The son of Rabbi Nachman Kahane (Rosh Kollel Chazon Yehezkel in the Old City) and nephew of Rabbi Meir Kahane, Brigadier General Mordechai Kahane, was suspended for 14 days from his post as Chief Combat Intelligence Officer and Commander of the Border Defense System.
Kahane was suspended by Ground Forces Commander, Major General Kobi Barak, with the approval of Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Gadi Eizenkot. The suspension followed an MPCID investigation resulting in suspicions that Kahane received and held equipment in his container for a long period of time without authorization.
The decision to make public a Military Police investigation which normally results in a hearing before the officer’s immediate commander and a slap on the wrist, suggests that someone in the military’s top brass is gunning for Kahane – a decorated warrior who has commanded two different IDF special forces, Golani and Egoz, and recently introduced significant improvements in the Counter Terrorist Rapid Response Units (Kitot Koninut) in Judea and Samaria settlements, of which he was the senior officer in charge.
Reshet Bet’s Carmela Menashe reported that Kahane is suspected of holding a private container that was transferred at his request from a base to a base throughout his military career as officer.
He stored a variety of military equipment in the container, including a captured Kalashnikov rifle seized from Hamas, a pistol and night vision equipment – in violation of military orders. He also kept in the same container accessory parts for IDF issue weapons, which he gave out to soldiers.
Kahane was recently appointed head of the team of experts charged with examining a self-propelled cannon accident that took place last month, in which two IDF soldiers were killed. Did he step on the wrong toe and made an enemy?
Kahane is a proud product of the Hesder Yeshiva system of the Religious Zionist sector. He represents the growing threat to the leftist old boys network running the IDF – a talented officer wearing a knitted yarmulke. Over the past few years, several promising Orthodox commanders have been dropped over relatively minor offenses that had nothing to do with their performance as military commanders and warriors.
In all those cases, a slap on the wrist has traditionally been the way the Army handled these violations – and the choice to use a stricter yardstick for the Orthodox guy was clearly political.
The Chief Military Advocate General, representing Kahane, issued a statement saying, “Brigadier General Mordechai Kahane has served in the IDF for 28 years, most of them as a combat soldier and commander on the battlefield. […] Since the investigation has been launched, he cooperated fully with his interrogators and answered all the questions posed to him From the information in our possession, the suspicions attributed to Brigadier General Kahane have no criminal aspects, and therefore it is appropriate to finish the investigation as soon as possible and to disperse the heavy cloud over his head.”