Leader of Kahane organization drums up support…

The empty tables cast a melancholy mood over the bar mitzvah that Brooklynite Mike Guzovsky attended in Israel last month. The family and friends who should have been there were instead sitting shiva for Yehuda Shoham, a 5-month-old baby killed by rock-throwing Palestinians in the West Bank.

"His parents couldn't have children, and then finally, they gave birth to Yehuda," said Guzofsky. "His skull was crushed by Arab terrorists, right by his home. He was murdered in cold blood just because he was Jewish."

He held up a photograph of Shalhevet Pass, a 4-month-old child of Jewish settlers on the West Bank, who was killed in a similar fashion a few months ago. "Does this baby look like an obstacle to peace?" he asked.

Guzofsky, who divides his time between his New York home and Jerusalem, made his remarks recently to a group of about 30 people -- mostly Russian immigrants -- in the San Francisco living room of Helene Klein, chair of the local chapter of Americans for a Safe Israel.

Guzofsky is the leader of the Brooklyn-based group Kahane Chai, meaning Kahane Lives (kahane.net), which carries on the work of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.

The outspoken Kahane advocated expelling all Arabs from Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and allowing Jewish law to be the rule of the land. His political party, Kach, was banned from the Israeli Knesset. Kahane was assassinated in New York 11 years ago.

Many American Jewish organizations did not allow the rabbi to speak when he visited the United States, on the grounds that he was racist. But Guzofsky thinks differently. Speaking of the organization that bears the late rabbi's name, he said, "We're the only group that has an answer."

That there was such a turnout in San Francisco for this unadvertised meeting underscored his point, he said: Imagine the number of people in Israel who must agree with him.

As if to prove his theory, he said that after most terrorist attacks in Israel, it isn't long before the slogan "Kahane was right" appears painted on a nearby wall. "More and more people are understanding this."

That's not quite the case in San Francisco. "Nobody would open the door for us except Helene Klein," Guzofsky said.

Klein, who sits on the board of the Jewish Community Relations Council, said she hosted the group as a favor.

Guzofsky, a short man whose tzitzit hung from beneath his French-blue shirt, told the group: "We waited thousands of years to be free at last, to be safe, with no more pogroms, no more gas chambers, no more being spit at, no more persecution for being Jewish. We came home to Israel, to live in the same nightmare."

Describing the life of Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, he said they have taken to wearing bulletproof vests, with women frantically calling their husbands on their cellular phones when the men are late by even five minutes in getting home from work.

"They live in fear of who will be next," he said. "This is the dream of our return to Israel. It's turned into a nightmare."

The question that must be asked, he said, is, why doesn't Israel do anything about this? Why does the Israeli government not equate the life of a settler with the life of a Jew inside Israel?

Holding up a recent issue of an Israeli daily, Guzofsky translated an article in a mocking tone.

Israel cares too much about world opinion, he said.

"Every Jew has a little bit of the shtetl inside us. Jews have this complex and that's the reason why Israel is allowing its citizens to be murdered and doesn't do what a normal sovereign state would do."

Sounding like his mentor, especially when he called the Israeli decision to withdraw troops from Lebanon "one of the greatest historical blunders Israel ever made," he said, "We left Lebanon running with our tail between our legs."

Guzofsky said he couldn't understand why people in Israel continued to speak of the Oslo peace accords as if they were still relevant.

"The process has blown up in our faces 1,000 times," he said. "What do they need to realize this, another dead Jew?"

While he did not doubt the sincerity of those on the left, he said they were misguided, especially those Jews who are fighting to end the occupation. "It is sad when Jews identify with the enemy, but don't ignore them. Try to bring them back to their nation."

The million Arabs who live inside Israel are just as great a threat to the Jewish people as those in the West Bank and Gaza, he said. But when pressed, Guzofsky said he believed those Arabs who accept Jewish sovereignty may be allowed to stay.

He criticized almost any tactic Israel had used to try to stop violence. "It took a few dead Jews for them to build special plastic windows," he said, referring to those installed in buses to stop stones thrown by Palestinians from reaching their targets during the first intifada in the 1980s.

Israel needs to go on the offensive, he said, rather than react to each situation.

"They throw rocks, we build thicker windows," he said smirking. "What about dealing with these terrorists?" Recalling that civilians have been driven out from their homes in almost any given wartime situation, he said, "That's what happens in a war, if the good wants to survive."

Guzofsky offered several solutions to the current crisis -- one being the formation of what he called the Independent Jewish Legion. It would be composed of volunteers to defend the Jews, independent of the Israel Defense Force.

"Jews must take the law into their own hands and do what they need to do," he said.

Michael, a 12-year-old Russian immigrant boy (whose father did not want his last name used) had some questions for Guzofsky, namely, "Why do Jews care about what the rest of the world thinks about us?" and "Why don't the Americans do anything while Jews are being killed?"

Guzofsky told him he should be prime minister of Israel.

Shifra Hoffman, the founder of Victims of Arab Terror International, also attended the meeting. A solemn woman wearing a purple-and-white headscarf, she spoke about her new organization, Shuva, which means "Return"; it's at http://www.shuva.cjb.net

"The Arabs have a three-letter word on their side: oil, and the Jews have a three-letter word on their side: God," she said. "He is our ally."

Hoffman's group advocates the return of American Jews to Israel. Based on the number of hate- and white-supremacist groups active in America, she warned that "time is running out for American Jews. It's time to come home."