The conservative International and Israel

Increasingly isolated on the international stage, the Jewish State can still count on the support of conservative parties in the West. In the recent period, this support for Israel has grown more radical.

The conservative International does not exist. At least, not in any highly organized form. The conservative parties have not built a transnational structure comparable to the old Socialist International. There is indeed an International Democrat Union, but it is of recent creation (1983), and, except for the period following the fall of the Wall when it helped set up conservative parties in Eastern Europe, it is hardly active. There does exist, at the level of the European Union (EU), a European People’s Party (EPP), but this one is devoted exclusively to EU policy, and for that reason is often deprived of the participation of the deeply Eurosceptic British Conservative Party. The conservative International exists even less as a conspiratorial force, as this expression might lead one to suppose. The phrase simply expresses a political reality. On the ideological plane, everything draws together the American Republican Party, the Israeli Likud, and the right-wing parties of Europe: the German CDU, the British Conservative Party, the Spanish People’s Party, the Italian People of Freedom, the French UMP… All these parties share the will to promote the most liberal economy possible, to reduce the role of the State, to whittle down social gains and the role of the unions, and to take an exclusively security-minded view of social deviance. One can likewise discern in their methods — the systematic discrediting of the left on the theme of its real or supposed naivety — and in their means — a closeness to the powers of money and their media — similarities that owe nothing to chance. To this must be added a shared vision of the Middle Eastern conflict, founded on the perception of Arab nationalism as the expression of a hostility toward the West that draws all these parties close to Israel, and above all to the party in power in Jerusalem.

The Likud–Republican Party axis

The bonds between the Israeli Likud and the American Republican Party sometimes amount to osmosis: in Jerusalem, the Merkaz Shalem, a think tank financed by right-wing Americans, has openly placed itself in the service of the Likud and its leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, as a reading of its bilingual journal Azure attests. But the relations between the two parties scarcely need to be formalized, for they spring first of all from the complicity between the men and from their shared ideological outlook. Between the leaders of the two parties, the ties are close, especially since Binyamin Netanyahu has reigned over the Israeli right — that is, for more than fifteen years. From his student days in the United States he was close to the Republican Party. For the young Bibi was a marginal figure within his generation, which supported the Democratic Party or the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS, far left) and the various currents of the New Wave and Flower Power, and which fought against the war in Vietnam¹. Binyamin Netanyahu supported the war and the American right. He multiplied his contacts with Republican leaders beginning in 1982, when he embarked on a mini-diplomatic career in the United States, as the number two at the Israeli embassy in Washington, then as his country’s permanent representative to the United Nations. Back in Israel, where he began his political career by getting himself elected to the Knesset in 1988, he reinforced these ties on two fronts. First, on the financial front. The Likud, bled dry after its defeat in 1992, needed to refill its coffers. Bibi and his henchman of the time, Avigdor Liberman, would manage to put the party back on its feet by appealing in particular to the generosity of several American billionaires close to both the Likud and the Republican Party². These same billionaires would finance Bibi’s campaign for the post of Prime Minister in 1996, when, against all expectations, he defeated Shimon Peres. On the ideological plane, Bibi Netanyahu, steeped in what he had learned during his studies at MIT and Harvard, borrowed from the American right its veneration for economic ultraliberalism. In other domains, and notably in the fight against insecurity, the closeness between the Likud and the Republican Party is obvious, even if the former thinks first of its external security and the latter of the struggle against crime at home. Another factor draws the Likud close to the Republican Party: the place granted to religion, and above all to religious communities. In the United States, the place won by the evangelical churches, which are said to number some forty million faithful, has important political consequences³. Without these communities, George W. Bush would not have been re-elected for a second term in 2004: the theme of the fight against insecurity after September 11, the discourse against abortion and homosexuality, played to the full in mobilizing this electorate to the benefit of the Republican candidate. The Likud, too, has perfectly grasped the rising power of religious communities in our era. But, unlike its American counterpart, the party of the Israeli right does not take up for its own account all the demands of the ultra-Orthodox parties: it contents itself with allying with them in government and buying their support in the Knesset by means of subsidies that give their institutions (educational and social) an unrivaled power.

