The recent British and French parliamentary elections surfaced an interesting Jewish angle: anecdotally at least, the Jews have much more fear of the far Left than the far Right – which is a historic shift that reflects a bigger story about world politics.
It’s all quite remarkable for me, since I’m old enough to remember the Jewish revulsion about 40 years ago when French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen was emerging as the world’s most unapologetic prominent antisemite. He made waves as far as suburban America by dismissing the gas chambers as a “detail” of World War II and expressing sneering skepticism about the scale of the Holocaust.
His daughter Marine Le Pen is now running the National Front Party he launched. She has rebranded it as the National Rally and spruced it up a little, including by sidelining her unpresentable dad, but it’s still fascist-adjacent, and it is now a major force in French politics. The twist is that it got that way by targeting Muslims, not Jews.
Indeed, much of Europe is being swept by an anti-Muslim message that seems more related to real-life problems than classic antisemitism ever was, reflecting growing concern about the influence of Muslim minorities, especially after the 2010s exodus from wars in the Middle East. Alongside standard-issue racism there are not-unreasonable fears that they will alter Europe’s culture and reject central values like secularism, tolerance, and liberalism. The irony, of course, is that the backlash benefits far-right parties that represent a stream in Europe that is not itself liberal.
In another time, Jews might have been especially sensitive to any whiff of xenophobia, even against other groups. But today, these communities fear hostility from these surging Muslim communities more and more. There have been terrorist attacks on Jews by Muslims (and, of course, terrorist attacks in general); the dynamic that emerges may be called “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” – that friend being, in a bizarre historical twist, the likes of Le Pen.
Although there are no polls measuring this, the anecdotal evidence is unequivocal. It is perhaps best represented by Serge Klarsfeld, the renown Nazi hunter, advising Jews to back Le Pen over the Left in this election.
Conversely, the Left – in France and elsewhere – is bleeding Jewish support because that is where the core of sympathy for the Palestinians (along with apologism and even backing of Hamas) can be found. Alain Finkielkraut, a well-known liberal philosopher and consistent critic of the far right, also posted that Le Pen was moving away from antisemitism and was no longer off-limits if the Left were the alternative.
There is almost nothing that remains of the idea that the Left is – by virtue of being historically the more intellectual zone of politics and due to being “anti-fascist” – somehow a natural home of the Jews. Instead, the global Left is sliding from liberalism to a variant of progressivism – often called “wokeness” in the US – that prizes binary narratives of oppressed and oppressors, and is obsessed with the underprivileged and with “decolonization.”
Across the channel: Similar fears
THE JEWS – in part due to the misconception that they are necessarily white – have run afoul of this bandwagon, a phenomenon driven not just by their professional and economic success in the Diaspora but the common perception of Israel (in these circles) as oppressing the Palestinians.
That’s why a very similar phenomenon has occurred in Britain, where in the 2019 election the traditionally robust Jewish support for Labour cratered amid a torrent of revelations about antisemitism in the party’s ranks and its tolerance by then-party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who could fairly be called a friend of Hezbollah. Corbyn’s successor Sir Keir Starmer, the new UK prime minister, made a convincing show of expunging antisemitism (and indeed Corbyn himself) from the party, and is rather supportive of Israel. But Labour paid dearly for that in last Thursday’s election.
The strong majority the party won is not the result of an especially strong performance. Starmer only won 34% of the vote, far less than expected, because of a rebellion by leftists and Muslims who ran separate candidates out of anger with Labour on Israel. He was lucky the Conservatives faced an even bigger rebellion from the far right – the Reform UK Party, which won 14% of the vote. As in France, the Jews are not especially concerned with this far-right surge. Reform UK is angry at Muslims (and others) – not Jews.
The situation applies all over. The Netherlands’ far right party, led by firebrand Geert Wilders, is now at the helm of the recently appointed coalition government. The Jews are not too concerned: Wilders, who spent time as a youth in Israel, views the country as a model of standing up to Islam. The far right in Sweden similarly has no problem with the Jews – only with the Muslims who now form much of the population of the area of Malmö, and are blamed for a rise in crime.
Indeed, the French election this Sunday came amid a wave of antisemitic incidents in France culminating in a widely reported case involving three boys accused of raping a 12-year-old Jewish girl while making anti-Israel slurs against her. Among the loudest voices against this was Le Pen who wrote in daily Le Figaro that the incident illustrated the anti-Jewish violence of immigrants from Muslim countries that “should outrage the whole of France.”
Le Pen’s party performance in the vote was somewhat weaker than expected (she still won over a third of the vote) outpolled President Emanuel Macron’s Ensemble Party, but won somewhat fewer seats because her support was more concentrated. Either way, under the electoral system the Leftist alliance won a plurality of the seats – and in a quirk of history – that is what worries many Jews.
It is not so very different from the US: Although more than three-quarters of the Jews have tended to vote Democrat, few would be happy by a huge success for the Squad and for the woke movement, which is ground zero today for anti-Zionism. The MAGA movement, despite its own vulnerability to charges of antisemitism, can seem somehow more benign.
The writer is the former chief editor of The Associated Press in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, a columnist for The Forward and the author of two books about Israel. Follow his newsletter “Ask Questions Later” at danperry.substack.com