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Throughout the 51 Day War, The Shadow organized alongside Michael Ben-Ari, a ringleader of some of the settlement movement's most extreme elements. Ben-Ari was a former lieutenant of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the patron saint of Israel's ul-tra-nationalist right who immigrated from Brooklyn to Israel in 1971 to organize militant cells among fanatical Jewish youth.
Though he was banned from the Knesset, where he served during the mid-1980s, for his open calls for violence, and his Kach party was outlawed, Kahane's influence has lived on in the discriminatory laws introduced by mainstream parties and through acolytes like Ben-Ari, who held a seat in the Knesset from 2009 to 2013. While in the Knesset, Ben-Ari turned his parliamentary field offices into organizing hubs for the anti-Af-rican movement, which organized vigilante patrols that harassed and incited violence against the sixty thousand non-Jewish African refugees living in Israel. Through Lehava, a radical hate group dedicated to preventing romantic relationships between Jews and Arabs, Ben-Ari and fellow Kahanists held rallies in mixed Jewish-Arab cities across Israel to spread held rallies in mixed Jewish-Arab cities across Israel to spread fear and hatred of supposedly predatory Arab males. In June, Lehava had helped organize the "Death to Arabs" rallies in Jerusalem that inspired the killing of Muhammad Abu Khdeir.
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