The Growing
Affinity Between Netanyahu’s Israel and the West’s
Far-right is Hardly Surprising
By Jonathan
Cook
September
21, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- The eldest son of Israeli prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu has found himself an unlikely poster boy
for David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, and
neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer.
Last week,
these cheerleaders for Jew hatred described
27-year-old Yair Netanyahu as “awesome” and “a total
bro” for posting a grossly anti-Semitic image on
social media.
It depicts
an Illuminati-like figure and a reptilian creature
controlling the world through money and dark arts.
Alongside them are a cabal of conspirators, their
faces altered to show Mr Netanyahu’s main opponents.
They include George Soros, a Holocaust survivor who
has invested billions in pro-democracy movements,
and Ehud Barak, a former Israeli prime
minister-turned-government critic.
This is not
Yair’s first troubling outburst. Last month, he
decried demonstrators who opposed a rally by white
supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left
a woman dead.
These might
be dismissed as the immature rantings of a wayward
son had Yair not been groomed by his father as
Israel’s “crown prince”. Netanyahu Jr was supposedly
behind an online media strategy that steered Mr
Netanyahu to electoral victory in 2015. He can be
seen at his father’s side at meetings with world
leaders.
The Israeli
media were shocked not only by the post but also by
Mr Netanyahu’s refusal to criticise his son. An
editorial in Haaretz concluded that the prime
minister’s silence signalled his “consent to the
ongoing demonisation of anyone who doesn’t get in
line with the Israeli right”.
Yair’s
choice of targets was revealing, particularly Mr
Soros.
In July, Mr
Netanyahu met his Hungarian counterpart Viktor
Orban, an ultra-nationalist who has led a xenophobic
campaign against immigrants. In a bid to crush
opposition, the Orban government has vilified Mr
Soros, an American-Hungarian who promotes
progressive causes. A billboard campaign against the
billionaire unleashed a wave of anti-Semitism across
the country.
Mr
Netanyahu ought to have rushed to Mr Soros’s defence.
Instead, he echoed Mr Orban’s incitement. Mr Soros,
he said, had “undermined” and “defamed” Israel too –
by funding human rights groups opposed to the
occupation.
Sympathy
with the European and US far-right is not restricted
to the Netanyahu camp. It is moving into the Israeli
mainstream. Last week, the Herzliya Conference – an
annual jamboree for Israel’s security establishment
– invited Sebastian Gorka as a keynote speaker.
Mr Gorka,
another American-Hungarian and Mr Trump’s former
terrorism adviser, is a figurehead of the alt-right,
a term for US white supremacist groups. Mr Gorka
told the conference that Israel and the US were
“founding members of the Judeo-Christian
civilisation” and would defeat their “common
enemies”.
Meanwhile,
another US alt-right leader, Richard Spencer,
appeared on Israeli TV last month to call himself a
“white Zionist”.
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The
affinity between Netanyahu’s Israel and the
West’s far-right is understandable. Both detest
a human rights discourse they have yet to crush.
Both mobilise their supporters with dog-whistle
Islamophobia. Both prefer militarised,
fear-based societies and both share an obsession
with Jew hatred.
Israel is
so esteemed by white supremacists because it offers
a double whammy of anti-Semitism. For decades,
Israel has sought to persuade the West that it faces
an endless war against Arab and Muslim “terror”,
while simultaneously declaring itself the only true
home for Jews. For an alt-right bristling with
hatred for all Semites, this is manna from heaven.
It, too, wants an apocalyptic battle against Islam,
and it, too, is happy to see the West cleared of
Jews by herding them into the Middle East.
At first
sight, that has created an ideological inconsistency
on the Israeli right that Yair Netanyahu’s meme
highlights.
The Israeli
prime minister has repeatedly called on all Jews to
come to Israel, claiming it as the only safe haven
from an immutable global anti-semitism. And yet, Mr
Netanyahu is also introducing a political test
before he opens the door.
Jews
supporting a boycott of Israel are already barred.
Now, liberal Jews and critics of the occupation like
Mr Soros are increasingly not welcome either. Israel
is rapidly redefining the extent of the sanctuary it
offers – for Jewish supremacists only.
The paradox
may turn out to be more apparent than real, however.
For Mr Netanyahu may believe he has much to gain by
abandoning liberal Jews to their fate, as the
alt-right asserts its power in western capitals.
The “white
Zionists” are committed to making life ever harder
for minorities in the West in a bid to be rid of
them. Sooner or later, on Mr Netanyahu’s logic,
liberal Jews will face a reckoning. They will have
to accept that Israel’s ultra-nationalists were
right all along, and that Israel is their only
sanctuary.
Guided by
this cynical convergence of interests, Jewish and
white supremacists are counting on a revival of
anti-Semitism that will benefit them both.
Jonathan
Cook is a Nazareth- based journalist and winner of
the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism -
http://www.jonathan-cook.net/
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