Giles Fraser
My
mother-in-law has just arrived from Israel for her summer holiday.
First she
coos over her grandchild. Then we sit on the floor and unwrap the beautiful
pots and cups that she has made for us.
We chat about how things are in Tel
Aviv – the people, the weather, new restaurants. Soon enough we turn to
politics.
Here the mood changes. Great place, Israel. Terrible politics.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu staged a
rally of his supporters last week.
In the face of mounting accusations of
corruption, he hit back at the media and the liberal elite who he says want to
unseat him.
Such are the
similarities between Netanyahu and Donald Trump, it is hard to know who is
copying whom.
Netanyahu deliberately plays up the connection.
Which is why events in Charlottesville, and Trump’s half-hearted condemnations of US fascism, have
given Israel’s PM a political headache.
Condemn Trump and he risks alienating
his political soulmate. Not condemn Trump and he looks like being soft on
neo-nazism.
Most
Israeli politicians got it right.
Reacting to Trump’s “there are two sides to
every story” line, Yair Lapid insisted:
“There are no two sides.
When neo-Nazis march in Charlottesville with antisemitic slogans against Jews
and for white supremacy, the denouncement is unequivocal.”
But Netanyahu took
three days to come up with a condemnation of neo-nazism, slipped out in an
English-language tweet.
Should it really have been so difficult for an Israeli
PM to condemn nazism?
A problem for the Israeli right is that there
are quite a few, especially on the outer fringes of rightwing politics in the
US, who don’t much care for Jews, but purport to admire and
support Israel because of its commitment to maintaining a
particular racial majority within its borders.
Speaking on Israel’s Channel 2 News on
Wednesday, the alt-right’s Richard Spencer, one of the leaders of the
Charlottesville rally, gave an astonishing example of this “antisemites for
Israel” philosophy.
“Jews are vastly over-represented in what you would call
‘the establishment’ and white people are being dispossessed from this country,”
he said of the US.
Yet he continued:
“An Israeli citizen, someone who has a
sense of nationhood and peoplehood, and the history and experience of the
Jewish people, you should respect someone like me who has analogue feelings
about whites.
“You could say I am a white Zionist – in the sense that I care
about my people, I want us to have a secure homeland for us and ourselves. Just
like you want a secure homeland in Israel.”
This
is staggering stuff.
Richard Spencer is the man who chanted “Heil Trump” during a Washington
rally.
His followers responded with the Nazi salute.
Praise from a man mired in
the worst sort of antisemitism should prompt soul-searching on the right of
Israel’s political establishment.
These are not admirers that they should want.
More shocking, some concede that Spencer and
his like have reason to find common cause with some of Israel’s outer political
fringes.
As the former PM Ehud Barak said of Charlottesville:
“You can’t say
you don’t see things here that bear a certain similarity – when you look at the
Lehava demonstrations or La Familia activity, or the ranting against
journalists covering Netanyahu investigations.”
It is especially against mixed
marriages (like mine) between Israeli Jews and non-Jews.
And it also wants to
rid Israel of Christianity.
La Familia are fans of the
Beitar Jerusalem football team.
A few months ago I went to see them playing an
Israeli Arab team from Galilee, Bnei Sakhnin – though the Sakhnin fans were not
allowed into the ground.
My remedial Hebrew was not enough to make out
what they were singing to the rows of empty seats opposite.
“We are going to
burn your village down,” was how my friend translated it.
Barak is right, the parallels with
Charlottesville are sometimes difficult to avoid.
And the problem everywhere
with these outer fringes is that they are getting less and less outer.
Frightening, isn’t it?
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