Can the fight against antisemitism be anything other than a parody when it is organized by the far right? By inviting members of Europe’s authoritarian and xenophobic right to parade on the stage of its “International Conference on Combating Antisemitism”, the Israeli Ministry of the Diaspora has committed a serious political error, which rings like a betrayal of its mission. Here, Michael Brenner reports on the drift represented by this move and the trap into which it is locking Jews.
Imagine if the German government organized a conference against xenophobia and invited mainly political voices from Europe’s extreme right-wing parties, and Giorgia Meloni as the keynote speaker. This is roughly what the program of an “International Conference on Combating Antisemitism” reads, to which Israel’s Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli invited people to Jerusalem on March 26 and 27.
A glance at the guest list is enough to give you the chills. Above all, it includes representatives of Europe’s radical right-wing parties, from France to the Netherlands and Hungary. Of course, the conservative American evangelicals, represented by Netanyahu’s friend Mike Evans, are also not to be missed at this gathering. Fittingly, Argentina’s President Javier Milei will be the opening speaker. He has not yet revealed whether he will come with a chainsaw. At some point, Putin’s friend and President of Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, will also be on the agenda. It will no longer surprise anyone to learn that Prime Minister Netanyahu feels at home in this circle. Since February, his Likud party has held observer status with the “Patriots for Europe”, the faction in the European Parliament to which the Austrian FPÖ and Hungarian Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz also belong.
Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French-Jewish icon in the fight against racism and antisemitism, felt less comfortable as the keynote speaker. When he saw the list of invitees, he canceled as quickly as possible. The German Government’s Commissioner for Antisemitism, Felix Klein, did the only right thing and followed him. So did the President of the German-Israeli Society (DIG), Volker Beck, former chancellor candidate Armin Laschet, and the British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis. More cancellations are likely to follow.
Experts on antisemitism are not welcome at this antisemitism conference anyway. They might have painted a slightly more differentiated picture than that of a Europe overrun by Muslims, and might have addressed not only left-wing and Islamist antisemitism but also the good old – and unfortunately still active – antisemitism from the right. This danger certainly does not exist with the “Patriots for Europe”: neither with the Dutchman Sebastiaan Stöteler, nor with the Frenchman Jordan Bardella or the Spanish Vox member of parliament Hermann Tertsch, whose father was once an SA storm leader and was sent to Madrid as a diplomat of the Nazi state. Incidentally, the organizers did not (yet) dare to invite a delegation from the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, a right-wing populist party in Germany).
This is a serious blow to the fight against antisemitism, because with such a cast, it loses credibility.
This conference is not a conference to combat antisemitism, but a conference to strengthen antisemitism. The right-wing nationalist Israeli government has long flirted with Europe’s right, but so far has shown so much restraint that it has not invited right-wing extremist politicians to Israel. This firewall has now been broken – and for a conference on antisemitism, of all things. This allows the organizers to take the wind out of the sails of all those who continue to warn of the threatening antisemitic ideas of the far right. This is a serious blow to the fight against antisemitism, because with such a cast, it loses credibility.
Amichai Chikli, a hardliner from Netanyahu’s Likud party, whose exact title is “Minister for Diaspora Affairs and for Combating Antisemitism,” is thus placing himself in the same line of thought as Elon Musk and J.D. Vance, who openly supported the AfD in the German election campaign. If these are Israel’s new friends, one can only agree with Voltaire: “Lord, protect us from our friends. We can defend ourselves against our enemies.” In any case, Chikli can no longer be a point of contact for Europe’s Jewish communities, who continue to keep their distance from far-right parties.
Theodor Herzl, David Ben-Gurion, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, the state’s guiding thinkers and formative figures, together with the founders of Yad Vashem and its recently deceased scientific director Yehuda Bauer, would turn over in their graves, seeing the chamber of horrors of this conference before them. So would Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Menahem Begin, the early leaders of Israel’s right wing Revisionists, the forerunners of Netanyahu’s Likud party. The Israeli government no longer needs to wait for its enemies to make mistakes; it now supplies its friends with weapons against itself. After this conference, people who adhere to liberal and democratic values can no longer take this Israeli government seriously as a partner in the fight against antisemitism.
