Isreal

Sarah Kendzior “The No World Order”

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Meir Kahane, Netanyahu, Trump, and the war beyond Iran.

 

 
By Sarah Kendzior | March 6, 2026
 

In 1989, terrorist rabbi Meir Kahane made a promise.

“A horrible world war is coming,” Kahane told journalist Robert I. Friedman. “Tens of millions will die. It will be the Apocalypse. God will punish us for forsaking him. But we must have faith. The Messiah will come. There will be a resurrection of the dead: all the things that Jews believed in before they got so damn sophisticated. The amount of suffering we endure will depend upon what we do between now and the end.”

Kahane did not live to see his vision realized. In 1990, the year Friedman published The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane, From FBI Informant to Knesset Member, the 58-year-old Kahane was shot to death while giving a speech imploring American Jews to move to Israel. The alleged assailant, Egyptian-American El Sayyid Nosair, was acquitted by a jury but sentenced by the judge. In death as in life, the circumstances surrounding Kahane are murky and violent.

Friedman had an eye for figures of the 20th century who would define the 21st. Ten years after The False Prophet, he published Red Mafiya: his investigation of a transnational crime syndicate whose members came from the USSR and spent the 1990s infiltrating governments and corporations worldwide. The head of that syndicate, Semyon Mogilevich, put a contract on Friedman’s life.

Death threats were nothing new for Friedman. He’d been getting them from Israelis ever since he wrote the Kahane biography. Friedman had also angered the FBI by claiming they could have prevented the 1993 World Trade Center attacks and correctly warning, years in advance, that the towers would be attacked again. Wary of institutional constraints, Friedman embraced the freedom of a freelancer. In 2002, Friedman died of cardiac arrest. He was 51.

He never saw the future he worked so hard to stop.

Red Mafiya gained a cult following during Trump’s first term. The book elucidates the structure of Trump’s life and presidency: a merger of organized crime, white-collar crime, and government by criminals who elude, then rewrite, borders and laws. Some blame Russia for the US downfall, some blame Israel, but it was always both — along with American collaborators and assorted global operatives.

Red Mafiya names key villains and locales, including Trump Tower, which functioned as a dormitory for organized crime. Mogilevich became an early investor in Trump Tower after fleeing the USSR by getting an Israeli passport in 1988 from Robert Maxwell, the father of Jeffrey Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine. To say Red Mafiya is timeless is to acknowledge we’ve been frozen in hell for forty years.

The False Prophet, on the other hand, is largely ignored. It is in demand but hard to find: used copies of the out-of-print book sell for over $100. I bought mine before the Kahanists — Kahane’s acolytes — returned to power in Israel.

I’ve been wanting to write about The False Prophet for years. I held back since it scares me more than any other book. If it were only history, I would not be so frightened. But The False Prophet describes current events: the extremism that Kahane espoused, and Friedman documented, now dominates Israel and in turn, the United States.

I was born during the Iranian Revolution. As a result, I’ve spent my entire life listening to US officials call for war with Iran. In Israel, the calls are even louder, drowning out reasonable voices who know such a war would be apocalyptic.

The architects of the Iran War know that too, but do not care. Elderly fanatics — from Netanyahu to Elliott Abrams, an Iran-Contra villain who served in nearly every administration of my life — understand that the time to see their goals reach fruition is running out. Trump is not the architect of the Iran war, only its vehicle.

“This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years,” Netanyahu said as the war began, thanking “the United States, my friend, US President Donald Trump, and the US military.”

Netanyahu now says openly what he said behind closed doors in 2001: “America is a thing you can move very easily.”

One cannot understand

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Massive protests in Israel over judicial overhaul. Another school shooting in the U.S. elicits the usual ‘thoughts and prayers’

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

March 27, 2023

Seven people died today in a school shooting in Nashville. Three of them were nine-year-olds. Three were staffers. One was the shooter. In the aftermath of the shooting, President Joe Biden once again urged Congress to pass a ban on assault weapons, to which today’s Republican lawmakers will never agree because gun ownership has become a key element of social identity for their supporters, who resent the idea that the legal system could regulate their ownership of firearms.

In the wake of the shooting, Representative Andrew Ogles (R-TN), who represents Nashville thanks to redistricting by the Republican legislature that cut up a Democratic district, said he was “utterly heartbroken” by the shooting and offered “thoughts and prayers to the families of those lost.” 

