As Netanyahu flaunts his ties to the global far-right

 

By James M. Dorsey

Hi and welcome,

Thank you for joining me today.

 If you appreciate hard-hitting, fact-based analysis, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

Paid subscribers can access the full archive, exclusive posts, and polling. They can leave comments, join debates, and know they are supporting independent writing, reporting, and analysis that lets the chips fall where they fall.

You can contribute by clicking here.

To listen to the podcast or watch the video, please click here.

Thank you for your support and loyalty, take care, and best wishes.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Israel’s ultra-nationalists and ultra-conservatives have turned Israel into a ‘haven’ for some Jews rather than all Jews.

Not only by encouraging an intolerant, supremacist domestic environment hostile to vigorous public debate and equality for all but also by endorsing the far-right’s flirt with language and imagery that risks stoking ant-Semitism, and efforts to rewrite the history of the Holocaust, Jews’ worst calamity in modern history.

The son of a scholar of medieval Jewish persecution, Mr. Netanyahu did so most recently as Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust prepared to commemorate the 80^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Nazi extermination camp in Poland.

Last week, Mr. Netanyahu charged that Elon Musk had been "falsely smeared" after the technology billionaire, standing behind a US presidential seal at a Washington celebration of Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, made a seemingly fascist gesture.

Mr. Netanyahu was joined in his defence of Mr. Musk by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a New York-based anti-Semitism watchdog headed by Jason Greenblatt, a former Middle East negotiator during Mr. Trump’s first term in office.

The League described Mr. Musk’s outstretched arm pointing to the sky, a move widely associated with Nazi Germany’s ‘Heil Hitler’ salute and World War Two Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, as an "awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm."

In contrast to Mr. Netanyahu and the League, 15 American Jewish groups said they would no longer post on Mr. Musk’s social media platform X.

In the days between his salute and the Auschwitz commemoration, Mr. Musk told a gathering of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party that the country had “too much of a focus on past guilt,” an apparent effort to do away with the shadow of the Nazis that hangs over the hard-right.

“It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” Mr. Musk said in a video address to thousands of party members in the eastern city of Halle.

Yair Netanyahu, the son of the Israeli prime minister, become the 2020 campaign face for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party

Mr. Netanyahu ignored Mr. Musk’s remarks because, in the words of journalist David Issscharoff, “Israel's government and Germany's far-right share an interest in portraying Palestinians as today's Nazis with global or Israeli leftists as their collaborators.”

Mr, Issacharoff noted that “the AfD gladly benefits from Israel's endorsement of its stance against Palestinians and Muslims, which is directed at immigrants whom it is seeking to ’remigrate,’ much like Mr. Trump’s mass deportation of undocumented migrants and his proposal to resettle 75 per cent of Gaza’s Palestinian population in Jordan and Egypt. 

Last year, Mr. Trump whitewashed a deadly 2017 anti-Semitic, white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “a little peanut” and “nothing” compared to pro-Palestinian campus protests.

At the time of the rally, Mr. Trump said “some very fine people on both sides” had participated in the rally.

Mr. Netanyahu is comfortable with Messrs. Trump and Musk’s far-right associations, despite their, for many Jews, problematic language and imagery.

Mr. Netanyahu’s minister for Diaspora affairs and combatting anti-Semitism. Amichai Chikli’s marching orders were to forge closer ties to the global far-right tainted by its anti-Semitic roots.

Similarly, Mr. Netanyahu had no scruples in siding with Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan against Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor and philanthropist George Soros, who has long supported liberal and left-wing causes.

Last week, the Istanbul Prosecutor’s Office last week justified a warrant for the arrest of Turkish television production mogul Ayse Barim on charges of supporting the 2013 mass anti-government Gezi Park protests by linking them to Mr. Soros.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan vs George Soros. Credit: Sol

The prosecutor’s office claimed the protests were an extension of the 2011 popular Arab uprisings and Georgia’s Orange Revolution that it alleged were orchestrated by Mr. Soros’ Open Society Foundation.

Mr. Erdogan has accused Mr. Soros of supporting Osama Kavala, a Turkish businessman sentenced to life in prison in 2022 in a high-profile human rights case for funding the protests.

“There is a person who financed the terrorists in the Gezi events. Now he is behind bars. And who is behind him? The famous Hungarian Jew Soros. This person sends people across the world to divide and tear up nations and uses the large amount of money he possesses to this effect,” Mr. Erdogan said.

Mr. Erdogan’s language and imagery echoed Mr. Orban’s ‘Stop Soros’ campaign that forced Mr. Soros to move to Vienna the main operations of his Budapest-based Central European University.

Advised by spin doctors Arthur Finkelstein and George Birnbaum, who also assisted Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Orban used attacks on Mr. Soros that Jewish groups said risked stoking anti-Semitism to garner votes in elections.

That was not a concern for Messrs. Finkelstein and Birnbaum. Nor was it a consideration for Mr. Netanyahu who saw no need to defend a Holocaust survivor against seemingly racial smears.

Mr. Netanyahu’s failure made a mockery of the notion of Israel as a haven for Jews, irrespective of their politics.

So does Mr. Netanyahu’s equation of criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic, which by implication labels Jewish critics as anti-Semites and/or self-hating Jews.

In Mr. Netanyahu’s world, Messrs. Trump, Musk, and Orban’s toying with questionable language and imagery pales in the face of their shared civilisationalist worldviews, support for Israel’s brutal Gaza war, and rejection of Palestinian identity and aspirations.

It’s a world that renders Israel’s raison d’etre as a haven for all, not just some Jews, meaningless.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.