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Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig – How Should Israel Relate to Radical Right-Wing Support?

Among its other dilemmas, Israel now has a particularly tough, diplomatic head-scratcher. With strong global criticism (albeit, not across the board, of course) for its Gaza war campaign, Israel certainly needs all the international support it can muster. What is disconcerting, though, is that a lot of support is coming from the growing populist, radical right in Europe and elsewhere. And they are gaining ground politically, with the latest political trends in Europe (and the U.S.) exhibiting populism conquering former bastions of liberalism. In America (Trumpism); in Holland (Geert Wilders recent election victory); in France (Marie Le Pen continues to rise in the polls); in Italy (the Prime Minister is far-right); in Sweden (de facto government partners); in Spain (rising far-right factions); Dublin’s recent far-right riots against immigration; not to mention the Orban government in Hungary and the newly elected President of Argentina, Javier Milei. The only move in the reverse direction occurred recently in Poland (by a whisker).

For Israel, the good news and the bad news are two sides of the same coin: most of these far-right leaders and/or their parties actually support Israel in its war on Hamas. The question is why.

The main reason is very clear because they do not hide it: antipathy to the Moslem world in general and massive Moslem immigration into their countries in particular (in the U.S., one can add: “brown,” Latin American immigration). From their perspective, Israel’s ongoing struggle with some of its Moslem “neighbors” (Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas) is seen as part of a wider struggle – call it “civilizational” if you will.

Should Israel be happy and encourage such support? Not really. The antipathy is presently addressed to Moslems, but at base this is a massive counter-reaction to any sort of “others” who are “invading” their country, thereby “diluting” the racial or cultural “purity” of their own people. From there to anti-Semitism (the classic “Other”), the distance isn’t great.

Indeed, one doesn’t have to predict the future; the past is enough indication as to how Jews were treated in pre-World War II Europe, before the Moslems “arrived.” Thus, if and when the Moslem issue of mass immigration is “resolved” by the Europeans (one way or another), it doesn’t take a prophet to understand who would be next on the Europeans’ anti-Other agenda.

The situation today is misleading. The classic aphorism in this regard states: “the enemy of my enemy is my (temporary) friend.” With Jews in Israel fighting the “Moslem horde” (from the perspective of the far-Right), Israel is a friend in need (not necessarily, indeed). But that will be a temporary, unofficial “alliance” of similar goals.

Further exacerbating the situation – for Israel and Europe – is the recent, widespread antisemitism evinced by Moslems in Europe, in the guise of pro-Palestinian rights (“From the River to the Sea”). Such protests merely raise the hackles even more acutely of Europe’s nationalists who worry that the Moslems are indeed “taking over.” Factually, however, there are several million Moslems in France, Britain, and Germany – and hundreds of thousands in some other countries (e.g., Holland, Spain) – but these still constitute less than 10% of those countries’ overall population. And given the right-wing reaction to continued immigration, those numbers will no longer increase, and might well actually go down.

Israelis, meanwhile, can sympathize with such right-wing reactions to non-European immigration. Israel also had to deal with this phenomenon a decade ago, mostly migration from Africa. However, given more pressing existential issues, this only had a peripheral influence on Israeli politics. Still, Israelis have little trouble identifying with right-wing Europeans on this issue.

That leaves the Israeli government with a tough foreign policy dilemma: how to maintain such right-wing European support without overly endorsing the more racist or xenophobic elements in radical right-wing ideology?

One possibility is to point to the fact that the concept of a “nation-state” originated in Europe a few hundred years ago, to consolidate the evolutionary movement from principalities to kingdoms to full-fledged states, each with a common ethno-cultural history. At some point – post-Enlightenment – the “nation” in nation-state evaporated, as countries focused on civic equality between all its residents. Today, Israel is one of the very few true “nation-states” left in the world in which ethnicity is the raison d’etre for its existence (among other true nation-states: Iceland, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bhutan). To be sure, this should not mean discriminating against ethnic minorities; it merely entails the state representing and symbolizing a specific religious and/or ethnic culture. That sort of approach could serve as a model for other ethnic majority, European countries with accompanying ethnic minorities.

Yes, such an approach is anathema to “enlightened,” universalistic-minded people and countries (e.g., France’s ideology of Laïcité), but the concept of a specific national identity within clear territorial boundaries seems to be too basic a part of human nature to fight. What Israel can do in this respect is to show that a nation-state need not be discriminatory to others in its midst; but conversely, for that to work, countries have to limit the number of “others” immigrating into that society if it doesn’t want to end up with a defensive public electing into office a racist, populist, xenophobic government.

For Israel, this is a delicate balancing act. How well it manages to stay aloft on this “balance beam” will be critical for maintaining the continued international support of its more liberal friends. As the adage goes: “Choose your friends wisely, for you will tend to become like them.”