Why Antisemites Love Israel, a Brief History
The embrace is ideological, strategic and religious.
American televangelist John Hagee claimed Hitler was a "half-breed Jew" sent by God as a "hunter" to drive them towards "the only home God ever intended for the Jews to have, Israel." (Photo: Haaretz).
In May 2019, as supporters of far-right parties in Germany amassed in Dresden chanting slogans of German virtue, one rally leader wore a blue cornflower once embraced by Nazi sympathizers while others waved large Israeli flags. It was a sign of the times, the renaissance of antisemitic Zionism.
In the 21st century, the alliance between the Jewish State and Jew haters has entered a golden age. Today, movements and political parties around the world most antisemitic or sympathetic to the Nazis are falling in love with Israel.
The embrace is ideological, strategic and religious. It’s ideological because Zionism signals support for ethnic purity and hostility towards Muslims. It’s strategic because Zionism offers a (false) veneer of distance from Nazism, broadening the appeal of far-right parties. And it’s religious because Zionism taps into the Biblical zeal and eschatological fantasies of so many Christians. This is a brief history of Jew hate among Israel lovers.
The alliance has a long history. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many notorious antisemites doubled as Zionists. This included the spokesperson for the Hungarian antisemitic movement, Győző Istóczy, the Prime Minister of Britain Arthur Balfour, and the German journalist Wilhelm Marr, known as the “patriarch of antisemitism.”
They believed Jews had inordinate power and wielded a parasitic social influence; that they were physically unfit, diseased and weak; that they were deceitful and untrustworthy in business; that they were associated with Bolshevist or Communist threats; and that they were disloyal countrymen. Zionism solved these problems by ridding Europe of its “Jewish problem,” as it was known at the time, i.e., the problem that there were Jews in Europe.
The embrace continued into the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s. In 1919, the Nazi leader Alfred Rosenberg said “Zionism must be vigorously supported…to encourage …German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.” This is why the Nazi SS & the Bavarian police favored Zionist Jewish organizations while severely restricting the activities of non-Zionist ones. In the 1920s-30s, the Italian fascist government also backed the Italian Zionist Federation and in the 1930s, the Polish government supported the Zionist movement as well since it offered an acceptable rationale for moving Poland’s Jews out of Poland. Antisemitism and Zionism were a match made in heaven, or perhaps hell, to be more precise.
In fact, the support was not just discursive, it was material. In 1933, after world Jewry spontaneously boycotted Nazi Germany, the Zionist community in Palestine signed a secret agreement with the Nazis known as Ha’avara. German Jews could move to Palestine and even transfer some of their cash to Palestine so long as they spent it on German products. Between 1933-1939, ~140 million RM of Nazi German goods were exported to Palestine as a result of the agreement, accounting for 60% of total foreign investment in Jewish Palestine. The program collapsed when Germany invaded Poland in 1939.
Then, the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews. This shattered whatever veneer of acceptability that antisemitism had. Nazi sympathizers went underground. The alliance between the Zionists and the antisemites collapsed as a result.
Some of Europe’s antisemites continued to support Zionism for the same reason they did before the war, to “free Europe of the malaise of Jewishness,” as John Bean, founder of the neo-Nazi British National Party (BNP) put it in 1961.
But these parties remained at the fringes and sought to broaden their appeal, leveraging Zionism as a strategic asset. The American white nationalist Richard Spencer, who has saluted the work of neo-Nazis, described himself as a “white Zionist” in 2017, saying he wants a secure homeland for “my people” like the Jews have in Israel. A white ethno-state would be an “Altneuland,” or “an old, new country,” a term Spencer borrowed from a Theodor Herzl novel. After all, if Jews deserve to be safe in their homeland, why shouldn’t white people deserve the same?
As the political scientist Emma Rosenberg argues, White supremacist movements have been experiencing a renaissance in recent decades. Europe’s far right has come to cast itself in civilizational, cultural, and religious terms, defending the nation from “threatening” foreign elements and promoting ethno-racial segregation. No surprise so many of them are so fond of Israel, which defines itself in civilizational, cultural and religious terms and whose raison-d'etre is defending the nation from “threatening” and “foreign” (read: native) elements and promoting ethno-religious segregation.
