Politics & Power Quote by Meir Kahane

“National amnesia” is a deliberately clinical insult: not mere forgetfulness, but a cognitive failure so severe it threatens identity itself. Kahane frames politics as diagnosis and emergency. If the nation is “suffering,” then ordinary disagreement becomes pathology; if the problem is amnesia, then the cure is enforced memory. The line’s power is how it turns history into medicine and dissent into a symptom.

The phrase “who and what we are” does double work. “Who” gestures to ancestry, belonging, and a shared story; “what” slides toward essence, the idea that a people has a fixed nature that can be betrayed. That pairing tightens the rhetorical noose: if identity is definitional, then pluralism becomes dilution, and change reads as self-erasure. The invitation is not to debate policy but to recommit to an authorized version of collective selfhood.

Context matters because Kahane was not a neutral guardian of heritage. As a militant Jewish nationalist and founder of the Jewish Defense League and Kach, he used moral language and religious authority to argue for hardline ethno-political boundaries, including the removal of Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories. In that light, “amnesia” implies that tolerance, compromise, or liberal democracy are lapses induced by modernity - tempting, even fashionable forms of forgetting. The subtext is a warning: remember correctly, or be replaced.

It’s effective propaganda because it flatters the listener as the lucid few, the ones brave enough to “remember,” while smuggling a radical program under the wholesome banner of identity preservation.