Behind the Headlines a Disturbing State Department Brief

Meir Kahane, the American-born rabbi who now heads the extremist Kach Party he founded in Israel, effectively lost his citizenship when he took up a seat in the Knesset, the State Department has argued in a legal brief.

The brief maintains that in addition to committing an expatriating act by accepting the parliamentary post, Kahane has demonstrated through words and deeds that his action was taken with the intent of relinquishing his American citizenship.

According to U.S. law, an American can be found to have lost his citizenship if he voluntarily performs what is defined as an expatriating act committed with the intent of giving up his status as a citizen here. The assumption of an important post with a foreign government is considered to be an expatriating act.

Kahane was notified by the State Department last October that his citizenship had been revoked, or, in the preferred jargon of the government attorneys, had been “lost.”

Represented by Charles Sims of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Kahane took the case to court, where he was told that he had not yet exhausted all the administrative channels for contesting the government’s decision. Back to the State Department went the Kahane citizenship issue, now awaiting the ruling of its Board of Appellate Review.

A POTENTIALLY CHARGED ISSUE

In the churning out of briefs and counter-briefs, a more potentially charged question of principle somehow worked its way into the case which might have otherwise been of little interest to mainsteam Jewish organizations with their aversion to Kahane’s political views.

Sims notified New York Times correspondent David Shipler that the State Department’s legal office had produced a brief that the ACLU lawyer called “an invitation to anti-Semitism.”

He said the document’s repeated references to Kahane’s personal beliefs suggested that religious and political affinity for Israel could be grounds for depriving an American of citizenship.

In a written response to questions from The New York Times, State Department legal adviser Abraham Sofaer maintained that the references had been taken out of their context. They were used only to underscore the argument that Kahane viewed his loyalty to Israel as conflicting with his loyalty to this country and that therefore he had not intended to retain his U.S. citizenship, Sofaer argued.

THE QUESTION OF CONFLICTING LOYALTIES

Many of the references in the brief that were cited by Sims quote Kahane specifically addressing the question of conflicting loyalties.

He is said to have stated, for example, that when the duty of a Jew to the land of Israel conflicts with that of “the land in which he temporarily resides,” the person “must leave the land, give up his citizenship, and resolve the conflict by returning from exile to his permanent home, the land of Israel.”

But other Kahane quotations appearing in the brief speak in more general terms about the central role of Israel for all Jews. These, Sims maintained in a telephone interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, were irrelevant to the State Department’s own argument and should never have been included.

Sofaer himself, Sims pointed out, appeared to acknowledge that the references were out of place when he wrote in his remarks to The Times that although he would still approve the brief in its present form he would insert language in future writings on the case “making clear that a religious Jew is not by that fact any less loyal an American than anyone else.”

Sofaer said he would clarify the language so as not “to allow anyone (even Kahane’s lawyers) a basis for making the claim” that the State Department was questioning the rights of religious Jews to maintain citizenship here.

REACTION BY JEWISH GROUPS

American Jewish groups here have interpreted the entire issue as, at worst, the product of poor wording both on the part of the State Department attorneys and that of The New York Times.

The Times story on the Kahane case appeared to suggest that the brief actually argues that “religious and political affinity for Israel may be a reason to deprive an American Jew of citizenship.” But some thought the State Department may have also been sloppy in its argumentation.

A spokesman for major Jewish organization here said he had heard that Sofaer had not seen the brief before it went out and that the legal adviser was “not at all happy with some of the terminology.”

Kahane’s own attorney said he doubted that Sofaer had seen the brief and that “when forced to recognize the implications” of its argument, he acted like “a good bureaucrat” by defending the document while promising “not to do it again.”

Sam Rabinove, legal adviser to the American Jewish Committee, told the JTA after reading the State Department document that he did not see how the brief “as a whole can be considered by any stretch of the imagination as bad for Jews.”

“I would be proud to associate myself with such a brief,” Rabinove said.

Hyman Bookbinder, the Committee’s Washington representative, said he regarded the issue “as one of the less critical crises” for the Jewish community here, but expressed unease over the linking of Kahane’s case to overall “Jewish” concerns.

“Once again this man, Meir Kahane, has really done the Jewish people a disservice by pressing his case of citizenship and visa rights and all of that in such a way that he has confused and confounded the whole dual loyalty issue,” Bookbinder said.

In his written statement to The New York Times, Sofaer, who is Jewish, pointed out that he himself has “strong feelings toward Israel,” as do President Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz, “but we do not regard those feelings as creating even a conflict of allegiances, let alone a situation in which we sacrifice our allegiance to the U.S. to satisfy some religiously based obligation to Israel.”

Invitation to anti-Semitism or not, the controversial references in the State Department brief are now being downplayed by the very one to have raised the issue in the first place. Still maintaining that the Department’s argument “is an outrageous point of view for the government to make,” Sims said he did not even make reference to the issue in a counter-brief that he has since submitted on the case.