The name Yechiel Leiter is not very familiar, but it likely will be soon. He is a hardcore settler leader who has advocated for the full annexation of the occupied West Bank. He is a full-on Kahanist, having literally been a member of Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League in his youth. The JDL was designated as a “right-wing terrorist group” by the FBI, and Kahane is the inspiration that informs the Jewish Power party and its leader Itamar Ben-Gvir, who now serves as Israel’s Minister of National Security.
Leiter was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and emigrated to Israel at age 18 in 1978. He quickly became part of the colonialist settler movement in the West Bank and was one of the first residents of the Admot Yishai settlement founded in Al-Khalil (Hebron) in 1984. There, he established the Hebron Fund advocating and promoting settlement in the city, and later, in 1994, he founded the One Israel Fund, a U.S. nonprofit that raises funds for settlements.
Leiter served as Ariel Sharon’s political advisor and as Netanyahu’s Chief of Staff when Netanyahu was finance minister under Sharon from 2003 to 2005.
Leiter was mentioned by Netanyahu in his speech to Congress on July 24 this year, since Leiter’s son was killed in November while executing the Gaza genocide. At the time Leiter used his son’s funeral to send a message to Biden that made clear his political fanaticism in no uncertain terms, calling upon Biden to “cease and desist” from any pressuring of Israel to stop the offensive:
“Stand back, Mr. President: don’t pressure us. Let us do what we know how to do, indeed what we must do, to defeat evil. This is a war of light against darkness, of truth against lies, of civility against murderous barbarism… Take it from one plain-speaking Scrantonian to another – we’re going to win this one, with you or without you.”
The bar quite literally can't go any lower