Why anti-Semites love Israel and vice versa

Imperialist governments and their media conglomerates repeat on a continuous loop: people who oppose Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza are anti-Semitic. The only reason anyone could protest the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinian children is a deep-seated hatred of Jews. All Republicans and half of the Democrats in the US Congress agreed that anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism. They keep repeating this claim even as more and more Jewish youth are breaking with Zionism – Jewish activists are also regularly accused of anti-Semitism.

But what if the opposite is true? If we look around the world today, some of Israel’s strongest supporters are blatant Jew-haters. CNN As investigations showed, the hooligans who attacked the pro-Palestinian camp at UCLA were not mostly Jews or Israelis — they were Trump supporters whose social media profiles were full of anti-Semitic memes about the Rothschilds controlling the world.

Let’s look at some examples:

# Just a week after Donald Trump received an award from the Zionist Organization of America for his unwavering support of Israel, he dined with anti-Semite Kanye West and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.

# In France, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) party was founded by former Nazi collaborators – fascists who rounded up French Jews for genocide. But Le Pen supports Israel more than any other French politician.

# In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party also has Nazi roots – its leading candidate in the European elections defended the SS, the organization that ran the extermination camps. The AfD is Germany’s most pro-Israel party.

# In Italy, the Israeli government of Giorga Meloni supports Israel, while members of her party’s youth organization give the fascist salute and use anti-Semitic slurs.

# Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who did not want his children to go to school with Jews, has called MAGA “the most pro-Israel group” in the country, while MAGA supporters commit mass murder in synagogues.

# In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has organized campaigns against the Jewish billionaire George Soros, using classic anti-Semitic metaphors: “We are fighting against an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hidden; not direct, but cunning; not honest, but mean; not national, but international; who does not believe in work, but speculates with money; who has no fatherland of his own, but believes that the whole world belongs to him.” Orbán’s government is Israel’s closest ally in the European Council.

The list could go on and on.

Israel claims to be a bastion against anti-Semitism – yet the Israeli government is friendly to all of the anti-Semites mentioned above. When Elon Musk started spreading anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and spent billions of dollars to open Twitter to white nationalists, he was not called out – instead, Netanyahu was all smiles as he posed for photos with him.

Zionists and anti-Semites: A long history

This symbiotic relationship between Zionists and anti-Semites dates back to the founding of the modern Zionist movement by Theodor Herzl just over a century ago. As nation-states were formed, some European nationalists believed that Jews should be sent back to the “land of their forefathers.” And some of the world’s most bloodthirsty anti-Semites were intrigued to learn of a Jewish movement whose goal was to expel Jews from Europe. British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour made his 1917 statement in support of a Jewish homeland in Palestine precisely because he did not want Jewish refugees coming to England.

Right-wing extremists such as the conservative British Prime Minister Winston Churchill or the German Nazi Party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg were both convinced that the revolutionary movements that shook the world at the end of World War I were orchestrated by a secret Jewish conspiracy. For both, the answer was to support Zionism and thereby encourage Jews to stay away from subversive movements.

Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, noted in his diaries: “The anti-Semites will become our most reliable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.” This was not an abstract idea: in mid-1903, Herzl traveled to St. Petersburg to meet with the Tsar’s minister, Vyacheslav von Plehve, who was responsible for terrible pogroms against Jews. The two men agreed to encourage Jewish emigration from Russia in order to keep Jews away from the revolutionary movements that threatened the Tsar.

Christian Zionism

Today, fundamentalist Christians are Zionism’s most reliable allies in the United States. John Hagee, the leader of a megachurch in San Antonio, was a keynote speaker at the Rally for Israel in Washington last November. He previously led a prayer at the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem in 2018. Hagee believes that Jews must return to Jerusalem to usher in the “end times”—in his view, God orchestrated the Holocaust to advance that process. As he said of the Holocaust in the 1990s, “How did it happen? Because God allowed it. Why did it happen? Because God said, ‘My number one priority for the Jewish people is to get them to return to the Land of Israel.'” He also believes that the banks are controlled by the Rothschilds and other Jewish families.

Hagee is a classic anti-Semite – and yet also a friend of Israel. He supports Israel because he believes that the Jews murdered Jesus and that they must all convert to Christianity or be killed for the Kingdom of Heaven to come. One might think that Israel’s leaders would be wary of such a “friend.” But Hagee speaks for a coalition of millions of anti-Semitic Christians in the United States who will reliably vote for never-ending arms deliveries to Israel.

Netanyahu reportedly told his advisers that “American Jews are not so important that they will not be Jews in a generation or two and that more can be achieved by building relationships with evangelicals.” Netanyahu’s ambassador to Washington confirmed that “evangelical Christians are the backbone of support for Israel in the United States.”

While it is often claimed that opponents of Israel are anti-Semitic, scientific research points in the opposite direction. As Peter Beinart explains in Jewish movementsStudies show that people who support Israel are more likely to agree with anti-Semitic statements such as, “Jews have too much influence in this country.” Pro-Israel countries tend to be anti-Jewish and vice versa. This sounds contradictory, but there is a certain logic: Just as in the past, people who don’t like Jews are happy when they are far away.

Anti-Semitism and Capitalism

Bourgeois ideology portrays anti-Semitism as a mythical, eternal phenomenon, beyond the forces of history. Yet, as Jewish Marxists such as Abraham Leon argued, anti-Semitism is a product of class society, and modern anti-Semitism emerged with the birth of capitalist nation-states. Each state was meant to correspond to an ethnically and culturally homogeneous nation—and Jews who did not fit perfectly were often suspected of “dual loyalty.” For many anti-Semites, the goal was to get Jews to leave, or, in the words of the Nazi Rosenberg, to get them “over the line” one way or another.

The right-wing extremist German-Swiss newspaper NZZa staunch supporter of Israel, said the quiet part out loud when he declared that “all Jews should help protect Israel” and “sooner or later they should probably move there too.” When the European right says “solidarity with Israel,” they might as well say “Jews out.” This is why they are so fiercely angered by the very existence of anti-Zionist Jews who do not believe in ethnically homogeneous societies and might even prefer to stay in the Diaspora.

The Dreyfus Affair broke out in France in 1894 when a Jewish army officer was accused of spying for Germany. People were shocked that seemingly civilized France was revealing its terrible prejudices. French socialists like Jean Jaurès responded by mobilizing the working class to defend the Jews and oppose any form of oppression. However, conservative figures like Herzl drew the opposite conclusion. As he wrote in his diary:

In Paris … I acquired a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to forgive. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of the attempt to “fight” anti-Semitism.

Herzl’s Zionism began with the extremely pessimistic belief that anti-Semitism was invincible. The only way to protect the Jews was to house them in a separate nation-state, behind barbed wire and eventually atomic bombs. This would require alliances with the colonial powers and anyone who wanted the Jews to leave Europe.

This has led Zionism to its current impasse: because it allies itself with figures like Trump and their deeply reactionary and anti-Semitic views, young Jews are breaking with Zionism. They understand the need to fight against Trump, Le Pen, Meloni and all these other reactionary figures. It logically follows that they must fight against the closest ally of the far right in the Middle East: Netanyahu. A new generation of young Jewish activists is already playing a role in the fight against the far right on an international level.

Zionism never had anything to offer against the crises of capitalism that led to endless suffering for the Jews. Socialists understood that anti-Semitism, like any form of oppression, is ultimately a product of class society and can therefore be eliminated through a worldwide socialist revolution. Today, this means fighting to build a revolutionary workers’ party to bring the struggle against capitalism to a successful conclusion.