“The State Department should not interfer with Rabbi Meir Kahane’s right to his American citizenship regardless of the fact that the rabbi has become an Israeli citizen and has been elected to the Israeli Knesset and taken an oath of allegiance to Israel, ” an Arab spokesman wrote to Secretary of State George Shultz in defense of Kahane’s right to his American citizenship. There are reports that the State Department is studying the possibility of stripping Kahane of his citizenship.
Citing a landmark Supreme Court decision, Afroyim v. Rusk (1967), Dr. M. T. Mehdi, president of the American-Arab Relations Committee, a pro-Arab organization which is strongly opposed to Zionism and what it terms “Kahane’s political theory,” said that an American citizen cannot be stripped of his citizenship except if he “voluntarily renounces his citizenship.”
He said that under the Afroyim case, “an American citizen may become a citizen of another country; vote in foreign elections; be elected to foreign parliaments and accept high foreign posts” without losing his American citizenship.
Even more, Mehdi, whose academic field at the University of California (Berkeley) was American Constitutional law, said “a U.S. citizen may join foreign armies and fight in foreign wars” without losing his American citizenship. He even can join a foreign army “in a war against the United States without losing his American citizenship.” In such a case he should be “tried for treason,” Mehdi wrote.
Mehdi said that he disagreed with Kahane and all the Zionists. “The Jews have no right to occupy Palestine” as Kahane and the Zionists maintain, Mehdi said. “But this disagreement should not be a ground to violate Kahane’s Constitutional right to U.S. citizenship.”
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.
