Israel's supporters on the cusp of embracing Marine Le Pen

Marine Le Pen after voting on Sunday.
Maillard ZUMA Press

Nobody should be surprised if the Israeli government soon hosts a visit from leading figures in France’s far right.

At least one minister from Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party endorsed Marine Le Pen’s National Rally ahead of the French National Assembly elections.

The pro-Israel lobby in Europe has lately warmed to that party, too.

A comment by Serge Klarsfeld, a Holocaust survivor who went on to hunt Nazi war criminals, indicating that he preferred the National Rally over the left-wing La France Insoumise has prompted similar remarks from other pro-Israel figures.

Richard Prasquier, a former head of CRIF, the main Israel lobby group in Paris, said that thinking about voting for a party founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen “turns my stomach.” Yet while Jean-Marie Le Pen was found guilty of anti-Semitic hate speech, his daughter Marine has displayed “impeccable behavior,” according to Prasquier.

Before its victory in the first round of the French election on Sunday, the National Rally had won 30 seats in the European Parliament a few weeks earlier – considerably more than its centrist and left-leaning opponents.

Yossi Lempkowicz is among the pro-Israel advocates in Brussels seeking to put a positive spin on the rise of extremists.

For Israel, “it is a good thing that hard right and also soft right parties won in Europe,” he said during a recent discussion.

“All the political parties that were very critical to Israel, even hostile – I’m speaking about the left, the greens and the extreme left – they lost,” Lempkowicz said.

Lempkowicz arranges propaganda trips for journalists to the Middle East. One recent trip featured briefings from the Israeli military – the military now committing a genocide in Gaza.

He combines that work with running the European Jewish Press news agency.

In a recent article, Lempkowicz claimed that Marine Le Pen has “worked hard to detoxify” her party’s “brand.”

His choice of the word “brand” is instructive. Marine Le Pen is far more concerned with image than substance.

Her father’s infamous contention that the Nazi gas chambers were merely a “detail” of World War II is not far removed from what others active in National Rally have said more recently.

Earlier this month, the party withdrew its backing for the election candidate Joseph Martin to try and distance itself from a tweet he had written in 2018 claiming the gas chambers had “brought justice” to the Holocaust’s victims.

It should be stressed that not everyone who has expressed favorable views about the Nazis has been shunned by Marine Le Pen.

Gilles Bourdouleix was an unsuccessful National Rally candidate in Sunday’s election. In a 2013 row with a group of Romani people, he said Adolf Hitler “perhaps did not kill enough.”

It is not hard to see why Israel’s supporters are on the cusp of embracing Marine Le Pen.

While she is publicly opposed to bigotry against Jews, the National Rally retains the racist worldview that nourishes such bigotry. The hatred which was – and to a large degree still is – directed at Jews is now more openly directed at Muslims.

The National Rally has fully backed the current genocide in Gaza, with Marine Le Pen offering excuses for Israel’s attacks on hospitals.

At a time when Israel fears that its prime minister could shortly be the subject of an international arrest warrant, having bigots cheer it on offers a small degree of comfort.