The Left’s Anti-Semitism Crisis Is the Right’s Opportunity France’s Marine Le Pen and Germany’s AfD are embracing Israel while socialists equivocate.By Joseph C. Sternberg
Wars have a way of scrambling politics near and far, and so it may become with the war Hamas has launched against Israel. One topsy-turvy outcome in Europe is that ostensibly anti-Semitic parties on the further reaches of the political right have embraced Israel—likely because they’ve realized that doing so emphasizes the left’s embarrassing anti-Semitic hypocrisies.
In France, representatives of the two main right-wing political movements—those led by Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour—participated in a pro-Israel rally days after the attack. Ms. Le Pen in the National Assembly last week expressed solidarity with Israel, describing Hamas’s attack as a “pogrom,” and reminding lawmakers of the need to “protect French Jews.”
That’s striking rhetoric from Ms. Le Pen’s party, now known as the National Rally, which has an awful record on anti-Semitism. The party’s founder and her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is notorious for Holocaust denial, and Ms. Le Pen eventually expelled him from the party because of it. She herself has waded into debates about France’s culpability for the deportation of its Jews under Nazi occupation and whether kosher animal slaughter should be legal.
In Germany, a parliamentary resolution in support of Israel garnered support from the Alternative for Germany, or AfD. This movement of the populist right, which opinion polls suggest is now the second most popular party after the opposition conservative Christian Democrats, periodically stokes arguments over how Germany interprets the history of the Holocaust. But two AfD members of Parliament visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel in May.
This apparent unity in support of Israel on the further reaches of the right contrasts with the disarray on the left. While Ms. Le Pen was speaking up for Israel, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the French version of Bernie Sanders who founded the France Unbowed party, argued Israel and Hamas both were responsible for the violence and then picked a fight with a major Jewish organization.
On the mainstream left there’s Britain’s Labour Party, which thought it had purged anti-Semitic elements left over from the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Yet several local politicians have or are threatening to quit the party after current leader Keir Starmer supported Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas. Mr. Starmer now must choose between offending this far-left wing or offending the millions of decent British voters who rebuffed the Labour Party in 2019 over Mr. Corbyn’s anti-Semitism and could do so again.
This mess makes the insurgent right’s embrace of Israel look all the better, which surely is the political motive. While one should hope for a conversion of heart on the right concerning relations with Europe’s Jewish community, this looks as if it could have more to do with advancing other right-wing priorities, namely anti-elitism and opposition to immigration.
Some of Europe’s wave of left-wing anti-Semitism burbles up from the same springs whence it flows in America: university campuses. This is a toxic brew of naive anticolonialism and pathological hostility to capitalism, combined with a diabolical conviction that Jews are on the wrong side of both lines. The result is a long tradition of academic hostility to Israel that spawns anti-Semitism.
This gives the far right good culture-war reasons to side with Israel and a political opportunity in doing so. There’s no better way to discredit the left’s philosophical belief in “rule by experts” than to highlight the reprehensible moral attitudes of the schools that are supposed to produce all that expertise—and that churn out most of Europe’s mainstream political class.
Of greater interest to the insurgent right, however, are the implications of the Israeli crisis for European immigration policy. Europeans have been shocked at the scale of pro-Hamas protests this month. Even commentators in left-leaning publications such as Germany’s Der Spiegel now admit that many of the people waving Hamas flags and cheering the murder of Jewish babies are immigrants from the Middle East or their descendants.
One thing everyone in Europe seems to know but hardly anyone in the mainstream wants to discuss is that the Continent is failing to assimilate these migrants, especially concerning values such as pluralism. The people who will talk about this are on the right, and support for Israel is becoming a convenient tool with which to embarrass the pro-immigration left.
Two lessons emerge. If the left won’t defend Western values in relation to Israel and the Jews, the far right will, and in ways the left doesn’t like. Consider that while left-leaning politicians still can’t say what they will do to ensure immigrants adopt Western values, the right has a ready answer: Keep the immigrants out.
Meanwhile, these political movements on the right are adopting pro-Israel rhetoric because they’ve figured out this reflects the moral sensibilities of large swathes of the European public. Allegations of anti-Semitism are an effective cudgel against immigrants (or against parties of the right) only because European voters view respect for Jews as a core value.
Britain’s Labour was reminded of this when it got wiped out in a 2019 election dominated by fights about Mr. Corbyn’s anti-Semitic attitudes. Who else wants to make the same mistake?
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