One of Kahane's stated priorities then was to remove the representatives of Israel's 1.7 million Palestinian citizens from the Israeli parliament. He regarded them as traitors, a Trojan horse for the larger Palestinian cause that could undermine Israel as a Jewish state from within.
On one occasion in 1988, Kahane publicly threatened an Israeli-Palestinian legislator with a noose.
'Terrorists' in the KnessetSuch views and threats are now entirely normalised inside Netanyahu's government. Avigdor Lieberman, until recently Netanyahu's defence minister and someone who himself spent his formative political years in Kach, has repeatedly sought to cast the Palestinian Knesset members as traitors deserving the death penalty.
Last year he called Ayman Odeh, the joint head of the Palestinian parties, a "terrorist". He has condemned the legislators as "war criminals" working "to destroy us from within". He had earlier argued that they should be "executed".
Lieberman helped Netanyahu drive through legislation to raise the electoral threshold in 2014, in a barely concealed effort to bar Palestinian parties from gaining any seats in the parliament.
When that move backfired, after Palestinian parties combined to form the Joint List, the government responded by passing an Expulsion Law, which empowers a three-quarters majority in effect, of Jewish legislators to expel a representative for holding opinions they do not like.
That threat is intended to serve as a sword hanging over Palestinian lawmakers, to prevent them from speaking out on key issues, such as the structural violence of the occupation or the systemic discrimination faced by Israel's non-Jewish population.
How Netanyahu himself views the representation of Palestinian citizens was illustrated starkly on the day of the 2015 election, when he warned that his government's survival was "in danger". He clarified: "Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves."
'Citizens, not lepers'Under pressure from then-US President Barack Obama, he apologised for his remark, but he has already restated that sentiment in the early stages of this campaign.
Netanyahu suggested that a Gantz-led government could betray the country by relying on informal support from Palestinian legislators. The prime minister characterised this electoral alliance as "an obstructive bloc" that would be "working to eliminate the state of Israel".
Netanyahu was thereby trying to create a false equivalence between his move to forge an alliance with the terror-supporting Kahanists of Otzma Yehudit and Gantz's possible reliance on Israel's main Palestinian parties.
This incitement barely attracted attention, apart from a former Israeli-Palestinian Supreme Court judge, Salim Joubran, who reminded Netanyahu: "These [Palestinian] citizens are legitimate, not invalid, contemptible, or lepers."
Marches demanding expulsionEfforts to cast the elected representatives of Israel's large Palestinian minority as traitors are intended to send a message that the Palestinian public is equally disloyal.
That would have been welcomed by Kahane. Under the slogan "They Must Go", he argued that there was no place for Palestinians either in Israel or in the occupied territories.
Shortly after he entered parliament in 1984, he staged a provocative march to Umm al-Fahm, a large Palestinian town in Israel that lies close to the West Bank, to demand that its inhabitants emigrate. Police blocked his way, and government leaders protested that his actions were "shameful" and "dangerous".
In recent years, his disciples, led by Baruch Marzel, have held similar marches to Umm al-Fahm and other Palestinian communities in Israel. These marches, however, have been approved by the courts and are provided with a police escort.
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