This influence of the evangelical churches is not unconnected to the Republican Party’s positioning on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict⁴. The evangelical churches openly support the colonization of the Territories, seeing in it the sign of the coming of the messianic Times, of Redemption, and… of the conversion of the Jews to Christianity! There is no doubt that the Likud and the parties of the Israeli far right do not accept the last point of the prediction, but they find among the American evangelicals a valuable support for their theses in the American heartland and the guarantee that those theses will be well defended by Republican representatives in Congress and at the highest level of the State whenever it is the Party of the elephant that holds power in Washington. All the more so since this approach to the conflict has solid historical foundations. Throughout the Cold War, Arab nationalism was supported by the Soviet Union and, on that account, vigorously opposed by the Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike. But it was a Republican administration, that of Richard Nixon, with Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State, which was the first to draw the military lessons from this, replacing France as the supplier of the Israeli army after 1967. This alliance, never formalized by a treaty, would endure, securing for Israel that strategic superiority which even today constitutes the best guarantee of the Jewish State in the face of its enemies. All administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, would remain faithful to this scheme. The Republicans simply insist a little more on the automatic character of this support for Israel, which is held to flow from the balance of power at the international level. Electoral considerations are not unconnected to this avowed support, the Republicans hoping at each election to win Jewish votes that traditionally elude them⁵. This pro-Israeli outbidding led the Bush administration to openly adopt the Likud line. During one of his rare diplomatic initiatives on Middle Eastern ground, George W. Bush, on April 14, 2004, wrote to the Prime Minister of the time, Ariel Sharon, a letter that contained a passage supporting de facto the colonization: In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it would be unrealistic to expect that the talks would end with a complete return to the armistice lines of 1949…⁶ More broadly, and clearly so since September 11, 2001, the Republican Party and the Likud share the thesis of the clash of civilizations, and they inscribe their reading of the Israeli-Arab conflict within that framework: that of the struggle between the Western democracies and a conquering, liberticidal Islam. Which is to say how much these parties owe to neo-conservatism.

What remains of neo-conservatism

At the start of the 2000s, neo-conservatism claimed to be becoming the reference ideology⁷. Former leftists were numerous in this movement, largely carried, often, by the sons of Irish or Jewish immigrants⁸ who had fled Europe, and who could very poorly bear criticism, and still less the self-flagellation of an America — that Golden Medina⁹ — which had allowed them to leave the working-class neighborhoods and become academics or journalists. Irving Kristol, a figure of the movement, gave a famous definition of his comrades who had passed from Trotskyism to neo-conservatism: the neoconservative is a man of the left who has been mugged by reality. This ideology means to go beyond traditional conservatism, which suffers from a congenital handicap: it is hardly inspiring. Does one fall in love with Victorian values, with economic liberalism and the dismantling of the State? This deficiency was to be made good by neo-conservatism, which — without abandoning a single aspect of traditional conservatism — would add to it an idealist dimension. In the international order, it falls to America, a benevolent Empire, to fight against tyranny and to spread the values of democracy¹⁰. Fundamentally, the influence of the neoconservatives stems from the fact that they had the intelligence of their critiques, notably since the war in Iraq. As Francis Fukuyama emphasizes: Many commentators have moreover pointed out that several prominent supporters of the war in Iraq, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle, were Jewish; they then suggested that Bush’s Iraq policy was calculated, in the last analysis, to ensure the tranquility and security of Israel in the Middle East (D’où viennent les Néo-Conservateurs ? (Where Do the Neo-Conservatives Come From?), Grasset, Paris, 2006, pp. 7-8).

To cultural relativism, they oppose the idea that there are universal values. In the name of those same values, they refuse to accommodate the authoritarian regimes spared by the status quo inherited from the Cold War, under the pretext of stability or of respect for national sovereignty. This “booted idealism”¹¹ has inspired the policy of the conservative International in the Middle East, presented after September 11 as the will to build a Greater Middle East that was to, on the model of a democratized and peaceful Iraq, permeate the entire Arab world. The Second Iraq War thus saw the influence of the neoconservatives reach its summits… and founder¹². But neo-conservatism continues to inspire a good many decision-makers.

