Kahane Demands Israel Put Him on Trial for His Arab Emigration Plan

The Jewish Defense League reported today that Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the JDL, demanded yesterday in Jerusalem to be put on trial immediately on charges filed against him in 1973 by the Israel government after he called for voluntary emigration of Israeli Arabs and sent letters to more than 3000 Israeli Arabs explaining it to them and urging them to accept his plan.

The JDL here stated that “despite the fact that a large number of Arabs accepted the idea.” Kahane was charged with “incitement to rebellion” and indicted. His trial, they added, has been in limbo since he was imprisoned in the U.S. for more than a year.

The JDL reported that Kahane, who returned to Israel last month after he was ejected from the second World Conference on Soviet Jewry in Brussels, called yesterday for Israeli “courage and initiative” in enforcing a Jewish-Arab exchange of populations that would see the emigration of the vast majority of Israel’s Arabs. He said the hostility and hatred of Arabs toward Israel is an “insoluble problem” and that Israel’s own Arabs pose “the greatest danger possible to the very existence of Israel.” The only solution, he said, was Arab emigration from Israel.

Claiming that the events of the past few weeks on the West Bank and in Israel “prove that I was more than correct,” Kahane warned that unless his emigration plan is put into effect Israel “will suffer another Northern Ireland or Cyprus.” He noted that the departure of Arabs from Israel “will be an exchange of population similar to that which took place between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s and between India and Pakistan in 1947.” He also demanded that the Israel government “expel all Arabs involved in treasonous or violent actions against Jewish sovereignty.”

According to the JDL, Kahane called “for an immediate convening of my trial” to “indict the government of Israel for blindness, weakness and stupidity in regard to the Arab problem” and to reply to the “insane charge” of “incitement to revolution.” He warned, the JDL reported, that “If after a certain time my trial is not resumed I will once again send out letters to Arabs urging emigration.”