The growing power of France’s pro-Israel lobby, by Serge Halimi & Pierre Rimbert (Le Monde diplomatique

Almost a decade ago, the results of the 2016 Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s first presidential victory made disoriented liberals redraw the ideological battlelines in terms so crude that no one could be left in doubt: on one side were the ‘bad’ populists and authoritarians, a group that lumped together Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro and their ilk. And arrayed against them were the ‘good’ liberals and progressives, represented by figures such as Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron.

But this remapping of the political fault lines and alliances in the Western world left an awkward anomaly: Israel. Whether democratic or autocratic, European and especially US governments refrained from sanctioning or even sharply criticising the illegal actions of Israel and its leaders. Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu — a friend of Trump, idolised by Bolsonaro and feted by Orbán — had made no secret of his hostility to the rule of law. He had been indicted in 2019 for fraud, corruption and breach of trust, charges that would have discredited any other ‘populist’ leader — especially one on the left.

Everyone looked the other way

While liberal governments in France, Germany, the UK and elsewhere spared Netanyahu their criticism, he was }}busy courting the European far right and entrenching ethnonationalism at home. Yet almost everyone looked the other way. Most liberal democracies, along with their media and tame intellectuals, ‘forgot’ to include the Likud leader in the ‘reactionary international’ they claimed to be fighting.

Now, barely a decade later, looking the other way is no longer a plausible excuse: Israel’s flagrant disregard for international law cannot be ignored. Netanyahu’s governing coalition, which includes supremacists who would be hard to distinguish from the Ku Klux Klan of old, has invaded Lebanon and Syria, bombed Iran and (…)

Full article: 4 444 words.