Meir Kahane, an American-born rabbi and founder of the far-right Kach movement, is shot dead in New York City. Egyptian El Sayyid Nosair was later charged with the murder but acquitted in a state trial. The federal government later decided that the killing was part of a larger terrorist conspiracy and thus claimed the right to retry Nosair. In 1995, he was convicted of killing Kahane during the conspiracy trial of Brooklyn-based Arab militants led by Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. Nosair was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Kahane, a charismatic Jewish leader who advocated expelling all Arabs from Israel, found followers in Israel and the United States. He formed the Jewish Defense League in the United States in the 1960s and in 1971 moved to Israel, where he founded the Kach Party. Because of its racist platform, Kach was forbidden from participating in Israeli elections after 1988, but it continued to be supported by extremist Jewish settlers in Israel’s occupied territories. In 1994, after a Jewish settler once affiliated with the Kach movement gunned down more than 30 Arabs worshipping in a mosque in the West Bank town of Hebron, Israel completely outlawed the organization.
