A Marriage Made in Hell

Israel's Fascist Friends

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At the end of this month, an unusual gathering is due to take place in Jerusalem, when representatives of various European far-right organizations are due to attend an International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem, hosting by Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry. These organizations include Spain’s Vox party, the Sweden Democrats, the French National Rally, and Hungary’s Fidesz party.

All of these parties have historic links to Nazism and/or fascism, and all of them have declared their strong support for Israel and their opposition to antisemitism, even though many of them contain members who have made antisemitic statements over the years. Take the Sweden Democrats. In 2022, the head of programming for the SDs television channel, mocked Anne Frank in an Instagram post in 2022.

Last year the SD leader Jimmie Akesson and four of his lieutenants co-signed an open letter declaring the party’s ‘zero tolerance against racism and extremism’. Yet one of Akesson’s co-signatories was Jörgen Fogelklou, the party leader in Gothenburg (on the west coast), who ran an antisemitic social media account in 2021 which described Jews as ‘the root of all evil’ (paywalled).

According to the Committee’s president Ulrika Knutson, the Sweden Democrats ‘strongly oppose it [antisemitism] when the issue can be used to attack political opponents and minorities, but are ‘much more lenient when it comes to statements within their own ranks’.

The same could be said of many of the parties represented in Jerusalem this month. The Holocaust Remembrance Project (HRP) has accused Fidesz of ‘rewriting history to rehabilitate war criminals and diminishing its own guilt’, in presenting Nazi-affiliated wartime figures connected to the Horthy regime as ‘anti-communist icons’. Even though Horthy presided over the deportation and murder of tens of thousands of Jews, the HRP has accused Fidesz of portraying Hungarians as ‘victims of what they say was Jewish-supported Communism’, rather than as aiders and abetters of Nazi genocide.

France’s National Rally was co-founded by a Waffen SS member and the paratrooper-torturer Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was convicted various times of Holocaust denialism. Vox’s members include neo-Nazis such as José Ignacio Vega Peinado, who served prison time in the 1990s for attacking and permanently disabling a professor at the University of Valencia. Yet Vox’s representative Herman Tertsch is one of the invitees who will be given the choice between guided tours to ‘Judea and Samaria’ (the West Bank, as the United Nations and much of the world calls it), or the Gaza border, followed by a ‘gala evening at the President’s Residence’.

This gathering is not as anomalous as it might seem at first sight. For some years now, the European far-right has removed overt expressions of antisemitism from its political program, and proclaimed its support for Israel as proof of the distance its various iterations have travelled from their predecessors.

In the 1920s and 30s, Jews were depicted by fascist organizations as the extraneous ‘cosmopolitan’ Other, and the conspiratorial hidden hand intent on world domination Beginning in the 1990s, the descendants of those movements began to identify Muslims as the primary threat to what they now call ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’.

To the ‘new’ nationalist far-right, Israel is the Jewish Sparta - a lone bastion of ‘the West’ on the frontline of civilisational conflict. These movements recognized that their ties to antisemitism excluded them from mainstream politics, and they also see antisemitism - narrowly defined as criticism of Israel - as a politically useful weapon to wield against the left and the new Islamic enemy.

This reorientation has coincided with the rightwards drift of Israeli politics, culminating in what is essentially a far-right settler government that no longer pays even lip service to the liberal - let alone socialist - pretensions of its predecessors. The result is a mutually-beneficial political relationship that has been strengthened since October 7 2023.

Both European far-right and mainstream conservative parties have fervently supported Israel’s genocidal destruction in Gaza, whilst also depicting pro-Palestinian protests as expressions of leftwing/Muslim antisemitism and anti-Jewish hatred.

In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) - a party whose leaders have described Nazism as a ‘blip in history’ - has made support for Israel and opposition to antisemitism central components of its political platform. As the Jerusalem Post noted, the AfD also promotes variants on antisemitic conspiracy theories such as the Great Reset and the Great Replacement:

While AfD doesn’t hesitate to condemn antisemitism on the left, it trivializes or even denies antisemitism on the right. While we don’t have airtight data on what motivates antisemitic acts, one thing is clear: right-wing extremism has always been one of the greatest dangers for Jews.

But for AfD, the anti-Semites are always on the other side. Anyone who is blind in one eye in this matter cannot credibly stand up for the safety of the entire Jewish community.

