The new pro-Israeli clothes of the European far right

By Gilles Paris

If, officially, Israeli diplomacy does not maintain relations with numerous far-right European parties, the latter assert themselves as unconditional support for the Jewish state.

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The observation says as much about the evolution of a significant part of the member countries of the European Union as about what Israel is becoming: the far right asserts itself as the most unconditional support of the Hebrew State, a a development that the carnage perpetrated in Gaza after the massacres of Israeli civilians by Hamas has not called into question.

In the Netherlands, the Party for Freedom, the formation of Geert Wilders, succeeded in inserting into the coalition contract concluded on May 15 with three other parties the “examination” of the relocation of the Dutch embassy in Israel from Tel -Aviv in Jerusalem, in complete break with the European position according to which the status of Jerusalem must be decided through negotiation.

Santiago Abascal, leader of the Spanish far-right party Vox, expressed his opposition to his country's recognition of the State of Palestine on May 28, meeting in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is fiercely opposed to it. The same day, the head of the list for the European elections of the French far-right party Reconquête!, Marion Maréchal, estimated that recognizing such a state now would amount to creating “an Islamist state, with all the dangers that this can represent for Israel and for the West in general.”

Bygone era

For a long time, a sanitary cordon kept Israel away from groups whose roots could go back to the dark hours of the Second World War and the Shoah. The assessment of the ninth legislature of the European Parliament drawn up by the European Coalition for Israel, an influential group founded in 2004, shows how much this era is over. The twenty parties whose votes were most favorable to Israel all belong to the far right and Eurosceptics, mainly to the European Conservatives and Reformists group. The leading trio is made up of Vox, a Czech party and the Sweden Democrats.

A set of circumstances explains the crumbling of this dike. After having been small groups for a long time, far-right groups considered that a radical change in discourse on Israel could break an electoral barrier in their quest for power. This was particularly the case for the Sweden Democrats, who triumphed in the 2022 legislative elections, and whose founding members had campaigned four decades earlier in the ranks of the Nordic Reich Party, a small neo-Nazi group.

The National Rally made the same calculation in France, distancing itself from the anti-Semitism of Jean-Marie Le Pen as well as from the positions of members of the student organization Groupe Union Défense (GUD), then close to Marine Le Pen, who in their time chanted “Deauville, Sentier, occupied territories” or “In Paris as in Gaza, Intifada”. The break, on May 21, with its ally Alternative for Germany (AfD), after comments relativizing Nazism made by one of its leaders, also resulted from this.

Transatlantic National Conservative Movement

This development was facilitated by an anti-Islam discourse assumed by most European far-right groups, starting with that of Geert Wilders or the Swede Jimmie Akesson. In the speeches of this extreme right, the Muslim scapegoat has replaced the Jewish scapegoat, against a backdrop of jihadist attacks and immigration from the Near and Middle East, or sub-Saharan Africa. On May 28, Marion Maréchal included the Israeli-Palestinian question in a world vision inspired by the controversial thesis of the “clash of civilizations” of Samuel Huntington.

While the far right also weighs more and more on Israeli politics, one figure embodies this unprecedented convergence: that of the political theorist Yoram Hazony. Born in Israel, graduated from the American universities of Princeton and Rutgers, the latter passed through the colony of Eli, located in the heart of the West Bank, and collaborated with Benyamin Netanyahu on the occasion of the edition of a book published before the latter's first experience as prime minister, in 1996.

Author of the conservative bestseller The Virtues of Nationalism (the French translation of which was prefaced by the lawyer Gilles-William Goldnadel), Yoram Hazony is a tutelary figure of the transatlantic movement of national conservatives highlighted by the historian Maya Kandel . His best support in Europe is another unwavering ally of the Israeli Prime Minister, his Hungarian counterpart, Viktor Orban. The two men share the same illiberal conception of the exercise of power, in particular the same distrust of counter-powers.

Officially, given a past consistently discussed, Israeli diplomacy does not maintain relations with many European far-right parties. In fact, this position is openly challenged by elected officials linked to the Israeli ultranationalist mosaic and religious Zionism who are the defenders of an alliance between national-populists.

Eli Cohen, Benyamin Netanyahu's foreign minister in 2023, campaigned for links with the Alliance for Romanian Unity, which put the Shoah into perspective. But nothing says this Israeli shift better than the presence in Madrid, on May 18, at a gathering of the European extreme right, of an Israeli minister, Amichai Chikli, former member of the extreme right formation Yamina, in charge of the diaspora and the fight against anti-Semitism. The occasion of the first informal meeting of Marine Le Pen, present at this gathering, with a member of an Israeli government who hopes to be able to count on this extreme right to defend its interests in Brussels.

Source: LE MONDE