Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, is calling for a coalition of religious and Zionist nationalist groups in the United States to oppose concessions by the government of Israel. In a release to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from Jerusalem, Kahane said the coalition, to be called Echad (One), will be launched at a convention in New York in October.
“I call upon every individual who is a member of a particular religious national group to remain in his organization, as active as before,” Kahane said. But, he added, “There is no reason why individual members of Mizrachi, Betar, ZOA, Agudat Yisroel, JDL, Yavneh and all the countless other groups as well as unaffiliated individuals who agree on a basic program should not be able to join together.”
Kahane said the new coalition would be similar to the Socialist Zionist Union, a coalition which was formed recently by Habonim and Hashomer Hatzair and a number of radical Zionist groups and individuals around the country. He called for “an even greater kind of unity on the part of the religio-national camps.”
Kahane said the members of Echad would support a program that calls for putting Jewish interests first; that says “The land of Israel is the home of the Jewish people and of no one else; there is no ‘Palestine’ or ‘Palestinian People’… not one inch of Jewish land should be given up and there are no allies upon whom Israel can depend.” He said the program would also urge that the “liberated land” be annexed to the State of Israel and “unrestricted Jewish settlement” be allowed there immediately.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
