WASHINGTON (Al Jazeera) – Palestinian rights advocates have raised the alarm over U.S. plans to remove a terrorist Zionist group from Washington’s list of “foreign terrorist organizations” (FTO), warning that such a move may embolden Kahane Chai’s supporters.
A United States official confirmed that the State Department has notified Congress of plans to delist the organization, originally known as “Kach”, because it considers it defunct.
Yet while critics acknowledge that the group – founded by extremis, U.S.-born Zionist politician Meir Kahane – officially has been inactive, they say adherents who espouse its ideology are still operating both in the U.S. and the occupied territories.
Before establishing Kach in the occupied territories, Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League (JDL) in the U.S., a hardline pro-Zionist organization linked to several violent attacks on U.S. soil, including the assassination of Palestinian-American organizer Alex Odeh in California in 1985.
“Kach and Kahane Chai splintered into various groups and political parties that continue to espouse, inspire and carry out acts of violence against Palestinian civilians,” said William Lafi Youmans, an associate professor at George Washington University who is working on a documentary about the assassination of Odeh.
“Rather than removing the designation, the State Department should have updated and expanded it. Simply dropping these groups from the list is going to be seen as the United States continuing its light approach towards right-wing violence against Palestinians,” he told Al Jazeera.
Odeh, who served as a regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), a civil rights group, was killed in a bombing as he opened his office in Santa Ana, a city in Orange County.
No one has been convicted for the attack, but ADC and Arab-American groups have long accused Kahane’s JDL of being behind the assassination. Numerous media reports also have connected the group to the killing.
Kahane, who was elected to the occupying regime’s Knesset in 1984 on a platform that openly advocated for Palestinians to be expelled from their homeland, was killed in New York in 1990. But long after his death, his followers continued to carry out violent attacks.