The leader of the ultranationalist Kahane Chai movement has been freed from prison after winning an appeal of his nine-month sentence.
On May 26, the Haifa District Court overturned the sentence of a magistrate’s court and sentenced Binyamin Ze’ev Kahane, son of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, to a four-month term of public service. He had been sentenced for attacking police while on his way to an anti-Arab demonstration three years ago.
The Kahane Chai movement, formed after the 1991 assassination of Rabbi Kahane, and the similar Kach organization were declared illegal in Israel in the aftermath of the Feb. 25 killings of at least 29 Palestinians at a Hebron mosque by a Jewish settler who was a follower of Kahane’s.
Also freed last week was Eyal Noked, who was held under an administrative detention order since March, when the two groups were outlawed.
Noked continued throughout his imprisonment to claim that he had never been a member of Kach.
Both the younger Kahane and Noked protested what they termed “the government’s arbitrary silencing of free speech.”
Kahane vowed that he would “continue to work to save the people of Israel from catastrophe and from their wicked leaders and the judges, who in many cases come under that same rubric.”
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