Learning to Love Israel

For at least the past two decades, European far-right figures have been keen to reach out to Israel and take part in solidarity visits. Apart from small neo-Nazi and hard-line fascist groups, this is increasingly the norm. Among others, politicians from the Flemish Vlaams Belang, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France, the Sweden Democrats, the Dutch Party for Freedom, Italy’s Lega, and Spain’s Vox — not forgetting Israel’s staunch ally, the Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán — have all headed to Israel in recent years to meet politicians and, more recently, express their steadfast support for Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

Things weren’t always like this. In Israel’s early years, effectively up until the 1967 war and the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, Europe’s social democratic parties were the ones who looked positively toward Israel. This reflected feelings of solidarity born from the memories of the Holocaust but also because of a certain mythologized view of Israel’s socialist ideals. Israel’s kibbutzim were viewed as shining examples of collective, egalitarian existence in practice.

Leaving aside the historical accuracies of such utopian accounts — consider only how some of Israel’s kibbutzim were built on the remains of Palestinian villages destroyed in the Nakba — it was common for left-leaning activists across Europe and elsewhere to travel to Israel out of ideological conviction. Even someone like Noam Chomsky, while critical of the notion of a Jewish state and promoting a binational alternative, fondly remembers the time he spent on a left-wing kibbutz in 1953. Yet if left-wingers once traveled to Israel to marvel at its cooperatives, today it is the far right that visits Israel to awe at its military might and methods of occupation.

That parts of the European far right would support Israel is a relatively recent development. France’s Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, who infamously referred to the Nazi gas chambers as little more than a “detail of history,” took a more hostile position. Yet the situation today couldn’t be any more different. Israel’s far-right admirers, including Robinson, always make the effort to visit Jerusalem’s Holocaust Museum — Yad Vashem — to signal their opposition to antisemitism, or draw a line in the sand regarding their own antisemitic pasts. No far-right actor with serious political ambitions today has much to gain from being associated with Nazism.

And with Zionism and Judaism continually conflated in public discourse, expressing support for Israel is often interpreted as a pro-Jewish position. Yet one can clearly be both pro-Israel and antisemitic, through subscribing to the racist logic that Jews seemingly belong “there” and “not here.” During an Israeli TV interview in 2017, the American white supremacist Richard Spencer explained he was a “white Zionist”: “I want us to have a secure homeland for us and ourselves just like you want a secure homeland in Israel.”

Role Model

However, solidarity with Israel goes beyond publicly disavowing antisemitism. For Israel increasingly functions as a role model for the far right. Looking on with a mixture of envy and admiration, nationalists in Europe see how Israel ignores international law, embraces military power, and robustly “defends its borders.” Thus, we have a situation today where far-right actors evoke Israel to legitimize their own policies at home. At the Alternative für Deutschland’s (AfD) 2021 party conference, for instance, a motion that passed in favor of building physical fences along Germany’s borders drew inspiration from Israel, where it was claimed that “because of its border fortification, the democratic state of Israel has virtually no illegal migration.”

In December 2020, Sweden Democrats MEP Charlie Weimers hosted an online talk on “Terrorism in Europe: Lessons Learned From Israel” in which he called on the EU to draw on Israel’s supposed expertise when shaping its counterterrorism strategy. Following the killing by Israeli soldiers of more than sixty Palestinians in Gaza in March 2018, including “women, children, journalists, first responders and bystanders” who were demonstrating near Israel’s militarized border fence, Marine Le Pen remarked that while she expected an investigation, “Israel has sent a clear message about the inviolability of its border: it can be judged excessively, unnecessarily brutal, but it is a clear message.” In a similar vein, drawing dubious analogies to the situation in Israel, Robinson claimed that Britain needs to learn that only a heavy hand will prevent a Muslim takeover.

Israeli Welcome

At the same time, we must acknowledge how the far right’s overtures are being received increasingly positively from the Israeli side. Israeli officials long claimed they refused to cooperate with far-right forces in Europe, particularly those with an antisemitic lineage. When the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) entered into a government coalition in 2000, Israel withdrew its ambassador to Austria in protest. Likewise, Marine Le Pen was reportedly refused entry to Israel as part of a European Parliamentary delegation in 2006.

But compare this to the muted response to the FPÖ entering a coalition government in 2017. Ex-FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache even visited Israel during a much-touted visit in 2010, where Strache’s checkered past was plain for all to see when he decided to wear the cap of a right-wing fraternity during a visit to Yad Vashem. Or consider the decision to invite Rassemblement National president Jordan Bardella as a keynote speaker at a public conference on antisemitism held in Jerusalem earlier this year.

Israeli officials and politicians have been even more forthright about hosting and meeting figures from newer, supposedly less tainted, far-right parties, with Geert Wilders of the Dutch Party for Freedom and Hungarian premier Orbán particularly frequent honored guests in Israel. As the journalist Dominique Vidal wryly notes, it would seem for Netanyahu and his colleagues, when it comes to far-right parties, “their antisemitism doesn’t matter so long as they are Zionists.”

It may be anathema to those who still harbor a romanticized vision of the country, but today the European far right and Israel are natural partners, sharing the same worldview — one where militarized fences, ultranationalism, and authoritarianism is the norm. If we reflect on the hegemonic status of the idea of democracy in today’s world — where only a tiny minority openly oppose it on principle — Israel is leading the way as an ethnocratic role model to emulate, claiming to be a democracy while enshrining laws that narrow full democratic rights to citizens belonging to the “correct” ethnic group.

While liberals and centrists still claim to believe in multiculturism, or civic nationalism, the far right is much more comfortable with Israel’s narrow understanding of national belonging. Hence it is the prospect of left-wing parties gaining power that worries Israeli officials more than the idea of far-right success. It is not Orbán or Marine Le Pen that Israel fears, but figures like Labour’s ex-leader Jeremy Corbyn or France’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

It is certainly notable that within just two days, Israel’s Jerusalem Post published an opinion piece warning about the left-wing Zohran Mamdani becoming the next mayor of New York and also released a video of a notably friendly chat between Robinson and a reporter from the paper. This trend is sure to continue. Israel is only moving rightward, and even abstract support for some reduced version of Palestinian statehood — that is, the effectively obsolete two-state solution — is a radical position within Israel.

It should then be clear that the story, here, is not Robinson’s own opportunism, but what Israel has become, or perhaps has always been. Across Europe, the public debate has shifted, and Israel is now increasingly viewed as an apartheid state, yet the far right’s support for Israel continues unabated. For their part, Israel’s political leaders, as well as parts of the media, view far-right success not as a danger but a green light to continue along the path of occupation.