Last weekend, a major event organized by the Spanish far-right party Vox took place in Madrid. The “Viva Europa 2024” convention aimed to bring together “the living forces of Europe in a historic event” just a few weeks before the European Parliament elections.
Over the three days (May 17-19), dozens of speakers from Europe, but also from the United States and Latin America, took part. On Sunday, the closing session was attended by leading figures from the “national-conservative” and “national-libertarian” spectrum, such as France’s Marine Le Pen, Argentinian President Javier Milei, Portugal’s André Ventura and Chile’s José Antonio Kast. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Obán and his Italian counterpart, Giorgia Meloni, and former Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki also took part via video connection. The absence of the German AfD is noteworthy, perhaps due to the recent problems between it and Le Pen’s National Rally.
Surprising Presence of Israeli Minister
The name of the event might suggest that it was an act to rally European “patriots”, but in reality it served to launch Israel’s presence within this group. If the AfD’s absence comes as a surprise, it’s also worth asking why the far right invited the Israeli Minister for Diaspora Affairs and the Fight against Anti-Semitism, Amichai Chikli, from the Netanyahu’s Likud party, to the event. At a time when the Middle East is perpetrating an alleged genocide under international law, why would “patriotic Europeans” want to risk getting involved in a conflict that has already caused so many waves of migration to their continent?
Chikli was one of the event’s leading figures and at the closing session, he was entitled to sit next to the organizer’s leader Santiago Abascal in the audience. In his speech, he made a point of implicating Europeans in Israel’s disastrous war: “This war isn’t just about the future of Gaza, or the State of Israel, or the Middle East; it’s an existential battle for the future of our civilization, against radical Islam, for the future of Western civilization, for the future of humanity!” he said. It was not an innocent speech, one that provoked obvious prescience in those who still think, but which drew a huge ovation from the ecstatic audience. The minister also appealed to the “Judeo-Christian” status of Europeans, a catchword used whenever Zionists need help from Europeans.
Chikli is said to have made friends with the Abascal recently, after the Spaniard’s trip to the kibbutz attacked by Hamas in October 2023. In April of this year, the Likud minister took part in CPAC Hungary in Budapest, the Hungarian branch of the Conservative Political Action Conference, a conservative conference that has been held in the US since 2014, linked to “Europa Viva 24”.
The Israeli far right is thus making itself at home in these European think tanks, in the same way that it already defines much of the agenda of the US far right, currently around Trump. This lobby, whose sole purpose is to take geopolitical credit for Tel Aviv, has also positioned itself in the leaderships of the main “nationalist” parties, adding to its anti-immigration discourse the idea of Islam as a whole, the confusion of Palestine with Hamas and the promotion of the idea of Iran as the great conspirator of international terrorism.
Javier Milei was another figure at the event. The president of Argentina dedicated his speech to blaming the left and “socialism” for all the world’s problems and praising “freedom” as the solution to all injustices. This rhetoric is as simplistic as it is misleading, and it’s no waste to listen to her delirious speech. But Milei is honest about one thing: he promised to suspend Argentina’s entry into the BRICS and has allied himself with the US and, above all, Israel. He radically changed the direction of Argentina’s foreign policy at the request of the multi-millionaire sponsors of his election campaign, turning his back on the growing multipolar world of which it would naturally be a part and would have so much to gain, and now has diplomatic problems with most of its neighbors, and even with Spain. This is the more “libertarian” version of this new far right, an openly “anarcho-capitalist” model that is set in place in one of the richest countries in the world as a laboratory.
Shifting Alliances and Historical Influences
In Spain, the process of rapprochement between the far right, traditionally pro-Palestinian at least until 9/11 and the March 11, 2004, attack in Madrid, was initiated by Rafael Bardají, former advisor to ex-Prime Minister José María Aznar on international issues. Bardají was the founder and director of the Strategic Studies Group (GEES) in 1987. He is said to have been the most influential element in convincing Aznar to enter the wars in Yugoslavia (1999) and Iraq (2003). He was one of the main links between FAES, the foundation of the Popular Party (PP), the Israeli Likud and US neocons Robert Kagan, Daniel Pipes, Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol, among others. While still in the PP, he established relations with Steve Bannon during the Trump era and shortly afterwards, jumped to Vox in 2018, where he took his agenda of unlimited defense of the State of Israel as the supposed bulwark of Western civilization in the world.
As proof of this twinning, during his trip to Israel, Abascal wrote on his X account that it was an opportunity to “express Vox’s support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in its fight against Hamas’ Islamic terrorism… and strengthen the close relations between Vox and Likud.”
It is clear that Netanyahu will try to make the most of this approach to the European far right, until recently an irreconcilable enemy. He knows that he has few cards left up his sleeve to save himself from a painful end to his political career, with a possible judicial conviction and imprisonment. For the time being, he is under investigation for corruption, with an arrest warrant from the ICC and facing a trial for alleged involvement in Gaza at the ICJ.
Jerusalem’s cat of nine lives has reached a crossroads, more because of the regional strategic constellation and the loss of international credibility than due to the military situation in Gaza, which, after more than seven months, has also debunked Hollywood myths about the supposed heroism and invincibility of the IDF.
