Benyamin Netanyahu was not only one of the first foreign leaders to warmly congratulate Donald Trump on his re-election to the White House, but he was also quick to announce the appointment of a new ambassador to Washington to replace Michael Herzog, brother of the current President of the State of Israel, whose relationship with the prime minister is notoriously strained.

Netanyahu, who himself served as deputy ambassador to the United States from 1982 to 1984, then as Israel's ambassador to the United Nations from 1984 to 1988, is back in control of the most strategic post in Israeli diplomacy.

He reminded even his allies that he intends to take charge of this diplomacy, whoever the foreign minister may be – yesterday Israel Katz until his recent appointment to defense, today, Gideon Saar, a dissident who has returned to favor. And the choice of Yechiel Leiter for Washington, an ultranationalist with no diplomatic experience, is extremely revealing.

Israel's new ambassador to the US is intimately acquainted with this country, where he was born in 1959 in the same Pennsylvania town as President Joe Biden. As a teenager, Leiter was active in the Jewish Defense League (JDL), founded in 1968 in New York by Rabbi Meir Kahane. The LDJ's aggressive methods and planned attacks exposed the group to repeated prosecutions.

Kahane, who emigrated to Israel in 1971, soon founded an equivalent to the LDJ, operating under the Hebrew name Kach, with the same symbol of a clenched fist over a Star of David. Arrested many times in Israel for disturbing the peace, Kahane was imprisoned for six months in 1980 for planning attacks on Palestinian residents of Hebron, in the occupied West Bank. Leiter, who had decided to emigrate to Israel in 1978, witnessed the rise to power of Rabbi Kahane, who, despite his run-ins with the law, was elected to the Knesset in 1984.

Yet Kach's program was one of overt racism, with plans to limit the rights of Arabs with Israeli citizenship, and even to criminalize sexual relations between Jews and Arabs. As for Kahane, his outrages are such that other parliamentarians resorted to boycotting his speeches and leaving him to speak before an empty Knesset. On top of this, an amendment to the electoral law excluded Kach for his incitement to racism and barred Kahane from standing for re-election in 1988. Two years later, the militant rabbi was assassinated in New York by an Egyptian extremist, leaving both Kach in Israel and the LDJ in the United States without a clear direction.

You have 53.01% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.