Such tendencies are not limited to the European far-right. In Argentina, Javier Milei - the man who once compared Argentina’s COVID-19 health pass to the yellow star worn by Jews in Nazi Germany - has converted to Judaism and embraced Zionism with a convert’s zeal. Like many of his fellow-travellers in Europe, Milei routinely invokes the ‘cultural Marxism’ conspiracy theory regardless of its antisemitic origins. He recently defended Elon Musk’s Nazi salute as an ‘innocent gesture’, and condemned his critics as representatives of ‘international wokism.’

Compared to the Trump/Musk tandem, Milei exudes scholarly gravitas. One of Trump’s first executive orders in January authorized the attorney general to order universities and colleges to monitor and report acts of ‘pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.’

In February, the US Justice Department established a multi-agency ‘Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism’, which set out as its first priority the rooting-out of ‘anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses.’ Earlier this month, Trump announced that he would cut funding for universities that allow ‘illegal’ protests, and prosecute and deport foreign students who participate. On Saturday 8 March, agents of the Department of Homeland Security arrested the Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, and announced his forthcoming deportation on criminal charges of abetting terrorism.

As Judith Butler has argued, Khalil’s arrest was part of a plan devised by the Heritage Foundation, which has published a list of 856 professors in the US and Canada, who it claims have ‘openly advocated or supported up to 63 different HSOs [Hamas Support Organizations]’.

Now the Trump government is wilfully conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism and even terrorism. In his spurious attempts to defend Jews, Trump has also arrogated to himself the right to decide who is and who is not a Jew. During his election campaign, he suggested that Jewish Democrat voters ‘hate Israel’ and ‘hate their religion.’ Last week, he suggested that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was aligned with Hamas, and declared:

Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I’m concerned. He’s become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian.

Trump’s sinister gremlin-clown sidekick, Elon Musk, has also taken time out from accusing ‘George Soros’ of funding anti-Tesla protests, to retweet:

In the battle against antisemitism or any kind of racism, these are not people you want on your side, and they will never be on anyone’s side but their own. The same can be said of the Israeli government, which has weaponised antisemitism with a cynicism that easily matches its erstwhile allies, in order to provide a propagandist distraction from its genocidal war in Gaza.

Last month, Nissum Vaturi, the Deputy Speaker of Israel’s parliament and a member of Netanyahu’s Likud part told the radio station Kol BaRama:

Who is innocent in Gaza? Civilians went out and slaughtered people in cold blood. We need to separate the children and women and kill the adults in Gaza, we are being too considerate. No one in the world wants the civilians in Gaza, everyone is pushing them into Israel, they know that these are scum and subhumans.

Such statements are no longer as problematic as they might once have been, with US government officials reportedly considering Sudan, Somalia and Somaliland as possible destinations for Gazan Palestinians, in the event that Trump is able to implement his obscene plans for the depopulation of the Gaza Strip.

The Death of Liberalism

The problem that liberal critics of Trump’s madness have, is that Israel had already been given a carte blanche by liberal governments and institutions to inflict virtually limitless violence on Gaza, even before Trump took power. And this complicity was often accompanied by a very similar conflation of Palestinian protest with antisemitism and support for Hamas. In April, German police broke up a pro-Palestine conference in Berlin and prevented Yanis Varoufakis from entering the country to attend it.

Now, Columbia University has effectively colluded in the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, and announced that it will expel and suspend pro-Palestinian students who occupied a campus hall last year.

If Columbia or any other university thinks that such shameful actions will placate the Trump government, they are likely to be very much mistaken. Through its enabling of Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza, American liberalism has not only paved the way for the destruction of the Palestinians and Israel’s descent into fascism: it has also helped to dig its own grave.

That antisemitism should become both the lubricant for America’s slide into oligarchical authoritarianism, is a jaw-dropping historical outcome in itself. And in these dire circumstances, it is not at all outlandish to find a gaggle of neo-fascists and ethnonationists taking part in panel discussions in Israel on subjects such as ‘double standards’ at the International Criminal Court, or ‘Antisemitism in academic and in public education’.

Nor, in this race to the bottom, is it surprising to find Israel making common cause with the descendants of movements responsible for the greatest crime ever committed against the Jewish people, in order to facilitate the destruction of the Palestinian people. And if Israel is using the 21st century’s neo-fascists to serve its own interests, the reverse is also true.

And when these born-again philosemites return to their countries infused with ethnonationalist fervour, they will continue to use antisemitism and ‘Hamas’ in much the way as Trump is using these terms - to attack immigrants and people of colour, and also to intimidate and silence their left/liberal opponents.

There was a time when very few people could have foreseen that the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ would be used in this way. But these are different times, and America will not be the only country in which liberal institutions discover - too late - that Israel’s new fascist friends are coming for them too.