From +972 Magazine
The Israeli right’s embrace of Viktor Orbán typifies its convergence with a global far right espousing what scholar Jelena Subotić calls ‘pro-Israel antisemitism.’ She tells +972 why they have so much in common.
In early August, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán opened the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas. Orbán’s primetime CPAC slot came amid ongoing controversy over a speech he delivered in his home country last month, during which he made comments so extreme — “[Hungarians] do not want to become peoples of mixed-race” — that even one of his veteran advisers quit, accusing him of giving a “pure Nazi speech” that was “worthy of Goebbels.”
Those comments were not too much, however, for CPAC’s organizers, who declined to rescind his invitation. In fact, Orbán was well-received at the conference, with his speech touching on pet far-right issues such as immigration, borders, Christianity, “gender ideology,” and the “traditional” family unit.
He also, as is his wont, included a sizable measure of antisemitism — delivered, as it so often is by the far right these days, as a seething attack on the Hungarian-Jewish financier and liberal philanthropist George Soros. Immediately after sounding the alarm about the fate of “Western Civilization[‘s]… Judeo-Christian heritage,” Orbán warned that Soros “has an army at his service: money, NGOs, universities, research institutions and half the bureaucracy in Brussels.” Soros deploys this army, Orbán continued, “to force his will on his opponents, like us Hungarians.”
An annual event that in recent years has turned into a kind of extreme-right summer camp, CPAC has frequently played host to some of the world’s most infamous and racist figures, with previous invitees including France’s Marion Maréchal-Le Pen; Orbán’s countryman, the alleged neo-Nazi group member and former Donald Trump advisor Sebastian Gorka; and, of course, Trump himself. The fact that Orbán’s speech happened at all, and the conservative embrace of it, reaffirmed the deepening ties between these members of the global far right, as well as the growing uniformity of the movement’s monocultural worldview.
Just as significantly, the event underlined the extent to which far-right antisemitism — so often rendered in dog-whistle references to Soros, which are by now an established plank in GOP messaging, and a chorus that the lobby group AIPAC has recently joined — enjoys the veneer of plausible deniability, largely because of its perpetrators’ avowal of their commitment to the state of Israel. And the Israeli far right itself is all too happy to be associated with the CPAC brand: this year, the conference added Tel Aviv to its growing list of international conference locations.
Back in Dallas, meanwhile, one of Orbán’s most enthusiastic admirers was his fellow speaker Yishai Fleisher, the international spokesperson for Hebron’s Jewish community. Tweeting a selfie with the prime minister at the conference, Fleisher called Orbán “a modern hero of nationalism… and [an] ally of Israel.” Responding to pushback about Orbán’s antisemitism, Fleisher shot back: “I am not looking at Hungary as a Hungarian Jew or a Diaspora Jew, I’m looking at it as an Israeli Jew — a fellow sovereign. And from this nationalalist [sic] perspective nation states must unite against the globalist agenda which seeks to force open borders & erase national identities.”
For Jelena Subotić, a political scientist who also works in memory studies, the Israeli right’s embrace of Orbán’s message — which has included chummy meetings with ex-Israeli prime ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett — is not as baffling as it may seem. Rather, Subotić explains, it is a function of how “far-right populist international networks are changing our traditional understanding of antisemitism, in that they’re decoupling from attitudes toward and relations with Israel.”
This separation, she says, is the key factor that distinguishes modern far-right antisemitism from its earlier forms — and which has helped ensure that antisemitism remains the ideological core of global far-right populism, even as its adherents insist otherwise by way of their pro-Israel bona fides. This “decoupling,” and the “pro-Israel antisemitism” it has cultivated, also help explain why Soros continues to dominate far-right conspiracy theories, and why such antisemitic flights of fancy have taken root in Israel as much as in Europe and the United States.
I spoke to Subotić about why Orbán continues to be at the forefront of international conservatism; the ongoing fixation with Soros; and why antisemitism and pro-Israel sentiment seem to coexist so comfortably on the far right. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Natasha Roth-Rowland is director of research and analysis at Diaspora Alliance. She has a PhD in History from the University of Virginia, where she wrote her dissertation on the Israeli- and American-Jewish far right, and is a former editor at +972 Magazine. She lives in Queens, New York, with her wife and daughter.
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