08.12.2022

Israeli far right is making the far right mainstream

If the fight against anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are closely connected, it is a blunder to have Hamas in the leadership of the BDS campaign, suggests Daniel Lazare

Two headline-grabbing events involving rightwing politicians clawing their way back to power recently occurred thousands of miles apart. The first was on November 22, when Donald Trump dined with the rapper Kanye West - now known simply as ‘Ye’ - along with a young fascist (for once the term is not misapplied) named Nick Fuentes at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

The second occurred days later when Binyamin Netanyahu disclosed that he would place Itamar Ben-Gvir in charge of national security in Israel’s new government and would give Religious Zionist leader Bezalel Smotrich extensive authority over the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Considering that Ben-Gvir until recently prominently displayed in his office a photo of Baruch Goldstein (the Jewish fundamentalist who in 1994 killed 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron and wounded 125 more) and that he was barred for a time from practising law due to a long record of anti-Arab hate crimes - and considering also that the equally extreme Smotrich has been dubbed a “Jewish terrorist” by none other than a former top official of Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence agency - this is an example of how Netanyahu, returning to power after an 18-month hiatus, is pushing the Jewish state into ultra-right territory previously beyond the pale.

Yet at first glance, the events seem unrelated. Ye is an anti-Semite who recently tweeted, “I’m going death con three on Jewish people.” Fuentes is a self-described “12th-century” man who longs for the days of crusades and inquisitions when Jews were besieged.¹ Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, on the other hand, are Jewish supremacists who direct their hatred primarily at Palestinians. These are different types of racism in different parts of the world. So what, if anything, is the connection?

The answer is that the different forms are interacting in new and explosive ways. Anti-Semitism at Mara-a-Lago promises to spill over into racism against other minorities in the US, while the Jewish state’s far-right lurch threatens to legitimise like-minded forces in other countries that view Israel as a model of militant ethno-racial nationalism. If Israel can elevate semi-fascists to positions of power, then so can Hungary, Poland and the US. If an ex-president can break bread with anti-Semites, then so can national leaders elsewhere.

In short, it suggests that a new epoch is opening up in which racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Palestinian oppression are all combining in an increasingly explosive manner. In a recent talk about the Israeli elections, Moshé Machover told the CPGB’s Online Communist Forum that the new government could lead to “a crisis that will go beyond the confines of Israel and Palestine”.² The words are an understatement. In fact, the consequences are likely to be felt around the globe.

For socialists, this means placing new emphasis on all three - ie, on racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Palestinian hatred - and on anti-gay hatred too, since Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are both outspoken homophobes. Rather than compartmentalising such phenomena, the struggle against them has to be integrated across the board. Anti-Zionists must combat anti-Jewish hatred, while leftwing opponents of anti-Semitism must campaign against an increasingly out-of-control Jewish state.

Let us begin with the US to understand more fully what this means. As the father of a Jewish convert and hence a grandfather with three Jewish grandchildren, Trump might be regarded as immune to anti-Jewish bigotry. But family ties do not confer immunity, as we all know, and Trump on numerous occasions has skated dangerously close to the edge. In 2018, he told Jews at a White House Hanukkah gathering that Israel is “your country”, while a year later he said that “any Jewish people who would vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty”. The charge of Jewish disloyalty is an old one that still rankles, yet here it was again. “Wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of [Trump’s record on Israel] than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the US,” he posted two months ago on his Truth Social website. “US Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel - before it is too late!”³

Depending on your point of view, that is either a pointed reminder of where Jewish interests lie or something more menacing.

But there is no disputing the nature of Trump’s dinner with West and Fuentes. Ye is a composer, performer, music producer and fashion-designer who has sold 160 million records and has long had a bad-boy penchant for the outrageous. “When you hear about slavery for 400 years ... for 400 years?” he mused in 2018. “That sounds like a choice. You were there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all. It’s like we’re mentally imprisoned.”

