The United States is reeling from the massacre of 31 innocent people in mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, in recent days. Twenty-nine, the initial body count in the US attacks, was also the number of Muslim worshippers slain by the Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein in a Hebron mosque over the Cave of the Patriarchs on Purim in 1994. Today in Israel, Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit), the party of Goldstein admirers, is running in the Sept. 17 Knesset election. Not only that, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his henchmen worked tirelessly to ensure that the attorney Itamar Ben-Gvir, Jewish Power’s leader and a disciple of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, would deign to join the United Right alliance. In the April 9 election, for the 21st Knesset, Ben-Gvir had occupied the seventh slot on the United Right's list of candidate.
According to the latest polling, there is little risk of Jewish Power polluting the benches of the Israeli parliament, given its eventual decision to run alone in the September election. Netanyahu and his ruling Likud’s courtship of Ben-Gvir, however, has already sullied the reputation of the State of Israel.