In 2021, Ogles, his wife, and two of his three children held guns as they posed for a Christmas card with a caption that read: “The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference—they deserve a place of honor with all that’s good.”

Meanwhile, protests continue in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to hamstring his country’s Supreme Court and put the legislature in charge of judicial review has sparked fierce opposition. 

Netanyahu regained power last November while he was facing criminal charges of fraud, breach of trust, and bribery. His far-right coalition put together a government and elevated two critics of the Israeli judiciary, who promptly put forward a plan of “legal reforms.” 

According to Amichai Cohen and Yuval Shany in Lawfare, supporters of those changes claim that unelected judges who are part of a “liberal deep state” have too much power, often using it to pursue criminal proceedings against senior politicians, prohibit Israeli settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank, or to refuse religious exemptions from military service for ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students.  

On January 4, 2023, Netanyahu’s minister of justice Yariv Levin proposed an overhaul of the judicial system that would put Netanyahu’s slim majority—just 64 seats in the 120-member Knesset—in complete control of the country’s laws, enabling the far-right majority to avoid any checks on its power (as well as enabling Netanyahu to evade the criminal trials he faces). 

But Netanyahu did not campaign on remaking the judiciary; it is the far-right members of his coalition who have made it their signature issue. Protests against the measures began almost immediately as alarmed Israelis realized the move would destroy their democracy.

The protests continued until this Saturday, when Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant warned that the massive backlash against the judicial overhaul, including more and more military members who are boycotting their training missions, threatened the nation’s military readiness. He called for a halt to the attempt to force through the changes. Two members of the coalition backed Gallant and one appeared to be wavering, thus threatening Netanyahu’s majority. The next day, Netanyahu fired Gallant.

The firing sparked massive demonstrations and widespread strikes. At first, the far-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition refused to stop their plans to overhaul the judiciary and called for their supporters to turn out to oppose the protesters, but Netanyahu apparently cut a deal with them. He has announced that the judicial reforms will be postponed while the two sides look for a compromise, and that he has agreed to the formation of a civil “national guard” the right will control. While Bethan McKernan of The Guardian called this move an empty gesture, Zach Beauchamp of Vox noted that the new paramilitary unit will be under the control of the extremist minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who in 2008 was convicted of supporting a terrorist organization and who used to keep a photograph of a mass murderer in his living room. 

Still, as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes, the halt is “pretty transparently a stalling tactic,” launched in the hope that the protests will die down and the package can go forward later, although, as Marshall points out, polls show that the so-called reforms are very unpopular. 

The crisis in Israel threatens the country’s relationship with the United States. During the Trump administration, Netanyahu cozied up to Trump and his Republican allies, and Israel’s continued rightward shift has alarmed foreign observers. In early March, Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the state to “erase” a Palestinian town, and he has called himself a “proud homophobe” and a “fascist.” In Israel, Netanyahu’s son tweeted that the U.S. State Department is behind the protests, hoping to overthrow Netanyahu, a sentiment to which Netanyahu himself has nodded.

When Smotrich visited Washington, D.C., earlier this month, White House officials declined to meet with him, and more than ninety Democratic lawmakers wrote to Biden asking him to use “all diplomatic tools available to prevent Israel’s current government from further damaging the nation’s democratic institutions and undermining the potential for two states for two peoples.” According to Josh Lederman of NBC News, more than 300 rabbis last year said that members of Netanyahu’s coalition were not welcome to speak at their synagogues. 

The threats to the Israeli judiciary threaten the nation’s economy, as billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg pointed out in a New York Times op-ed earlier this month. “Companies and investors place enormous value on strong and independent judicial systems because courts help protect them — not only against crime and corruption but also government overreach. Just as important, they protect what their employees value most: individual rights and freedoms,” he wrote. 

In case anyone missed the obvious comparison between what is happening in Israel and what might transpire in the U.S., Bloomberg continued: “In the United States, our founding fathers’ insistence on checks and balances to control the tyrannical tendencies of majorities was part of their genius. Our Constitution is not perfect—no law is—but its many checks and balances have been essential to protecting and advancing fundamental rights and maintaining national stability. It was only through those safeguards that the United States has managed to withstand extreme shocks to our democracy in recent years—including a disgraceful attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power—without a catastrophic fracturing.”