ABSTRACT
On October 18, 1988, in an unprecedented ruling, Israel's Supreme Court upheld a decision by the Central Elections Commission to disqualify a sitting party from the upcoming Knesset elections. The party was Rabbi Meir Kahane's extreme right-wing Kach movement. Kahane and his movement continue to promote the ultimate form of labor market exclusion: physical expulsion of the Arabs of both Israel and the territories from their homes to some other country. The Kahane vote was positively correlated with the vote for the Likud, Israel's mainstream right-wing party, whose positions on the Arab-Israeli conflict were considerably more moderate than those of either Kahane or Tehiya. Multivariate regressions analyzed the relationships between support for Kahane and the explanatory parameters. To gauge the full range of sentiment toward Kahane, his party and his platform, a five-level Kahanism scale was constructed. The Kahanism scale had strong and significant correlations with a number of other variables.