“If Israel falls, we all fall”

Thus, when José María Aznar or Silvio Berlusconi sent troops to Iraq, where they had scarcely any interests, they were convinced that they were working for the supremacy of the West. Silvio Berlusconi expressed this idea crudely when he declared, on September 27, 2001: One cannot put all civilizations on the same plane. We must be aware of our supremacy, of the superiority of Western civilization (which has guaranteed) respect for human, religious, and political rights, which do not exist in the Islamic countries… Binyamin Netanyahu thinks nothing different when he founds his “Arab doctrine”¹³ on the precondition of the democratization of the region’s regimes before any solution of the conflict.

In general terms, the parties of the conservative International share the idea that, Israel being on the front line in the face of the Islamist threat, the Jewish State must be solidly anchored to the Western camp. Thus, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, and their counterparts at the OECD threw all their weight behind Israel’s admission to the Organization, which was done in June 2010. More than that, a certain number of European leaders, among them José María Aznar, openly campaign in favor of Israel’s accession to NATO. This idea is part of the will to redeploy the integrated defense organization toward the fight against Islamism, the previous favored enemy, communism, having disappeared. The former Spanish Prime Minister even went further, forming in June 2010 a movement of the friends of Israel (Friends of Israel) with a text published on June 17 by The Times¹⁴, whose argument is directly inspired by the neoconservative doctrine: Israel is our first line of defense in a turbulent region that is constantly at risk of sinking into chaos… a region that forms the front line in the struggle against extremism. If Israel falls, we all fall. Speaking on June 30 on an Israeli radio station, José María Aznar made his approach more precise: Israel is not part of the Middle East; it is a Western State that finds itself in this region… And he concluded: When we fight for Israel, we are also fighting for our own good¹⁵. In the same vein, but with a less elaborated body of doctrine, in Great Britain, David Cameron described his bond with the Jewish State as very deep inside and as indestructible, and it even led him to proclaim himself a Zionist. In Germany, support for Israel transcends the political divides for obvious historical reasons, and constitutes a strong point of the national consensus. Moreover, the end of German guilt, sometimes called for here and there by intellectuals, has never led to establishing any distance from the Jewish State, to which Angela Merkel’s CDU remains faithful.

But support for Israel is not solely a matter of ideology. The EPP supports the Jewish State in the European Parliament: without the votes of this group, the association agreement between Israel and the European Union would have been suspended long ago, for during each crisis, deputies of the left and far left call for that measure, and a portion of the Socialist deputies votes in favor of this retaliation¹⁶. All in all, in the major European countries, the right-wing parties constitute the best support for the Jewish State. The French right does not escape this rule, even if the UMP’s Israelophilia deserves to be demythologized.