Geopolitical Implications and Future Strategies
Netanyahu knows that Israel has lost a lot of external support, but not all of it. He knows that the country he governs still has supporters all over the world, and that many of them are willing, to varying degrees and shapes, to defend an entity that they confuse with the Bible, with Judaism and even with Christianity. In a video that recently went viral on the internet, three elderly Brazilian ladies leaving a Bolsonaro event in São Paulo wrapped in Israeli and Brazilian flags, justified themselves in a street interview with a YouTuber that “we defend Israel because they are Christians like us”.
The imagery of Israel in Europe is only slightly more sophisticated, has very little to do with spirituality, but appeals enormously to a system of beliefs and myths held by a considerable proportion of the population, above all among the political class where the status of the “only democracy in the Middle East” remains unchallenged, but also among the faithful of new evangelical religious denominations, created in the 1960s, particularly in the Third World, precisely for the purpose of expanding Zionism and recruiting messianic soldiers among populations with a Christian background.
To these groups must be added a growing European population hostile to immigration, which confuses the Middle East conflict with the problems associated with immigration across borders. This fringe tends to sympathize with Israel because “they are ours”, against the Muslims, “of another cultural matrix”, at a supposedly more backward stage and “historical enemies” of a Christian Europe.
After all, it was Europe that divided up and gave half of Palestine to Europeans of the Jewish faith at the expenses of the indigenous Muslim and Christian populations because of tragic events that occurred in Europe. It was a tremendous injustice for which the European powers never wanted a full and lasting solution. Later, coinciding with the new global energy paradigm of the petrodollar and the concomitant end of the gold standard, the US took the lead in this alliance between the Christian West and the Jewish State, now converted into an inexpensive “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that fit Washington’s plans to dominate that strategic region like a glove.
From the 1967 war onwards, we all know the history of violations, from the successive campaigns of ethnic cleansing, massacres and chaos, the consequences of which spread to the entire neighborhood, until they reached Europe in the form of different migratory waves, which continue to this day. And herein lies the contradiction, the puzzle and the paradox of the European anti-immigration far right’s support for the Israeli far right, which on more than one occasion in their officials has expressed its desire to expel Palestinians to Europe.
The European right, which for decades led the neoliberal paradigm of open doors and labor deregulation in partnership with the Social Democrats, while maintaining a role of passive, if not active, collaborationism in the disaster that was unfolding in the Middle East, is now complaining about its results and is replicating them in increasingly muscular and vociferous versions, which are leading the political discourse. At the moment, it is this far right, almost all of which comes from the liberal right and its decades-long mistakes in power, that is waving the flag of immigration, a problem that, due to the scale it has taken on, has become one of the voters’ main legitimate concerns.
This sentiment is compounded by various phenomena of a cultural and religious nature and by a series of very obscure terrorist events that have taken place on European soil, Islam has been chosen as an easy enemy to simplify. There’s plenty to say here. Voters who feel that the identity of Europe, their country, their city or neighborhood is threatened by the presence of new groups with very different habits and cultures, don’t know or care to know the Western origins of the wars in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan or Yemen, which brought these millions of people to the old continent. People who stayed here, multiplied and today claim social power without wanting to give up their different identities or even habits that are incompatible with the native societies. Others are marginalized in “no-go-areas” like in any big European city.
In Eastern Europe, which has been emerging from a very different economic model for decades, societies have remained more authentic, faithful to their own. Today, Poles or Hungarians who vote for PiS or Fidesz respectively do so out of conservatism, not out of reaction. When it comes to immigration, they simply don’t want to follow the multicultural model of Western Europe and prefer to live in their “monolithic” societies, even if they are constantly blackmailed by Brussels to do otherwise.
The large-scale event in Madrid, with the use of modern audiovisual media, was sponsored by the Tikvah Fund, an “American conservative nonprofit charitable foundation whose stated mission is to promote Jewish thought and ideas”, according to its Wikipedia entry. It is headed by Elliott Abrams, the veteran Reagan Undersecretary of State, who is accused of having ordered several massacres of civilian populations in Central America in the 80s. The infamous New York Republican was also one of the leading figures in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which is said to have had the greatest influence on Bush Jr. for the Iraq war. His entire career has been marked by the defense of Washington’s hegemony in the world, particularly over Latin America, and the unrestricted protection of Israel as a US ally. Why he is now sponsoring expensive acts by “European patriots” is for the reader to guess.
Netanyahu is in a race against time, hoping for a comeback of Trump, the ally that really matters, from whom he expects unconditional support and probably a further headlong flight by escalating into a regional war with Iran. Until then, he will use these minor European assets instrumentally, extracting geopolitical dividends that are not to be disdained, with hypothetical future support from countries that could turn to the extreme right and follow the bizarre example of Argentina, or Hungary, both of which always vote against Palestine or in favor of Israel at the UN. At a time when the global majority no longer has any doubts about the disaster caused by his government in the Middle East, the cat thinks those can save his last life.
Ricardo Nuno Costa ‒ geopolitical expert, writer, columnist, and editor-in-chief of geopol.pt, especially for «New Eastern Outlook»