Israel’s Central Elections Committee has barred the son of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane from running in the upcoming Knesset elections on grounds that his Kahane Chai-Koach party incites racial hatred.
And the High Court of Justice is due to review a similar ruling barring the other post-Meir Kahane faction, Kach, which was founded by the elder Kahane and now led by veteran activist Baruch Marzel.
Kahane, who served in the Knesset from 1984 to 1988, was banned from participating in the 1988 election under the same law, which was enacted during the previous Knesset with the specific purpose of ensuring that he could not run again.
The rabbi was killed in New York in November 1990.
Likud joined with Labor and left-wing parties in voting against Kahane Chai. The vote in the elections committee Wednesday to ban Binyamin Ze’ev Kahane from participating in the June 23 elections was 25-5, with two abstentions.
The Kach party announced in August 1991 that it intended to run a slate of candidates in the next Knesset election. At the time, a Kach spokesman said the ban on the Kach party under the late rabbi had been a one-time matter.
The elections committee on Wednesday also barred three other lists from running — all of them on technical grounds.
One of the three is Medinat Yehuda, another ultra-rightist group whose leading candidate was to have been Robert Manning, currently in police custody in Jerusalem pending the outcome of extradition proceedings against him.
Manning and his wife, Rochelle, are wanted by the U.S. Justice Department in connection with the July 1980 mailbomb killing of an employee of a Los Angeles computer firm.
25 PARTIES LEFT IN RUNNING
Also ruled out on technical grounds was the Malkhut Yisrael party, led by Avraham Banjio of Acre, whose platform included rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem.
Upon hearing the ruling, Banjio burst into tears.
Judge Avraham Halima, chairman of the elections panel, held that he had not produced a sufficient number of signatories to qualify for the elections.
Banjio said his wife had stolen some of the signatures.
The third non-runner was a haredi group, Torah La’am.
This leaves — pending the court’s final word — 25 Knesset lists approved to contest the election, of which 15 are pre-existent and 10 new, among them the immigrant party Da.
One member on Da’s list, Michael Kalvo, has appealed to the High Court against his personal disqualification on grounds that he holds dual citizenship — Israeli and French.
Kalvo argues that he formally applied to the French authorities to revoke his citizenship, which is all that Israeli law requires.
Meanwhile, the elections committee rejected a move by the National Religious Party against Labor’s decision to change its official name from Labor to “Labor under the leadership of Yitzhak Rabin,” which is the name that will appear on the ballots.
The committee held that Labor has the right to add these words.
In light of this ruling, Yahadut HaTorah, the unified Agudat Yisrael-Degel HaTorah list, announced that its official name would henceforth be “Yahadut HaTorah — Agudat Yisrael, Degel HaTorah and Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz.”
Peretz, the absorption minister, is running in the second slot on that list.
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