A division of labor within the UMP

The UMP, the single party of the right founded in 2002 in the wake of Jacques Chirac’s re-election, brings together first of all the veterans of the RPR. Of the Gaullist tradition, more remains than one might think on the diplomatic plane: a strong bond with the Maghreb, a closeness to a number of Arab regimes, including that of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, to whom Nicolas Sarkozy’s France sold nuclear technology after the liberation of the Bulgarian nurses in 2007. One will also note within the UMP the persistence of a very active pro-Arab faction, with a few parliamentarians such as Didier Julia, close to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq; Roselyne Bachelot, who chaired the France-Iraq study group of the National Assembly and campaigned against the sanctions inflicted on that country after the first Gulf War; or again Philippe Marini, chairman of the France-Syria friendship group in the Senate, who travels regularly to Damascus and Riyadh¹⁷. This tradition is very present among the former ministers of Foreign Affairs. One is struck by the similarity of views among all those who occupied the Quai d’Orsay. Maurice Couve de Murville, who made France’s Arab policy, boasted on that account of having put an end to the flings with Israel. Michel Jobert reacted to the Yom Kippur War by declaring: Does trying to set foot back in one’s own home necessarily constitute an unforeseen aggression?¹⁸ Closer to our own time, Dominique de Villepin, on February 25, 2003, receiving a delegation of UMP parliamentarians favorable to the war in Iraq, declared to them: The hawks of the Bush administration are completely taken in hand by Sharon, which was to earn him a scathing retort from Pierre Lellouche¹⁹. It is true that the flamboyant Foreign Minister of the time had already made known his feeling that Israel is an accident of History. And so, contrary to the legend, the governments of the Chirac presidency and those formed by President Sarkozy do not escape the tradition of the Quai d’Orsay²⁰. Hervé de Charette, Michel Barnier, and Bernard Kouchner have, on numerous occasions, severely criticized Israeli policy. One simply observes a shift: officially, since the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s Middle Eastern policy is more pro-Israeli than before. The President has never hidden his sympathy for the Jewish State²¹, and has often supported it publicly. Thus, he was the only first-rank French political figure to recognize Israel’s right to defend itself during the Second Lebanon War (July 2006). He made this declaration on television at prime time²², preferring to confide to the print press²³ more moderate opinions on the war waged by the Jewish State against Hezbollah: Do I for all that consider that the Israeli government, in defending itself, gave the appropriate response? I am not sure. If I am the friend of Israel, I am also that of Lebanon, which must become a truly sovereign country. These nuances bring Nicolas Sarkozy closer to the consensus existing throughout the Western world on the Middle Eastern conflict. But he is careful not to proclaim it, leaving to his Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner — who can do nothing without the approval of Jean-David Levitte, the President’s diplomatic adviser — the task of condemning Israel in difficult moments: during Operation Cast Lead, in Gaza in December 2008, or again after the boarding, followed by nine deaths, of the Turkish ship of the flotilla seeking to break the blockade of the Strip in May 2010. More than that, initiatives such as those of the former director for the Middle East at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Yves Aubin de La Messuzière²⁴, who advocates a dialogue with Hamas, cannot be undertaken without being covered by the French authorities.

This division of labor has an advantage. Toward his friend Binyamin Netanyahu, Nicolas Sarkozy can still present himself as a loyalist of the Jewish State, ready to play a role in the peace process. Such is the meaning of his proclaimed willingness to organize in Paris an international conference on the subject. But on the whole, Nicolas Sarkozy remains in the mainstream of the European political world: a support in principle for Israel, increasingly stingy, tempered by criticism, qualifying Israel’s military responses with a word that has made its fortune since the Second Lebanon War: disproportion. To be sure, within the UMP, Israel can count on rightist elements, such as Eric Raoult, president of the local elected officials who are friends of Israel; Rudy Salles, deputy for the Alpes-Maritimes, who had chaired the France-Israel friendship group in the National Assembly; or his successor in that post, Claude Goasguen. Patrick Devedjian and Alain Madelin are also among the supporters of the Jewish State within the UMP. This confirms that the de facto distancing of the moderate right from Israel clears a space for the right of the right, where pro-Israeli outbidding establishes dangerous liaisons.

Dangerous liaisons

The dangers are first of all of the order of discourse. The American Republican Party drifts easily toward an ethnic reading of the Middle Eastern conflict. Thus, in 2008, its Jewish branch, the American Jewish Coalition, had developed against Barack Obama a rhetoric with obvious racist connotations, with campaigns on the Democratic candidate’s Arab associations, his ties with a Palestinian professor at the University of Chicago…²⁵ Right-wing parties in Europe are not to be outdone. First in Italy, where, as we have seen, Silvio Berlusconi’s party, the People of Freedom (PDL), displays a support for Israel on an ideological basis that is less and less masked: the struggle against Islam. More subtly, the president of the National Assembly, Gianfranco Fini, a former neo-fascist leader long since distanced from the far right²⁶, never fails to manifest his attachment to Israel. Following the incendiary declarations of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Gianfranco Fini, then in charge of Foreign Affairs, declared during a stay in Israel to the daily Yedioth Ahronoth that these declarations had provoked disgust throughout the world and that the response of the international community must be clear and resolute.

