The Israeli right’s immoral bargain with Western bigots

The British Board of Deputies protested that he was honouring a “thug, who represents the very worst of Britain”. The Israeli government ignored them.

As if to prove that he collects racists the way other men collect stamps, Chikli welcomed to a conference on combating antisemitism in Jerusalem leaders of the Bosnian Serbs, who denied the Serbian genocide of Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s.

Think about that for a second. Just when Israel was denying that it was covering up war crimes that amounted to the genocide of Muslims in Gaza it was embracing Serb nationalists, who covered up the proven genocide of Muslims in Srebrenica.

This time the Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis rather than the Board of Deputies urged Chikli to think again. And, of course, Chikli refused.

It is not progressive hyperbole to call members of the Netanyahu government “far right,” and not only because of Chikli’s shameful behaviour. The UK government sanctioned Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, and the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, for “repeated incitements of violence against Palestinian communities”.

Some members of Likud have many of the same hatreds as other Western far-rightists. When he sneered at the Board of the Deputies for protesting against Robinson, Chikli sounded like an alt-right Twitter incel screaming against “libtards” from his mother’s basement.

The Board’s opposition to Robinson’s street violence proved that it was “openly aligned with left-wing, woke, pro-Palestinian parties,” he cried – which I have to say was news to the rest of us. If nothing else, Chikli showed how the interests of the Netanyahu government and the interests of diaspora Jewry are pulling in different directions

Perhaps Israeli politicians think that they can forget about the far right’s antisemitism even as they alienate every liberal who might once have given Israel a fair hearing. For it is worth emphasising that it is perfectly possible to be an antisemite while supporting Israel as a potential place of exile for your Jewish neighbours.

If they were paying attention they would surely have noticed that Jew hatred was spreading like bindweed through the supposedly new and cleaned-up radical right. Of course it is, antisemitism is an essential component of Western extremism, and only fools fail to see it.

When Bannon and the rest of the crew fume about “globalists” conspiring to flood the Christian West with migrants, everyone with a passing knowledge of the history of fascism can guess who those “globalists” might be.

The Tucker Carlson wing of MAGA has always opposed Israel for isolationist reasons – why should US taxpayers fund a foreign state? But we can also see the radical right embracing Jewish conspiracy theory as it has done throughout history, and was always going to do in the 21st century.

Last week, Politico reported on group chats of young US Republican leaders, in which participants called an internal rival a “fat stinky Jew” and made detailed jokes about how they’d send others “to the gas chamber.” In response to a claim that one subgroup was pledging to vote for “the most right-wing person,” one participant wrote back: “Great. I love Hitler.”

Such are the men Chikli, Ben Gvir and their ilk have bet Israel’s future on. Such are the men they embrace as allies even as they denounce every moderate voice.

If I were an Israeli, let alone a Palestinian, I would want Netanyahu out of power as soon as possible. As for the rest of us, if you want your neighbours to take antisemitism seriously it seems perfectly clear to me that you must disassociate yourself from the current Israeli government. After all, it has already shown that it wants to disassociate itself from you.