Pariah friends for a pariah state

This Green and Surprisingly Pleasant Land examines the growing closeness between the global extreme right and the Netanyahu government in Israel

At last the extreme right, featuring a ragbag collection of xenophobes, racists and haters of liberalism, has found a ‘respectable’ cause to promote. Astonishingly it is support for the Jewish state of Israel.

Astonishingly because these individuals and organisations are the descendants of the fascists who were responsible for the biggest massacre of Jewish people in history.

Astonishingly because support for the foundation of the Jewish state was heavily backed by the left and the Zionist movement itself was largely run by people who considered themselves to be socialists and social democrats.

Astonishingly because a central tenet of Judaism, heavily influencing the early Zionist movement, is known in Hebrew as Tikkun Olam, literally meaning healing the world, a concept that Judaism should be a force for improving the lives of mankind and pursuing social justice. Exactly the kind of thing that right wing extremists treat with the utmost contempt.

This is why I was taken aback after stumbling upon a so called patriots rally filling Trafalgar Square on a sunny day in London at the end of July. The crowd cheered wildly as the racist leader Tommy Robinson spewed his trademark vitriol against immigrants, and all the other people he hates. Protestors held aloft the Union flag, the English St George Cross, joined by just one foreign flag, that of the State of Israel.

Where does this new found love for Israel come from? Almost certainly not from a love of the Jewish people. More likely it is derived from enthusiasm for a state seen to be slaughtering Muslims in their tens of thousands, a state run by a rabid right wing extremist government which exemplifies this rabble’s belief in militarism as a means of solving problems. Israel’s premier, Benjamin Netanyahu is thus embraced as one of their own.

There is no suggestion that the Netanyahu government had anything to do with this rally nor that it has become so deranged as to confine its international alliances to those on the far right. Nor is it the case that a majority of Israelis want anything to do with these people but, at least for now, they are living under a government that is unpleasantly comfortable in the company of some seriously mad and bad people.

While Mr. Netanyahu may not have set out to choose friends like these he has not been shy in cultivating extremists. When the far right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was in power, he was avidly courted in Jerusalem alongside the Hitler-admiring former president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte. In world where appropriate distance is carefully kept from far right parties such as Austria’s Freedom Party, Germany’s Afd and the Swedish Democrats, Israel offers a warm embrace

This kind of company makes Mr. Netanyahu’s best friends in Europe and America, the xenophobes Viktor Orban and Donald Trump, seem like moderates.

Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, uncannily predicted that ‘the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.’ He wrote this before the Nazi Holocaust but against a background of agitation against Jews which he believed could be eased if the Jewish people declared a willingness to leave their homes and emigrate to a new Jewish state.

As it turned out antisemitism was even more dangerous than Theodore Herzl realized yet his shrewd observation about the strange alliance between anti-Jewish racists and the Jewish state has been realized.

Like many strange alliances this one is cynical and opportunistic. However in a world where Israel is fast slipping into pariah state status it is not that surprisingly that its newest best friends are from the pariah right side of politics.

Is this what was envisaged in the biblical prophecy, eagerly embraced by the Zionist pioneers, about the Jewish state becoming ‘a light unto the nations’?