In the UK, the politician Tommy Robinson is almost a caricature of Rosenberg’s thesis. He has boasted of his attendance at a march in Poland where demonstrators chanted for a “Jew free” country and demanded “Jews out of Poland,” while defending Kanye West’s antisemitic tirades. No surprise he also describes himself as a Zionist and an ally of “the Jewish people” in their putative struggle with Islam.
The alliance extends to the very top in some countries, like Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban is a close ally of Israel. For Orban, Netanyahu is a natural partner in crime given their mutual distaste for a free press, civil society and independent judiciary. Both leaders also embrace a form of ethnic nationalism that thrives on the demonization of the other.
Orban’s antisemitism credentials are also impressive despite his best attempts to appear tough on antisemitism. He named a public site after the Hungarian Nazi Miklos Horthy, who deported 400,000 Jews to Auschwitz. He venerated Jozsef Nyiro, whose Arrow Cross Party murdered 10,000 Jews in Budapest in 1944. He gave a speech in 2018 which reads “like a checklist drawn from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” according to one analyst, while his party’s media wing is notoriously antisemitic and his close associates Zolt Bayer and Maria Schmidt peddle in holocaust revisionism.
Then there’s the Romanian presidential candidate Calin Georgescu who has said he would not respect the ICC's arrest warrant on Netanyahu and promised to move the country's embassy to Jerusalem. His outpouring of support for Netanyahu probably does not stem from his love for Jews either, though, since he praised the former Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu, who collaborated with Nazi Germany in murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews.
The largest and most powerful source of antisemitic Zionism is not white nationalists or anti-Islam activists, though, it’s religious Christians. Their antisemitism, according to Daniel Hummel, a historian of evangelicals and Jews, comes from an association of Jews as liberal, cosmopolitan, and international, as elites in control of too many things, as a threat to American Christian identity. “You’re going to find those views, weirdly, right alongside expressing support for Israel,” Hummel said. “Someone like that would be vaguely or even strongly anti-Semitic but also pro-Israel.”
But it’s more than just cultural antisemitism, it’s theological. The American televangelist John Hagee claimed in his Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World Adolf Hitler was a "half-breed Jew" sent by God as a "hunter" to persecute Europe's Jews and drive them towards "the only home God ever intended for the Jews to have, Israel." Hagee also has a long record of stoking antisemitism.
Incidentally, he founded the largest Zionist organization in the US, Christians United for Israel, claiming some ten million members. They support Israel because they believe the Bible teaches the Jews must possess their own state in Israel before Jesus can return. About a third of America's 40-50 million evangelical Christians say Israel will play a central role in the second coming of Christ.
This community has also been deeply influenced by the teachings of the late televangelist Pat Robertson. He also trafficked in anti-Jewish tropes for a living. After former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke, Robertson suggested it was divine punishment for “dividing God’s land.” He is unsurprisingly a die-hard right-wing Zionist who believed in Jewish supremacy from the River to the Sea. After all, God loves the Jews and God promised Israel to Abraham’s offspring, the modern day Jews. There it is in Genesis, chapter 15!
Christian theology, for popular theologians like Hagee and Robertson, has a master plan for the Jews. The Jews are not individuals, they are a collective, and have a purpose to serve at the end of days as a collective. No surprise so many adherents of this brand of Protestantism also traffic in so many antisemitic tropes about Jews, it’s sort of baked into the theology.
Over the past few decades, Jew haters have been falling in love with Israel. The relationship is based on the perception of a shared enemy, Muslims, “the new Jews” of Europe, as one scholar put it. It’s also based on a shared belief in ethnic purity and segregation in addition to serving as a strategic weapon to gain broader acceptance. Zionism has become so mainstream in the West, the argument goes, so too should White Nationalism! Finally, the alliance is also based on conservatism, religious fanaticism and Biblical literalism. Each of the trends have been strengthening in recent decades and will likely continue to do so in the coming decades.
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