
If there was a prior moment when the US served as an alibi for extreme violence, where Jewish terrorism was blamed on the American settler, is the use of that alibi even necessary anymore? Or is vigilantism now considered totally legitimate?
NRR: Yes, blaming Americans was definitely a tactic back in the ’70s and ’80s, and even in the ’90s, when you had Kahanists attacking Palestinians and damaging, vandalizing mosques, and when you had the Baruch Goldstein massacre in Hebron in ’94. Israeli media and political officials remarked that Goldstein was an American, a New Yorker. Shin Bet officers and whoever in the Israeli press would say, “Well, it’s just those out-of-control Americans. As soon as we saw that they were attacking a mosque, we knew that it was foreigners.” Anybody who opens a newspaper and sees pictures of mosques in absolute devastation in Gaza, in the West Bank, after airstrikes will make of that what they will.
So yeah, that alibi just isn’t necessary anymore. And yes, partly, it is because there is less of a political need to deflect responsibility for vigilante violence by far-right Jews, especially Jewish settlers, as something that is foreign to the Israeli political body.
The “bad apples” argument that you were still hearing even in 2014 and 2015—after some of the horrendous abuses and murders of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank that were carried out by settlers—that just isn’t really heard anymore.
Further, as I’ve been reporting on in +972 Magazine and other outlets, sometimes, Israeli soldiers have not just stood by and tacitly abetted these crimes but have actually joined in. At that point, the pretense that this is somehow a thing that has been imported into Israel-Palestine just rings so hollow that nobody really bothers with it anymore.
In some ways, the foreigner alibi is still in use. But it’s now restricted to the other side of the political spectrum. So when foreign presence or involvement in Israeli politics is criticized or demonized, it’s only when it is coming through progressive organizations or progressive funding from overseas.
LA: This is a good segue to a more sociological question that we had about the nature of violence and anti-Palestinian vigilantism and rampages against Palestinian communities. Is there a particular sector of society that is more involved? Is there a class element?
We know from the history of Kahanism, for example, that there was an attraction by Mizrahim, or Jews who descended from North Africa and the Middle East, to this movement because they came from traditionally more marginalized communities of Jews in Israel. Is this a politics of resentment? Is that part of what’s going on?
NRR: As with any far-right populist nationalist movement, there is always grievance politics and a politics of resentment at play. And there’s also a politics of marginalization that has been exploited by various Israeli leaders and politicians to dismiss how widespread this far-right sentiment is, to obscure what the sources of far-right violence are, and to obscure how widespread the ideology is across ethnic, economic, and geographic lines in Israel-Palestine.
So politicians use racist tropes, pointing to the role of Mizrahim in that movement. It’s a way for them to dissemble and say, “Well, actually, this doesn’t reflect who Israelis really are.”
At the same time, Kahane was very astute about how he appealed to different communities to build his movement. As he did in New York, he sought out people who felt left behind, who felt excluded. Who felt like they weren’t understood as people, who weren’t given a role to play in their society, who were just dismissed, counted out, scorned, discriminated against. All of those things apply to Jews of Middle East and North African origin in Israel. And so Kahane appealed to that sense. And he didn’t just appeal to it and say, “You have a role, too,” but he articulated it in such a way as to say, “Actually, you are the true inheritors of this state. Western Jews from Europe and the United States over-assimilated. They became weak. They left their traditions behind. They abandoned and betrayed Judaism. You, who were living in the Middle East all this time, you stayed true to your traditions. So that actually puts you spiritually in the top spot here. And I’m seeing that in you, and that’s what’s going to be realized if you become part of my movement.”
AS: You talk about the place of Mizrahi women within far-right gender ideology and for Kahane in particular. For Kahane, Mizrahi women epitomized racial and religious purity. But they were also, in some ways, a weak link, because they, in his mind, were uniquely susceptible to Palestinian men. Kahane’s approach foregrounds their Middle Easternness, but also portrays it as a potential threat because it blurs the distinctions between the Jew and non-Jew.
That struck me as super interesting, but I wonder if you could also speak more generally about the role of “traditional” family values within this far-right ideology and where women fit. Not just as tropes, but as actual people within these movements. Are they members of these movements? If so, why do they join them?
NRR: They are members of these movements. And what that looks like depends on what wing of the movement it is.
I want to reference some really incredible work that’s been done on this by a couple of scholars. One is Lihi Ben Shitrit. Another is Tamar El-Or, and also Tamara Neuman. These are people who’ve investigated the role that women play, particularly within the religious far right.
When we bring to mind what you mentioned, Ajantha, about traditional family values and how that may or may not come into conflict with the active political role that people are expected to take when they’re in these movements, these scholars have delved into the complementarity that exists in terms of women’s role on the religious far right and particularly within the settlement movement.
Now, the settler movement is kind of about home building, which sounds like a gross underplaying of its violence. But actually, it is so centered around creating homes, creating communities.
The act of creating those homes and communities is inherently violent; it enables endless state violence, and it enlists interpersonal violence. But at its core, it’s about building homes. And that is how the people in the movement understand it. They are putting down roots in the land.
Within these traditional family setups, who is responsible for maintaining the home? It’s women. They have domain over the private sphere.
