Baruch Goldstein's journey through the West Bank settler movement ended singularly on Friday when he fired his assault rifle at a congregation of Palestinians. But the journey began 11 years before in the same place as so many others have: the borough of Brooklyn.
Thousands of New Yorkers, many of them from Brooklyn and Queens, have moved into the white concrete houses and apartment blocks of the West Bank since the settler movement began after Israel captured the territories in 1967. Some, like Dr. Goldstein, who was born in Bensonhurst, have gravitated toward the extremes of anti-Arab furor, while others lead placid, less political lives, commuting from the territories to jobs inside Israel.
Almost all are part of a pipeline of Orthodox Jews from neighborhoods like Borough Park and Flatbush that has helped fuel the growth of Jewish settlement from a few dots on a map of the Israeli-Occupied Territories to a significant political force.
The movement's political influence has diminished since the Likud Government of Yitzhak Shamir was replaced by the Labor Government of Yitzhak Rabin in 1992.
But its militant and at times violent opposition to the peace agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization threatens to disrupt the peace talks.
Near the Militant Edge
Even before his attack on worshipers in the mosque in Hebron on Friday, Dr. Goldstein positioned himself near the edge of an already militant movement, issuing public calls for the forcible expulsion of Arabs from a greater Israel and referring to them as "Nazis." But in fact, Dr. Goldstein's oratory was simply an echo of Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League and the Israeli Kach party, who was assassinated in 1990 in New York. He was the spiritual mentor of the gunman and of many others who left the boroughs for the territories.
Much of the bristling intensity of Rabbi Kahane's movement and the settlers he influenced can be traced to tensions between Jews and blacks that began 25 years ago, producing a strain of religious combativeness that continues, in a somewhat different form, to this day.
"If you look at what made Kahane, it all took place in Brooklyn, " said Rabbi Shea Hecht, a Hasidic leader who is chairman of the Crown Heights Coalition. "The riots in the sixties, the things between the blacks and the Jews going on -- it's very natural that these are the people who pick themselves up and follow him to Israel." He explained that many of those who considered themselves fighters against anti-Semitism in Brooklyn took up a similar fight when they arrived on the West Bank and encountered new hostility.
Rabbi Kahane founded his movement in Brooklyn and Queens, and it was in those boroughs that his message found its greatest appeal. His earliest organizing attempts were in working-class neighborhoods in central Brooklyn that were once heavily Jewish, but which began shifting toward black and Hispanic majorities in the late 1960's. Playing on Jewish fears of black militancy, he distributed .22-caliber rifles and organized armed patrols in areas like East Flatbush, urging young residents toward armed confrontation.
A Testing Ground?
"You're dealing with an area like Crown Heights or East Flatbush, where you have someone like Sonny Carson," Rabbi Kahane told The New York Times in 1971, referring to the black organizer. "Now, how do you get Sonny Carson out, especially when the Jews are terrified? They're afraid to call the police. They're afraid of doing anything." He added: "You don't sit down with Sonny Carson. Sonny Carson does not listen. With Sonny Carson, you walk in and you say: 'Sonny baby, you gonna get out? Or do we have to cut you up?' "
In a 1985 column in The Jewish Press, he said much the same about Arabs in complaining about Israeli Government inaction: "But Kahane the Arab understands well. He understands that Kahane understands him, that Kahane knows that there are no partial answers to the Arab threat. Kahane knows that only expulsion, ridding the land of them will save Israel. . . . And so of course the Arab is terrified of Kahane."
Dov Hikind, a state assemblyman from Borough Park and a former Jewish Defense League leader, portrayed Rabbi Kahane's Brooklyn as an early testing ground for the Jewish response to modern anti-Semitism.
"In those days, there were many communities in Brooklyn that felt themselves under siege," said Mr. Hikind, who spoke at Rabbi Kahane's funeral. "The neighborhoods were changing, and it was a natural place to get involved in organizing to deal with things like that."
Mr. Hikind said there was no connection between the muscular response to racial tension that gave rise to the Jewish Defense League and the violence that has grown out of religious nationalism on the West Bank.
Close Ties to Kahane
"There is no way in the world that Rabbi Kahane would have condoned anything like this tragedy," Mr. Hikind said. "You can't blame him for people out there who are very sick and like to latch on to him."
Friends of Dr. Goldstein say he was more than simply an admirer of Rabbi Kahane; he was a close associate, traveling frequently with him and helping organize Kach, Rabbi Kahane's Israeli political party, in the 1980's.
Barbara Ginsburg, the director of Kach International, said the two men were so close that Dr. Goldstein served as the rabbi's campaign manager for an Israeli Parliament seat.
When Rabbi Kahane moved to Israel in 1971, he quickly became a hero to many in the settler movement, centered in the ancient town of Hebron.
In his 1992 book, "Zealots for Zion," Robert I. Friedman noted that posters of Rabbi Kahane are plastered throughout the family compound of Rabbi Moshe Levinger, the father of the ultra-nationalist Gush Emunim settler movement, who lives in Hebron.
It was Rabbi Kahane, Mr. Friedman wrote, who broke the taboo on discussing the expulsion of Arabs from Israel, only to be followed by settler leaders and nationalist politicians.
Another Side of the Story
Some Brooklyn leaders say the borough's prominence in the settler movement has nothing to do with the ideology that produced Rabbi Kahane and Dr. Goldstein, but rather springs from the fact that it contains the Diaspora's largest concentration of Orthodox Jews.
"Of the 2,000 American Jews who made aliyah to Israel last year, about 25 percent came from the Brooklyn area," said Herbert Bomzer, rabbi of Young Israel of Ocean Parkway, where Rabbi Kahane's funeral was held. "Why is that? It's simply because we have so many Zionist-oriented yeshivot here who teach a great love for Israel. People grow up here and want to move to Israel and be where the action is, and nowadays, that's on the frontier."
But others among Rabbi Kahane's ideological heirs say the link is less coincidental. There is no better preparation for life in the rough neighborhoods of the West Bank, they say, than life in the rough neighborhoods of Brooklyn.
"You don't want to indict all of Brooklyn Jewry for this one case," said Steve Segal, a Brooklyn leader of the Jewish Defense Organization, an offshoot of the Jewish Defense League that says it has repudiated Rabbi Kahane. "But let's face it. You grow up in a neighborhood where you're surrounded by violence, and then you move to Israel and you run into the same garbage. We don't endorse this kind of immoral act, but that's what happens when you grow up in a bad area."
