War & Peace Quote by Meir Kahane

The line isn’t trying to persuade so much as to pre-authorize exclusion. Kahane frames elections - the signature mechanism of liberal legitimacy - as something that must be fenced off from the “wrong” voters. The premise is stark: democratic participation is acceptable only when it ratifies a single ethnic-national conclusion. “I know” performs certainty as a political weapon, foreclosing debate by treating suspicion as fact.

The subtext runs on a familiar extremist logic: if the out-group is existentially “deadly,” then any internal dissent becomes collaboration. Arabs are not positioned as a rival constituency, neighbor, or political opponent; they’re cast as an implacable force whose mere proximity equals annihilation. That move isn’t descriptive, it’s instrumental: once the other side is defined as murderous by nature, the range of morally permissible responses widens to include disenfranchisement, segregation, and coercion.

His most loaded move is the phrase “a slow Auschwitz.” It’s an act of rhetorical capture: appropriating Holocaust memory not as historical reckoning but as perpetual emergency siren. The pivot - “not with gas, but with knives and hatchets” - modernizes genocide into street-level terror, translating state machinery into intimate violence. It’s meant to be viscerally imaginable and politically actionable: fear you can feel in your body, not just in archives.

Context matters: Kahane built a movement in the late 20th century that fused religious nationalism with ethnocratic policy proposals, especially during years of heightened Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This quote functions as a diagnostic of that project: turning trauma into a mandate to narrow democracy until it becomes protection for one group and probation for everyone else.