Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs reached out to some of Europe’s most extreme right-wing politicians before Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress this Wednesday.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has often expressed a proclivity for certain ideas on the authoritarian right. That tendency accelerated after Netanyahu was forced to include Israeli ultranationalists in his already shaky ruling coalition. While Netanyahu may not agree with the ultranationalists on everything, he has made no secret about his feeling more comfortable with someone like Donald Trump than he does with the Biden administration. Netanyahu’s scheduled speech to Congress this Wednesday, July 24, is at the invitation of Congressional Republicans.
Netanyahu’s conservative preferences were also on display when he informally allied himself with Christian evangelists, who believe, according to their interpretation of the Bible, that Jews can only attain salvation if they convert to Christianity before Judgment Day. It did not seem to be a problem that some of Netanyahu’s evangelical supporters, notably US televangelist John Hagee, had expressed questionable views regarding Judaism.
Hagee once suggested that Hitler was a divine agent sent by God to encourage Jews to move to Palestine — a statement Hagee later retracted. Netanyahu made his predisposition even clearer when he repeatedly backed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who upset much of Western Europe when he rewrote Hungary’s constitution, effectively dismantling a number of Hungary’s democratic protections.
Orbán, who has held power as Hungary’s prime minister since 2010, has repeatedly engaged in smear attacks against 92-year-old Hungarian-born philanthropist George Soros, whom he has accused of encouraging Islamic immigration into Europe. Orbán’s anti-Soros rhetoric is laced with antisemitic tropes.
Soros, who is Jewish and a Holocaust survivor, had angered Hungary’s ultraconservatives by opposing Orbán’s attacks on Hungary’s universities and other educational institutions along with the country’s court system. Netanyahu later emulated Orbán’s approach when he tried to limit the authority of Israel’s Supreme Court.
With Israel drawing intense criticism in Europe over the enormous toll of Palestinian casualties in Gaza, Netanyahu has found common ground with a number of extreme right-wing parties in Europe that are voicing support for his hard-line approach.
Israel’s economy depends heavily on European trade partners, and Netanyahu has been forced to walk a delicate tightrope to maintain diplomatic relations with most nations on the Continent. Until now, he has personally kept his distance from Europe’s most extreme right-wing political parties like Spain’s Vox, which harbors Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis. But that could be about to change as far-right parties make headway in the European Parliament and in national elections, as in France, or are newly voted into office, as in the Netherlands.
While Netanyahu continues to give the impression that he is above the fray, Amichai Chikli, 42, his minister of diaspora affairs, has hit the road, in an effort to make contact with as many far-right groups as possible, regardless of the antisemitism in their past. Chikli, the son of an ultraconservative rabbi, was elected on the Yamina slate to the 24th session of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. By the Knesset’s 25th session, he had switched over to Netanyahu’s Likud party.
A recent report by Tel Aviv University’s Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, describes Chikli as a “junior politician with little relevant experience,” and adds that he “lacks vision and substance.” The Center reported that the Ministry for Diaspora Affairs had been created “for nothing but petty political reasons.”
While Chikli’s political credentials in Israel might be paper thin, his use to Netanyahu is obvious. A member of the Likud, with no significant popular power base, Chikli can forge closer ties to the global far right just as public opinion in Europe and the United States is turning against the Jewish state. Chikli’s outreach to the far right caters to Netanyahu’s ultranationalist and ultraconservative coalition partners at a time when Netanyahu is increasingly dependent on their support. Best of all, Chikli is politically expendable.
With a green light from Netanyahu, Chikli has spent the last year arguing the Netanyahu’s government case in a whirlwind of contacts with members of the extreme right. At this year’s CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) conference in Budapest, Chikli shared the stage with Tom Van Grieken, the head of Belgium’s Flemish Vlaams Belang Party, which has long-standing ties with European neo-Nazis as well as Israel’s Likud. Two weeks before the CPAC meeting in Budapest, Chikli had attended a “National Conservatism” conference in Brussels. That gathering’s opening session ended in chaos when Brussels’s mayor, Emir Kir, ordered police to shut the event down in order to protect public order.
Chikli’s message to the conference in Brussels was a warning that Europe is in danger of losing its Judeo-Christian beliefs. That fit nicely with the far right’s mobilizing argument that uncontrolled immigration and foreigners are currently the greatest threat to social stability.
In May, Chikli was a keynote speaker at the Europa Viva 24, a far-right gathering in Madrid hosted by Spain’s extreme right-wing Vox Party. The gathering took place just before the surge of the European right in elections for the European Parliament that were held in June. Other participants included Orbán, Argentina’s recently elected President Javier Milei, , Italy’s right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Rally. The leaders of right-wing movements in Chile and Portugal also attended.
Chikli had already established contact with Vox when its leader, Santiago Abascal, visited Israel in December 2023 at the invitation of Avi Dichter, Israel’s minister of agriculture. Netanyahu had previously refused to legitimize Vox, but apparently was no longer bothered by the connection.