This is a very sad realization for all those who believe in the importance of a Jewish state and the security of Jews in the diaspora, because this capitulation to the right is above all one thing: a victory for Israel’s opponents and antisemites. And it comes at a time when a traumatized and deeply divided Israel urgently needs broad support from the center of society, and not just from the right.
They forget that these right-wing extremists detest Muslims only a little more than Jews, who are just as much on their blacklist.
A conference on antisemitism with right-wing extremists is an insignificant event in the record of the current Netanyahu government compared to its failure on October 7, 2023, to waging an uncontrolled war in Gaza, to negotiating the release of all Israeli hostages, to reining in its own right-wing extremist ministers, the planned restructuring of the judiciary, the dismissal of the defense minister and now also the removal of the head of the secret service and the attorney general. Symbolically, however, this conference shows the point at which Netanyahu, encouraged by Trump and Musk, has now arrived.
Liberal Jews, like all friends of Israel who continue to define themselves as Zionists and recognize the necessity of a Jewish state, are walking a very fine line. On the left side, the abyss of an ever-strengthening anti-Zionist movement is opening up, which has become particularly visible at American universities. It simplifies Zionism as an enterprise of European settler colonialism and denies the state of Israel’s right to exist. In doing so, it fails to recognize the historical roots of the Jewish people, as well as the reasons that led to the establishment of the State of Israel and the fact that half of Jewish Israelis fled or were expelled from Arab countries.
On the right – and this includes the current Israeli government – are those who, for religious or nationalist reasons, deny the Palestinians the right to statehood and are willing to compromise parts of the state’s democratic structures. In Jewish communities outside Israel, which feel increasingly threatened by verbal and physical attacks, there is a growing willingness to see right-wing and anti-Muslim forces as their supposed allies in the fight against terror. In doing so, they forget that these right-wing extremists detest Muslims only a little more than Jews, who are just as much on their blacklist.
All those who continue to believe in the possibility of a Jewish and democratic state, based on a secular foundation, granting equal rights to its non-Jewish citizens and enabling the existence of a Palestinian state, are caught between a rock and a hard place. The political representation of the Palestinians and the Arab states have not made it easy for those in Israel who believe in this vision to realize this possibility, even throughout history. The security of Israel must be guaranteed. But for Israel, it is not only a matter of physical survival, but also of spiritual survival. In other words, can the State of Israel remain true to the humanistic principles that Theodor Herzl and his comrades-in-arms had once formulated and that David Ben-Gurion read out in the declaration of independence in May 1948? Or is the state developing into an entirely new entity following the territorial conquests of the Six-Day War of 1967, the shift to the right in domestic politics from 1977 and the terrorist attack of 2023 and the war in Gaza?
But for friends of Israel, the question is no longer whether they want to support Israel, but rather which Israel they want to support.
Israel is not alone in facing the challenge of defending a fragile democracy. The oldest continuously existing democracy in the world is facing a similar threat under completely different circumstances, following Donald Trump’s election victory. And the state of European democracies is equally worrying. So before we point the finger at others, we have to deal with similar problems on our own doorstep.
But in democracies, there is always a glimmer of hope, even in difficult times: Netanyahu and Chikli in Israel, just like Trump and Musk in the US, cannot claim a monopoly for themselves. They are part of a government elected by a narrow majority in a democratic country, and just as they were elected, they can be voted out of office again. The Americans have already done it once with Trump. In Israel, hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets regularly in defense of democratic values, and Netanyahu does not fare well in the polls. Only the Israelis themselves can decide the next election, and until then, foreign governments must recognize even unpleasant political constellations. But for friends of Israel, the question is no longer whether they want to support Israel, but rather which Israel they want to support: the government linked to Europe’s far-right extremists or the diverse democratic opposition. The Jerusalem conference on antisemitism may have provided the answer for some who have not yet made up their minds.
Michael Brenner
Michael Brenner holds the chair of Jewish history and culture at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Seymour and Lillian Abensohn chair of Israeli studies at the American University of Washington DC. His books include The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, Yale University Press (1996); German-Jewish History in Modern Times, Columbia University Press (as co-author, winner of the 1997 National Jewish Book Award for Jewish History); After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany, Princeton University Press (1997); A Short History of the Jews, Princeton University Press (2010); Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History, Princeton University Press (2010); In Search of Israel, Princeton University Press (2018)
