In this period of escalating outrage, and proving right the old adage ‘birds of a feather flock together’, we have learned that Amichai Shikli, Israeli Minister for the Diaspora (Likud), has invited Jordan Bardella (RN) and Marion Maréchal Le Pen (Identité-Liberté) to an international conference to combat antisemitism in Jerusalem on 26 and 27 March 2025. Bardella has reportedly even been invited to give a speech on the rise of antisemitism in France.
On 5 November 2023, this same Bardella declared on television: ‘I don’t believe that Jean-Marie Le Pen was antisemitic’. Faced with an outcry, he had to backtrack. But when Le Pen died, the entire RN leadership paid him a vibrant tribute, without ever mentioning his constant antisemitism. Marine Le Pen even declared that she regretted having excluded her father from the party he had founded – together with former members of the Waffen-SS, by the way. Similarly, during the recent legislative campaign, it was revealed that dozens of RN candidates were disseminating explicitly antisemitic and Holocaust-denying content. At the time, Bardella played down the situation, referring to ‘a few black sheep’.
We already had the international Holocaust-denialist cartoon competition in Tehran. Now we have an international anti-Arab far right that claims to be fighting antisemitism. They are two sides of the same coin.
This is not Likud’s first attempt. To ensure European support for his policy of colonisation, Netanyahu has allied himself with just about every antisemitic far right force in Europe (notably Orban, with his antisemitism directed against Soros, the Polish PIS, Romania’s AUR…).
The RAAR vigorously denounces this unhealthy recuperation and calls for the utmost vigilance with regard to this hold-up, as in the recent diatribe by Julien Odoul, deputy and official spokesperson for the RN, against the CRIF, accusing it of supporting the ‘Great Replacement’, when the latter pointed out the incompatibility of the ideas of the RN with the values of the French Republic.
We affirm that neither the French far right nor the Israeli far right have ever been or ever will be on the side of the fight against antisemitism. They are intrinsically the enemies of emancipation and opposition to racism, as we demonstrated in an article published in Le Monde together with other organisations, entitled ‘Antisemitism is consubstantial with the RN, both with its history and its ideological matrix’.
The French original of this article was first published on the website of the Réseau d’Actions contre l’Antisémitisme et tous les Racismes.
Translation: Daniel Mang