In Belgium, support for Israel is first of all the work of the Reformist Movement, the French-speaking center-right party of the former Foreign Minister, Louis Michel, who was one of the rare European leaders not to condemn Israel during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. But his current status as European Commissioner for Development does not allow him total freedom of expression. It is above all Viviane Teitelbaum, a Brussels deputy who came from the very left-wing Secular Jewish Community Center (CCLJ) and is still very engaged in the communal sphere, who leads the fight against a systematically anti-Israeli left. But this support of a moderate party for the Jewish State takes place in a much more extreme context: very lively controversies over the Middle Eastern conflict in the kingdom’s capital and in Wallonia, where the left is accused of practicing a support for the Palestinian cause that is a function of its electoral interests in municipalities where the presence of Muslim populations is significant, indeed majority. In Flanders, in Antwerp, the nationalists have gone further by sometimes displaying a support for Israel that presents a double advantage: as an argument showing the danger of the real or supposed Islamization of Belgium on the one hand, and as cover against any accusation of antisemitism on the other²⁷.

In Holland, it is the same configuration that one can observe to the benefit of Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch populist party, which became the third force of the country in the legislative elections of June 2010. Geert Wilders, ever since his youth, when he had worked on a moshav, openly proclaims himself pro-Israeli. He, too, does not burden himself with nuances: If Jerusalem falls into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome will follow. Thus, Jerusalem is the principal line of defense of the West. This is not a conflict over territory, but an ideological battle between the mentality of the liberated West and the ideology of Islamic barbarism. He proposes simply to… rename Jordan and call it Palestine²⁸, which would suffice, in his view, to settle the Palestinian problem.

The hard Swiss right is not to be outdone. Oscar Freysinger, the man behind the referendum on the ban on the construction of minarets in November 2009, explains: Our party has always defended Israel because we are well aware that, if Israel were to disappear, we would lose our vanguard… As long as the Muslims are concentrated on Israel, the fight is not hard for us. But as soon as Israel has disappeared, they will come to seize the West²⁹.

In France, the excesses are less conspicuous. Marine Le Pen long tried to turn her mandate as a member of the European Parliament to advantage in order to get herself invited as part of a parliamentary delegation to Israel, a project always refused by the Jewish State. But, caught between the anti-Zionism of her father and the negationism of her rival Bruno Gollnisch, she is careful not to cut herself off from the antisemitic elements of her party. It is therefore elsewhere that a radical support for Israel finds expression. Thus, intellectuals such as Guy Millière, very close to the American neoconservative think tanks, or again the writer Maurice G. Dantec, from a communist milieu and converted to Catholicism, support Israel in terms close to those of Geert Wilders and Oscar Freysinger. These interventions sometimes take a more political turn. One will note on this account that during the Paris demonstration in memory of Ilan Halimi on February 26, 2006, Philippe de Villiers was only expelled thanks to the intervention of Patrick Klugman, former president of the UEJF and vice-president of SOS Racisme. It is true that the president of the CRIF at the time wished to invite the leader of the very right-wing Movement for France, a notorious anti-Muslim, to his organization’s traditional dinner. This invitation was not sent, Roger Cukierman being outvoted on this point by the bureau of the CRIF.

These stances of the hard right and of the new European populist formations confirm a shift that an Israeli commentator, Nadav Haetzni, underscored, congratulating himself on it, when he wrote in the daily Maariv of June 24, 2010: In Europe, there are signs of vital changes that Israel must nourish. Many Europeans are finally realizing the consequences of an open-door policy toward immigration from North Africa and the Arab countries. The positive side of the arrival of cheap labor is henceforth counterbalanced by what many of these immigrants bring with them: extremism and a will to impose Islam on old Europe. In Amsterdam, Paris, and Madrid, people are finally waking up and are terrified by the direction being imposed on the West. This awareness allows a better understanding of what we have had to confront since the birth of political Zionism. It is therefore time… to begin listening to these new voices coming from Europe.

All in all, the position of the traditional right and this recent shift of support for Israel toward radicality are not without political consequence. The ever-narrower base of the support that Israel enjoys within the conservative International marginalizes Israel a little further still on the international stage. In Israel, the Likud puts forward the support it enjoys among a portion of the Western political world, whereas the Labor Party cannot avail itself of any such support from the Socialist International, of which it is nonetheless a member. In the diaspora, this already has important consequences for the positioning of the Jewish communities on the domestic political scene of their respective countries³⁰, which, with the notable exception of American Jewry, have all turned to the right: the conservative International, for lack of a very organized existence on the ground, does indeed have one in people’s heads, and that is what makes its strength.

Notes