Israel is teaming up with the far right to fight global antisemitism
Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli said Jews should focus on the shared threat posed by ‘radical Islam’
Israeli Minister For Diaspora Affairs and Antisemitism Amichai Chikli speaks during a memorial event at Chabad of Bondi Synagogue on December 17, 2025 in Sydney, Australia. Photo by George Chan/Getty Images
By Arno Rosenfeld January 28, 2026
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The Israeli government’s second annual antisemitism conference in Jerusalem this week is part of a relatively recent move by the country to concern itself with countering global antisemitism.
Early Zionists presented the State of Israel as a solution to antisemitism, sometimes downplaying the concern Jews expressed about their persecution. “The Jewish people were mistaken for blaming antisemitism for all the troubles and suffering endured in the diaspora,” David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, wrote in 1950. “This is one of the blind spots that the Jewish people were stricken with in exile.”
But in the decades since, and especially since the government established its Ministry of Strategic Affairs 20 years ago, Israel has poured tens of millions of dollars into fighting antisemitism in the diaspora.
“You must declare, no more antisemitism. Not here. Not now. Not anywhere,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told attendees at the Jerusalem conference. “Not on the right, not on the left.”
Netanyahu’s rhetoric mirrored the way many American Jews think about antisemitism, with concern shifting since Oct. 7 from an overwhelming focus on the far right to equal levels of concern across the political spectrum.
Israel, though, has adopted a strategy to combat antisemitism with little precedent in the diaspora: It’s partnering with the far right to fight two groups that Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister for diaspora affairs and countering antisemitism, believes are a shared enemy for Jews and European nationalists: the “woke far left” and Muslim extremists.
Concern about antisemitism on the right is relegated to what Chikli calls the “woke right,” meaning figures like Tucker Carlson and former U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who have turned against Israel in recent years.
This framework leaves space to partner with European officials like Jordan Bardella, a French politician who attended the conference and has called for closer ties between Israel and France even as he leads a party founded by a Holocaust denier.
Chikli’s approach threw last year’s inaugural conference into turmoil as Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and several other prominent leaders pulled out of the event over the inclusion of far-right figures.
Yet Chikli doubled-down this year, reportedly dropping the ADL from his guest list while welcoming Sebastian Kurtz, the former Austrian chancellor who has railed against “political Islam,” far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders, and Dominik Tarczynski, a Polish member of European parliament who has called Islamists “sick animals” and pledged to “fight for Christian Europe until the final victory.”
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Some have argued that Jews should embrace these tactical alliances so long as they help address a common goal — support for Israel in Europe, say, or pressure on university leaders to address campus protests in the U.S.
But most diaspora Jews have taken a much dimmer view of antisemitism strategies that appear too one-sided. While the Israeli government presented Leo Terrell, Trump’s antisemitism task force chair, with its annual Award of Honor ahead of the conference, many Jews in the U.S. have opposed the antisemitism policies that Terrell and the White House have promoted.
And when the Heritage Foundation released their blueprint for Trump to fight antisemitism, several prominent Jewish organizations rushed to distance themselves from the plan, despite supporting some of its ideas for targeting anti-Zionists, because it completely ignored far-right antisemitism.
Israel, though, is in a bind.
Given their relatively small share of the population, Jews inevitably seek to craft narratives about antisemitism that can help build a broader coalition of supporters.
For liberal Jews, who make up a majority of the American Jewish community, that often means joining with other minority groups by connecting antisemitism to other forms of racism and discrimination.
But that’s a nonstarter for the Israeli government, which is now treated as a pariah by most non-Jewish liberals outside the country, compelling it to embrace a different narrative that views its controversial conduct in Gaza as an asset: Israel is on the front lines of the battle against the threat radical Islam poses not only to Israelis and Jews but also to white, Christian Europeans and Americans.
“This conference seeks to banish political correctness,” Chikli declared during his welcome address, outlining a “struggle of the free world against the imperialism and tyranny of radical Islam.”
It’s an effective strategy for joining Israel’s cause to that of the growing nationalist movements in Europe, though it also threatens to drive a deeper wedge between American Jews and Israel.
Chikli, at least, seems to have made his peace with such a rupture and suggested that it was liberal Jews who had gone “against Torah” by succumbing to “progressive, woke neo-communist ideology.”
“This is the reality,” he said. “At the core, we’re very different.”
GO DEEPER:
- Hosting Europe’s far-right again, minister says Diaspora criticism ‘just a disagreement’ (Times of Israel)
- Israel’s antisemitism confab welcomes far-right pols, but draws less fire than last year (Times of Israel)