A multi-millionaire thus cannot understand why slaves put up with shackles and chains for so long. Ye’s comments about Jews are equally poisonous. After being kicked off Instagram in October for declaring that rapper Puff Daddy is controlled by Jews, he tweeted: “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con three on Jewish people ... You guys have toyed with me and tried to blackball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.” He added a few days later: “When I say Jew, I mean the 12 lost tribes of Judah, the blood of Christ, who the people known as the race black really are.” On October 16, he complained that “the Jewish media” and “Zionist Jews” were out to get him. “You really influenced me to get on this anti-Semite vibe,” he said, “and, you know, I’m here to finish the job. I’m here to not back down. They should’ve never let you niggas get money.” Last week, he told disgraced far-right talk-show host Alex Jones: “I like Hitler. I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis.”⁴

Plainly, these are the ignorant ramblings of a man who was once hospitalised with hallucinations and paranoia and who brags of never reading a single book in his entire life.⁵

Fuentes, for his part, is a holocaust denier, an anti-Semite (“I don’t see Jews as Europeans and I don’t see them as part of western civilisation”), and a proud homophobe to boot.⁶ While Trump says he had no idea who Fuentes was when Ye brought him to dinner, he is hardly an unknown quantity as far as the rest of the Republican right is concerned. Marjorie Taylor Green - the Georgia Republican congresswoman famous for blaming California brush fires on Rothschild-controlled space lasers - spoke at a white-supremacist conference that Fuentes organised in February in Orlando, Florida. So did Arizona Republican congressman Paul Gosar - an outspoken Trump supporter, who claims that Joe Biden stole the presidential election in 2020. So did Steve King, an ex-congressman from Iowa who once displayed a Confederate flag in his office and complained to a reporter: “White nationalist, white supremacist, western civilisation - how did that language become offensive?”⁷

Trump cannot complain of being blind-sided. To the contrary, he sat down to dinner with someone he knew to be an anti-Semite, thereby providing Ye’s poisonous ravings with new force. The Mar-a-Lago incident is evidence that racism is surging in the Republican Party and that anti-Semitism, after all but vanishing from the liberal west after World War II, may be poised for a comeback.

Israel’s role

It is certainly a game-changer if it is. But now let us consider Israel’s role. According to the conventional wisdom, the Jewish state’s raison d’être is to serve as a “life raft” (to quote Primo Levi) for Jews facing oppression. It is a refuge when things get tough - no small matter when memories of the holocaust are still fresh. Indeed, that seems to be the problem with Israeli politics: ie, that in its eagerness to protect the Jews, Israel mows down anyone who gets in the way, Palestinians first and foremost. Jews gain, while Palestinians lose again and again.

That is the way the petty bourgeois left sees it, but it is wrong. Zionism is not a life raft. Rather, it advocates a state that fosters anti-Semitism at every turn and therefore increasingly places Jews in harm’s way.

Yes, the Jewish state is now one of the most anti-Jewish forces on earth. It is hard to think of a rightwing authoritarian - many with pronounced anti-Semitic tendencies - whom Netanyahu has not embraced. He endorsed Jair Bolsonaro in the October 2 Brazilian elections. He hailed Italian ultra-rightist Matteo Salvini as a “great friend of Israel” and exchanged congratulations with Italian neo-fascist Giorgia Meloni following their mutual election victories. He welcomed Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki to Jerusalem in 2019, even though Morawiecki’s government prescribes criminal penalties against anyone who dares suggest that Poland was complicit in anti-Jewish genocide during World War II (as, of course, it was).⁸

But the most remarkable beneficiary of Netanyahu’s largesse is Hungary’s Viktor Orbán - a rightwing populist who has dedicated his career to the rehabilitation of interwar strongman Miklós Horthy, dubbed “the jackal of Europe” after joining the Axis in 1939.

In 2018, Netanyahu invited Orbán to Israel, prompting angry protests following his visit to the Yad Vashem holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. But Netanyahu earlier did him an even bigger favour by providing him with a pair of rightwing campaign consultants who had helped him win the Israeli election in 1996 and who would help Orbán win re-election as well.

The strategists - a couple of hard-driving New Yorkers named Arthur Finkelstein and George Birnbaum - gave Orbán advice that was little short of stunning. In essence, it was to win re-election by demonising the Hungarian-born financier, George Soros, who was raising hackles by funding liberal projects in Hungary and other east European countries as well. Orbán’s Fidesz party plastered the country with posters of Soros, along with the inscription, “Don’t let Soros have the last laugh!” His supporters accused him of plotting to flood the country with African and Middle Eastern refugees. They described NGOs receiving Soros’s money as “mercenaries” in the service of a foreign power.