Abascal’s visit was followed in January 2024 by a delegation of far-right Swedish Democrats, the second largest party in the Swedish parliament, which has neo-Nazi and antisemitic roots. The previous October, the head of the party’s television programming operation, Rebecka Fallenkvist, caused a stir when she remarked on Instagram that the diary of Anne Frank, who died in the Holocaust, was “immoral” and “horniness itself.” The Instagram post was subsequently deleted.
Earlier, Chikli surprised Canadian officials during a private visit in which he scheduled meetings with far-right leaders rather than representatives of Canada’s Jewish community. One of the figures who attracted Chikli’s interest was Charles McVety, treasurer of the Canadian affiliate of Global Evangelism Television. The network is run by far-right Christian evangelist Hagee, who also heads Christians United for Israel.
Besides the controversy over his claim that Hitler was God’s agent sent to lead Jews to Palestine, Hagee had also asserted that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for Americans’ encouraging gay rights, and he suggested that the World Health Organization used the COVID-19 pandemic to promote a “one world economy, one world government, one world religion and one world currency,” in which “the whole world will be under the iron hoof of the Antichrist.”
Responding to the French far-right National Rally’s unexpectedly poor showing in the second round of France’s elections for the National Assembly in July, Chikli said that he was not ready to eulogize the movement’s leader, Marine Le Pen, quite yet. Chikli had declared earlier that if Le Pen were elected president of France, it would be “excellent for Israel.” Chikli’s interventions elicited a phone call to Netanyahu from French President Emmanuel Macron accusing Chikli of interfering in France’s domestic affairs.
The National Rally, originally called the National Front, was the creation of Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who famously dismissed World War II’s Nazi gas chambers as a mere detail of history. Le Pen’s partner in creating the National Front was Pierre Bousquet, a former member of the French division of the Nazi Waffen-SS. In addition to running the National Front, Jean-Marie also independently created his own publishing operation to distribute speeches by Hitler and Mussolini, as well as Nazi paraphernalia and recordings of Waffen-SS marching songs.
Speaking on Israel’s Army Radio network, Chikli said Europe’s far right has “a great love for Israel” and a “shared commitment to conservative values.” Despite the far right’s past connections with antisemitism, Chikli argues that it is in Israel’s and the Diaspora’s interest to forge close ties to far-right European movements because of their shared conviction that “Islamic immigration is problematic and that radical Islam is very dangerous, primarily to the Jewish community.”
Chikli also has a bone to pick with Reform Jews, many of whom live in the United States. He accuses the movement of identifying itself with the “radical left’s false accusations that Israeli settlers (on the West Bank) are violent.” A major target for Chikli, Netanyahu, and the global extreme right is philanthropist Soros, who has put more than $32 billion of his personal fortune into campaigning for human rights, democracy, and freedom of speech, mostly through his Open Society Foundation. Soros’s great crime, as his critics on the right see it, is to have subverted the established order and diluted the white, Judeo-Christian nature of society by failing to oppose immigration.
Last year, both Chikli and Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz joined a conservative choir that accused Soros of funding pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses across the United States.
While Chikli abhors Soros, he has identified himself as a fan of Elon Musk, who stirred controversy when he endorsed an antisemitic post on Twitter accusing Jewish communities of encouraging “hatred of whites” and supporting the immigration of “hordes of minorities.” Musk said that the post expressed the actual truth. He later felt compelled to visit the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz as a form of atonement, which he said sensitized him to the World War II plight of Jews and made him “aspirationally Jewish.”
When the controversy over Musk’s statements exploded, Chikli tried to resurrect some of Netanyahu’s attacks against Soros that were made during the smear campaign by Hungary’s Orbán in 2018. “Israeli citizens see Elon Musk as an amazing entrepreneur and role model,” Chikli said. That followed Musk’s assertions that Soros “hates humanity” and that he was “doing things that erode the fabric of civilization.”
As Israel’s minister who's entrusted on combating anti-Semitism, I would like to clarify that the Israeli government and the vast majority of Israeli citizens see Elon Musk as an amazing entrepreneur and a role model. Criticism of Soros – who finances the most hostile…
— עמיחי שיקלי – Amichai Chikli (@AmichaiChikli) May 18, 2023
Soros is not the only public figure to have sparked the wrath of Chikli, Netanyahu, and the far right. Groups like the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and prominent Jewish intellectuals, such as journalism professor and columnist Peter Beinart, have also been targeted by Chikli. “It is heartbreaking,” Chikli says, “to see Jewish young people concede their connections to their people and their heritage in order to connect to the latest fashionable movement that they call ‘woke’.”
The Jewish Voice’s executive director, Stephanie Fox, recently warned that the far right is on the rise around the world and that it poses a “real and violent threat” to Jewish people everywhere. Rather than work together to defeat fascism, Fox warns, “Western states are mis-defining antisemitism in order to justify ongoing genocide.”
