Far-Right Parties in Europe Have Become Zionism’s Greatest Backers
The far right in Europe has a long and shameful history of antisemitism. Yet as the far right seeks to renew its image and make electoral gains, emphatic support for Zionism has become a key pillar of the project, while hatred of Jews has been supplemented with newer forms of racism and xenophobia.
An Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) supporter with a Germany flag, to which the flag of Israel is also pinned. (Boris Roessler / picture alliance via Getty Images)
Last year, Yair Netanyahu, son of former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, became the literal poster boy for the German right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Netanyahu’s eldest son had provoked controversy when he called for the abolition of the “evil” European Union, which, he argued, was an enemy to Israel and “all European Christian countries.” The AfD, which, by contrast, escapes Netanyahu’s scrutiny, is regularly accused of antisemitism and has been called “a disgrace for Germany” by World Jewish Congress president Ronald Lauder. (The AfD’s former coleader Alexander Gauland infamously called the Nazi era a “speck of bird shit” in German history.)
Far-right support for Israel is not unique to Germany but is developing across Europe. Alongside the AfD’s Alice Weidel, far-right leaders like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen in France, Nigel Farage in the UK, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all openly sided with Israel. Open and enthusiastic support for Zionism has become an ideological tenet for most of these parties, a scenario unthinkable from the perspective of fifty or even thirty years ago. And while the old far right of the post–World War II era continues to chant for the annihilation of Jews, its modern reincarnation cozies up to the Netanyahus. How did we get here?
Makeovers for the Far Right
Our contemporary era is not the first to see antisemites supporting Zionism. Since the Jewish nationalist movement was born in Europe in the nineteenth century, a minority of European antisemites have championed Jewish settlements in Palestine. Indeed, one of the reasons British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour pushed for British government support of the Zionist movement in the 1917 Balfour Declaration was to rid British soil of Jews.
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