There are moments—where women step outside of those roles and actually do go into the public domain and stand in front of the bulldozers and protest, which occurs when they perceive the settler movement to be under extreme threat—what Lihi Ben Shitrit calls frames of exception.
But by and large, traditionally, the role for far-right women has been one of homemaking, and that becomes inherently political because of the situation in the occupied territories.
Where conflict arises, and this is what I believe Tamar El-Or explores in her work, is that there’s a contradiction between the imperative to build these homes as an act of territorial expansion, contributing to the Zionist political projects, and the spiritual command to recreate the nation.
Because when you recreate the nation in such a dangerous environment, which imperative takes precedence? Is it recreating the family and safeguarding the family, or is it expanding the political project?
They exist along this fault line with this tension that just hasn’t been resolved yet.
AS: I’m wondering about the natalism aspect—is it just religious conservative settlers who subscribe to the natalist imperative to reproduce, or is that more widely shared? And how does that fit with LGBTQ politics, queer rights? What’s the connection between these things?
NRR: The natalist framework is wall to wall. That is not owned by any political or social segment of Israeli society. There is just constant fearmongering about the “Palestinian birth rate” and the supposed threat that poses to the Jewish state. It’s understood as demographic warfare essentially, with all of the racist connotations that brings. So yes, the natalism is inherent across social and political sectors in Israel.
In terms of LGBTQ rights, I have seen liberal / left-wing queer activists propose that the reason that same-sex Jewish couples in the country are allowed to adopt, even though they’re not allowed to marry, is in service of this demographic fight.
There are by no means comprehensive laws enshrining the right to surrogacy and the right to adopt, and it’s still very much a battle for queer couples there. But the fact that it exists at all in such a conservative country speaks to that commitment to increasing the Jewish proportion of the population of the country by any means necessary.
AS: I am wondering about the early years of Labor rule and the characterization of Israel as a socialist state. How does one reconcile that characterization with a settler-colonial occupation?
NRR: Well, it was socialist for Jews only.
When socialism is only intended for one ethnic group, it is not a safeguard against other, more discriminatory, violent, or exclusionary policies, ideologies, or modes of government.
When you understand what was at the heart of that socialism, which was that it was ethnically defined—
AS: Circumscribed.
NRR: Circumscribed, exactly. It’s less of a contradiction; it’s easier to see how that unfolds in line with a settler-colonial policy. In fact, they work together, because that settler-colonial project is being upheld by this restricted socialist model.
LA: You’re saying it was socialism for the Jews. And similarly, it’s been a democracy for the Jews, right? I wonder if part of what Israelis were objecting to in the current Israeli government was fascism now directed more against Jewish Israelis. Of course, this is what Palestinians have been feeling and resisting since the Nakba of 1948.
NRR: In those protests, there has been talk of fascism and authoritarianism in Israel, but it hasn’t related to how Israel treats Palestinians. It’s just related to the rights and trappings of democracy that Israeli Jews have become accustomed to for themselves.
There are some people who’ve started to draw the connections between that and the occupation. But there’s not been a mass understanding that actually the root causes of this are also the root causes of violence against Palestinians. The analysis just hasn’t got there yet. And I fear that what has happened since October 7 has taken us more than two steps back.
I hope that eventually Israeli Jews will understand the contradictions inherent in the idea of a Jewish democracy, but we have to see what transpires in the wake of everything that’s going on now.
LA: Could you reflect on the terms fascism and radical right, and what they might offer, or what you think they might obscure?
AS: And populism. To compare with the India case, there’s a lot of hesitation in using the term fascism, even among scholars who are openly critical of the Hindu right. Other terms are used, such as authoritarian populism.
NRR: Speaking as a Jew, I can understand why people are uncomfortable with ascribing the ideology of fascism to a population that has suffered its most grievous effects. It is uncomfortable to refer to that community as belonging to the same political tree as the one that tried to destroy it less than a century ago.
At the same time, I think it’s important to be realistic about the connective tissue between these ideologies.
I do not believe the term fascism should be liberally applied to describe the whole spectrum of the Jewish far right. I try to be judicious in my use of the term, because I think it describes something very extreme. And if everything is fascism, then nothing is. But I do believe the term serves a purpose.
And certainly, when you’re looking at a movement like Betar, we see that it openly took inspiration from the fascist movements that surrounded it during the interwar period. When you look at the Kahanist movement and aspects of its political platform, you cannot look at those movements and say they are not fascist.
I think “populism” is a useful term if we are thinking about this resurgent far-right nationalism that’s been bubbling up over the last 20 to 25 years, particularly in Eastern and central Europe.
In the Israeli context, there are ideological overlaps: in terms of conversations about securitized borders, ethnic nationalism, “gender ideology” and family values, and Islamophobia. So I find populism useful in a contemporary context.
The term radical right has been used a lot in the literature on the Israeli far right. I understand the “radical” part to refer to something that is extragovernmental; it signals some kind of distance from the authorities and distance from the government.
In my analysis of Israeli politics, that distance has never been established. So I tend to avoid the term “radical” right. “Far right” is more accurate. 
This article was commissioned by John Plotz.
Featured image: Leader of the Kach right-wing movement Meir Kahane speaking before his followers in his office in Tel Aviv (1984). Photograph by IPPA photographer / Wikimedia Commons