Israel embraces France’s far-right, turning a blind eye to its Nazi past

A generation ago, it would have been unthinkable: the leader of France’s far-right party – an organization infamously founded by Nazis – invited to speak at an Israeli antisemitism conference.

But on Thursday, Jordan Bardella, leader of France’s National Rally party, will take to the stage in Jerusalem – a victory both symbolic and political for the far-right lawmaker as Israel seeks new friends around the world.

It’s a stunning reversal of political norms. Far-right leaders across Europe, desperate for mainstream acceptance, are seeking common cause with Israel in demonizing Muslims sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose party has long seen itself as a natural ally of right-wing movements around the world, is giving his stamp of approval to a movement historically shunned by Jews.

It is all the more surprising because antisemitism remains a core ideology of most ring-wing extremists – who have been behind some of the most deadly attacks on Jews in the West in recent years.

Unlikely bedfellows

In France, the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023 may have been the touchpaper for the public melding of far-right and Israeli positions, but it’s been an evolution decades in the making.

National Rally was a 2018 rebranding of the National Front, which was founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen together with wartime Nazi collaborators and veterans of France’s colonial disasters in Algeria and then-Indochina. The youthful Bardella, a loyal disciple of Le Pen’s daughter, Marine, has helped rehabilitate and detoxify the movement’s image as he seeks to invigorate a new generation of far-right voters.

French Jews – the largest such community in Europe – have not been immune to his charms, especially as he shifts his movement’s ideological crosshairs away from Jews to Muslim and migrant populations.

The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions (CRIF) in France, in partnership with the Ministry of Interior, recorded 1,570 antisemitic acts in the country in 2024 – more than triple the number logged in 2022.

Parties like National Rally, he said, “are perceived as the only ones able to defend Jews” – against what far-right parties have billed as the “Islamist” threat, Ackermann said.

Indeed, Bardella canceled a speech at the US Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February after former Trump adviser Steve Bannon made what some likened to a Nazi salute. Bannon deniedthe accusation.

On Monday, Bardella told France’s BFMTV that he was “not seeking to instrumentalize” antisemitism for political gain, hitting back at comments from the CRIF chief Yonathan Arfi, who had said that the country’s Jewish bodies had always had a “distrust” of the French far right.

In the mind of the far right, “supporting Israel and fighting against terrorism, it’s fighting against Islamism,” Martigny said.

Political chameleon

The growing acceptability of the European far right coincides with a rightward shift in Israel.

Netanyahu now governs alongside Itamar Ben Gvir, a minister who was once considered too extreme even to serve in the Israeli military, and who carries a conviction for supporting a terror organization.

The decision to invite someone like Bardella to speak in Jerusalem has “been coming for a while,” said Daniel Shek, a retired career Israeli diplomat who served as ambassador to France from 2006 to 2010.

Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister for diaspora affairs, who organized the conference, “has been promoting this idea that extreme right parties across Europe and beyond are a natural allies of Israel,” Shek said. “And therefore all their history, their ideological roots, becomes insignificant as long as they support the Israeli government and hate Muslims.”

Indeed, Shek said, “in the eyes of the current government the only antisemites are Muslims and the extreme left.”

The Anti-Defamation League, which tracks a soaring number of white supremacist incidents, says that geographic location is a far more important indicator of antisemitic views than religion.

Netanyahu, who often presents himself as the defender of Jews all around the world, has declared that he will “never allow the atrocities of history to recur – we will never capitulate to antisemitism or terrorism.”

Shek’s views are not universal among former Israeli diplomats. Avi Pazner, who also served as ambassador to France, in the 1990s, said the National Rally had “evolved.”

When Shek headed European affairs at Israel’s foreign ministry, he said, he was constantly batting away attempts by Marine Le Pen – Jean Marie’s daughter and Bardella’s predecessor – to come to Israel.

“It was a constant issue,” he said.

In the end, he said, the Israeli government should listen to the majority of French Jews, who despite their desire for law and order, are skeptical of the far-right.

“My view was always we take our lead from the local Jewish communities,” he said. “It’s simply a stab in the back to go around them.”

Whatever Bardella’s views, Shek said, the prospect of the party once led by Jean Marie Le Pen attending a conference in Jerusalem is too much to bear. “He is not a private person. He represents a party and a movement that has very deep roots in antisemitism and Holocaust denial.”

Spurned invites

The increasing embrace of Bardella and his party among the French Jewish community is by no means universal.

In France’s famously secular state, pollsters are not permitted to ask for a respondent’s religion, so it is impossible to know the exact percentage of French Jews who support the far right.

Bardella’s presence at the Israeli conference prompted a wave of other speakers to pull out of the event, including French-Jewish philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy and CEO of the US-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Jonathan Greenblatt.

“I find it hard to feel protected by a party whose leader still does not know whether (National Rally founder, the late) Jean-Marie Le Pen was antisemitic or not, and whose presidential candidate (Marine Le Pen) lumps the kippa and the Islamic veil together in the same category of opprobrium,” Henri-Levy wrote in an open letter to the Israeli president after he cancelled his planned speech at the conference.

Eugenia Yosef, Dana Karni and Lauren Izso contributed to this report.