Meir Weinstein’s Announcement Should Surprise Nobody

By Howie Silbiger

Meir Weinstein announced this week that his Israel Now movement is forming what it calls the New Jewish Defense Force. The group intends to document organizations and individuals it considers a threat to the Jewish community, conduct research, gather intelligence and confront those supporting Hamas and other terrorist organizations. Weinstein said he is finished with statements and passive reactions. His message was simple: Enough being a victim.

Weinstein’s announcement will be condemned. The history of the Jewish Defense League will be pulled out, the old labels will be repeated and respectable Jewish leaders will warn against vigilantism. Some will attack Weinstein personally. Others will dismiss the entire project as a fringe organization exploiting Jewish fear.

The more important question is why an organization like this can once again find an audience in Canada.

Weinstein led the Canadian Jewish Defense League for decades and has long described himself as a disciple of Rabbi Meir Kahane. Kahane founded the original JDL in New York in 1968 on the belief that Jews could no longer leave their physical security entirely in the hands of governments and police departments. He wanted Jews trained, organized and prepared to defend themselves.

His movement grew because Jews were being attacked and the established Jewish organizations appeared powerless to stop it. Kahane had little patience for meetings, resolutions and quiet diplomacy. He believed Jewish leaders had become too dependent on the approval of people who would never face the consequences of Jewish weakness.

His methods made him an outcast, but his larger argument was harder to dismiss. He did not believe American Jewish security was permanent. He did not believe anti-Jewism could be educated out of society. He did not believe assimilation could continue without eventually hollowing out American Jewish life. He also rejected the idea that Israel’s enemies were simply waiting for the right peace proposal.

Most importantly, he understood that Israel was facing a religious war.

I made that argument on my show last night. Once we accept that the war is religious, the list of possible solutions becomes very short. A dispute over territory can be settled by dividing territory. A disagreement over money can be settled by paying money. A political conflict can sometimes be settled by changing governments or laws. A religious war over whether Jewish sovereignty is permitted cannot be settled by moving a border five kilometres in either direction.

Hamas does not want a better Palestinian state beside Israel. It wants Israel gone. Palestinian Islamic Jihad does not object to a particular Israeli government. It objects to Jewish sovereignty. Iran does not spend billions of dollars arming terrorist organizations because it is concerned about checkpoints or municipal boundaries. The destruction of Israel is part of its larger religious and political ideology.

The West continues to treat the conflict as a real estate dispute. Diplomats speak about confidence building measures, economic cooperation and negotiated settlements. Israel has tried negotiations, territorial withdrawals, prisoner releases and allowing billions of dollars to flow into Gaza.

October 7 was the answer.

Kahane concluded that Jews and Arabs could not share the same national future. More than 35 years after his death, Israel remains trapped because its leaders still refuse to accept the nature of the conflict. Israel can separate the populations, or it can continue trying to manage a religious war while the two sides remain economically, politically and physically entangled.

Complete separation means separate political futures, firm borders and an end to the fantasy that Israelis and Palestinians can be pushed into one state and somehow learn to live together. Israel cannot continue depending on Palestinian labour, allowing hostile populations regular access to Israeli communities and administering millions of people who do not accept its existence. The Palestinians must be responsible for their own government, economy and society without expecting Israel to remain both their enemy and their permanent provider.

Security policy cannot be based on the hope that enough people on the other side privately want peace. It must be based on the beliefs, institutions and armed movements that actually hold power. Gaza was handed to the Palestinians and became a Hamas military base. Schools, mosques and media were used to prepare another generation for war. Israel did not receive coexistence. It received rockets, tunnels and a massacre.

Kahane also warned American Jews that they had mistaken success for safety. Jews had entered universities, government, business and the professions and convinced themselves that America had escaped the pattern of Jewish history. They were wealthy, politically connected and accepted in places that had excluded their parents. Synagogues were growing and Jewish organizations had access to the highest levels of government.

Kahane believed that comfort was temporary.

He warned that anti-Jewism would return and that American Jews, weakened by assimilation, would not be prepared when it did. He argued that Jewish continuity required serious Jewish education, opposition to intermarriage and a stronger commitment to Israel. He believed that a Jewish community which no longer understood why it should survive eventually would not.

He was ridiculed for saying it. The future now looks considerably closer to what he predicted.

Jewish students are told that Zionism makes them unwelcome on university campuses. Jewish businesses are targeted because their owners are Jewish. Synagogues and schools require guards, locked doors and police protection. Protesters praise Hamas in Canadian streets and then insist their hatred is directed only at Zionists.

The word Zionist has become a permission slip. Call the Jew a Zionist first and almost anything said or done afterward can be presented as political protest.

Kahane understood that anti-Zionism would become the language through which anti-Jewism returned to respectable society. A Jew who remained quiet might be tolerated. A Jew who defended Israel would be treated as a supporter of oppression. A synagogue, school or business could be attacked over events in Gaza, while everyone involved continued insisting that the attack had nothing to do with Jews.

His warning about assimilation was just as direct. American Jewry would not necessarily disappear through persecution. Much of it would simply fade. Judaism would become a cultural attachment, then an occasional holiday, then a story told about grandparents. Jews would become successful Americans while becoming less Jewish.

Kahane believed Jewish survival required more than memory and cultural pride. It required Jews who still believed in Judaism and understood why a Jewish state was necessary.

That brings us back to Meir Weinstein.

His announcement is important because the same conditions that produced the Jewish Defense League more than half a century ago are once again present in Canada. Jewish schools have been shot at. Synagogues have been attacked. Jewish businesses have been vandalized and struck by gunfire. Open supporters of terrorist organizations march through Canadian cities, while the government holds summits, appoints special envoys and promises that hatred has no place here.

Groups like Weinstein’s emerge when people no longer believe the institutions responsible for protecting them are capable of doing it. A Jewish school under threat needs more than sympathy. A Jewish business attacked by gunfire needs more than a statement from a politician. A synagogue surrounded by protesters needs more than advice to remain calm.

Jewish defence must be organized, disciplined and real.

Kahane’s opponents believed that discrediting the man would also discredit the conditions that produced him. It did not. Anti-Jewism returned, terrorism became more organized, the peace process collapsed and the religious nature of the war became impossible to ignore.

Meir Weinstein’s announcement is important because many Jews are once again losing faith in the people and institutions that are supposed to protect them. The return of a movement built around Jewish defence should surprise nobody. When Jews no longer believe the people in authority will protect them, they begin looking for someone who will.

That was Kahane’s message. It is also why, 35 years after his assassination, his ideas and solution still resonate.