The strategy worked, propelling Fidesz to victory in 2014 and again in 2018. In fact, it succeeded so brilliantly that it soon spread to other countries. By 2017, Italy was filled with talk about Soros-financed refugee boats heading for its shores. A Polish member of parliament called Soros the “most dangerous man in the world”. Trump claimed that Soros was behind protests against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.⁹ A gunman who invaded the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018 in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, killing 11 people and wounding half a dozen more, did so because he believed Soros was secretly controlling a Honduran migrant caravan heading for the US-Mexico border.¹⁰ Even Netanyahu’s son, Yair, got into the act by posting an anti-Semitic cartoon of Soros on Facebook.¹¹

An Israeli leader thus encouraged an anti-Semitic campaign in Hungary that led to Jews being killed in the US. Netanyahu did so not because it was good for the Jews, but because it was good for a Jewish state whose interests are diverging more and more sharply from those of the Jewish masses.

Volodymyr Zelensky’s statement in April that he wants Ukraine to become a “big Israel” says it all. Israel is setting the pace for rightwing nationalists who want their own countries to be no less militant, powerful, and ethno-racially exclusive. The more Netanyahu moves in a fascist direction, the more a growing corps of admirers will do so as well.

None of which is unprecedented. Rather than opposing anti-Semitism, Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, welcomed it on the grounds that it would encourage Jewish emigration. “Anti-Semites … need only do what they did before, and then they will create a desire to emigrate where it did not previously exist, and strengthen it where it existed before,” he wrote in his 1896 pamphlet, The Jewish state. He also welcomed it because he believed it would weaken the left. Jews, he wrote,

continue to produce an abundance of mediocre intellects who find no outlet, and this endangers our social position as much as does our increasing wealth. Educated Jews without means are now rapidly becoming socialists.

A Jewish state would fix all that by unwinding the Jewish diaspora that was responsible for it in the first place.¹² “They will pray for me in the synagogues, and in the churches as well,” Herzl confided to his diary. Not only would Jews liberate themselves by moving to Palestine, he said, but they would be liberating Christians too - “liberating them from us”.¹³

This is the programme that Netanyahu is now implementing in spades. For Jews, the effects are tumultuous. Less than 80 years after the holocaust, Israel is on the cutting edge of international fascism. A people who played an outsized role in revolutionary politics from 1848 on now make up the most rightwing nation on earth, as least as far as its Middle East branch is concerned. This is the reason for the growing split between Israeli and American Jewry, the world’s two biggest Jewish communities. By cosying up to Trump, evangelical Christians and an increasingly crazed and fanatical Republican Party, Netanyahu is undermining American Jews, who, except for an orthodox fringe, know all too well that their survival depends on the continuation of democracy and racial equality. The more it is threatened, the more Jewish fortunes are threatened too. But that is precisely what Netanyahu is doing: ie, working to pull the plug.

A Jewish state may sound good for the Jews, but in reality it is turning out to be the very opposite.

The left

What does it mean for socialists? If a new epoch is dawning, in which racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Palestinian oppression are all combining in one fearsome package, what should the response be?

The answer is to recognise that, the more Israel moves in an overtly anti-Semitic direction, the more the struggle against anti-Semitism becomes the key to overcoming the Jewish state. This does not mean shifting Palestinians to the backburner: on the contrary, it means mobilising more support than ever. But at the same time, it means recognising that Zionist oppression of the Palestinians goes hand in hand with Zionist encouragement of anti-Semitism. They are two sides of the same coin, and combating one is impossible without combating the other.

This is the difference between Bolshevism and petty-bourgeois nationalism, which sees the conflict in zero-sum terms and therefore views fears of anti-Semitism as a distraction from the problem at hand, which is defending Palestinians. “To distract from Gaza slaughter, Israel lobby manufactures antisemitism freak-out,” a headline in the US-based Grayzone website proclaimed following the short-lived May 2021 Gaza war. Referring to an attack by pro-Palestinian demonstrators on outdoor diners in a heavily Jewish area of Los Angeles, the article says: “… it remains unclear if anyone at the restaurant was targeted based on their religion or ethnicity.”¹⁴ But this was plainly untrue, since eyewitnesses reported that the assailants asked diners if they were Jewish before attacking them - a clear indication that ethno-religious motives were the reason for the assault (two of the attackers were subsequently charged with hate crimes).¹⁵

If anti-Semitism charges benefit the Jewish state, then they cannot be true - or so petty bourgeois dogmatists insist. Similarly, the Palestinian academic, Joseph Massad, recently complained on The Electronic Intifada website that western liberals were imposing “a double burden” on Palestinians by requiring them “to fight off the Jewish racist colonists, while having to defend their colonisers against anti-Jewish European Christian racism”.¹⁶ It is unfair to ask Palestinians to take a stance against anti-Semitism, evidently, because that is a Euro-Christian concern. But the complaint is nonsense. Only a reactionary nationalist would see anything wrong with drawing Palestinians into the international struggle against fascism. Bolsheviks, by contrast, view it as an opportunity to broaden the Palestinian movement, to draw it into international socialist politics, and to strengthen it overall.

There is a lot to unpack here. Obviously, Zionists can use spurious anti-Semitism charges to discredit critics and intimidate opponents into silence. Keir Starmer’s neo-McCarthyite witch-hunt is a textbook example of how it works.

But the answer to people like Starmer is not to insist that anti-Semitism is a phony issue that invariably plays into Zionist hands. Rather, it is to expose Zionist misuse of the term and to point out the degree to which anti-Semitism permeates the imperialist ranks. Besides Israel, America’s other main ally in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia - a country with a rich history of vilifying Jews as well as Christians and non-Wahhabi Muslims. This did not stop the Tony Blair Faith Foundation from accepting millions in Saudi donations, just as it did not stop the Clinton Foundation from raking in more than $10 million in Saudi money as well - yet somehow they got a free pass.¹⁷ In Ukraine, Zelensky combines admiration of Israel with support for neo-Nazi military movements, such as the Azov Battalion - a very au courant combination that puts him at the ideological forefront. But the task is to expose neo-Nazism and show how it undermines Joe Biden’s claim that he is defending Ukrainian democracy against evil Kremlin autocrats. Prior to Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” against Ukraine, virtually every major news outlet - Reuters, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, the BBC, you name it - ran exposés about growing neo-Nazi influence in Ukraine.

But that has all disappeared down the memory hole ever since the February invasion began. Now the Azov Battalion has been scrubbed clean and reinvented as liberal heroes. Dozens of statues and plaques in Ukraine celebrate Stepan Bandera and other World War II collaborators who assisted in the murder of an estimated 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews.¹⁸ Yet that is ignored as well. It is the job of socialists to expose such hypocrisy before imperialists commit still more crimes.

But what about boycott, divestment and sanctions?

Supporters of South African-style BDS against the Jewish state have also been tarred with the broad brush of anti-Semitism. Texas, Kansas and Arkansas have all passed anti-BDS laws, which, among other things, have resulted in residents being required to sign no-boycott pledges before receiving hurricane aid or, in the case of government employees, before collecting their state salaries.¹⁹ Congress has done the same, passing laws in 2017 and 2019 that penalise companies which abide by the BDS campaign. In Germany, the Bundestag approved a resolution in 2019 calling for a cut-off in funding for any pro-BDS project - a case of boycotting the boycotters, so to speak. But the effort backfired when a raft of blue-chip cultural and intellectual organisations - the Goethe Institute, the Berlin Deutsches Theater, the Berliner Festspiele, the Einstein Forum, etc - issued a joint statement complaining that “accusations of anti-Semitism are being misused to push aside important voices and to distort critical positions”.

Score one for free speech. But this does not let BDS off the hook. The movement is open to criticism on a number of grounds:

rather than opposing US imperialism, it seeks to enlist it in the cause of anti-Zionism;
by branding Israel as singularly evil, it takes the pressure off even more reactionary regimes like the Saudis;
by targeting Israeli companies, it seeks to throw employees out of work;
by classifying the entire Israeli working class as the enemy, it glues Israeli workers and the Zionist ruling class together ever more strongly.²⁰

But BDS is open to criticism for another reason that is even more pertinent: the presence of Hamas on its governing board as a member of an umbrella group known as the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine.²¹ The group’s role is a godsend for Zionists, who are happy to use it to tar BDS as anti-Semitic. But it is a problem for anti-Zionists, who are hampered in their battle against Netanyahu and his anti-Semitic cohorts by equally vicious forces in their own midst. If the Socialist Workers Party was criticised for teaming up with the Muslim Brotherhood as part of its Respect coalition, if the Zelensky government is slammed for tolerating the Azov Battalion in its military, then it is difficult to see how BDS cannot be criticised due to its links with Hamas.

The more BDS supporters keep quiet about such skeletons in the closet, the less they are able to take advantage of what is in fact Zionism’s growing weakness. They may gain a few adherents on US college campuses, but they will end up losing the war. Netanyahu is highly vulnerable due to his role in the international ultra-right, and it would be nothing less than a dereliction of duty not to make maximum use of the opening.

But this is just what BDS now prevents. To quote Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, “It’s worse than a crime: it’s a blunder.”