Recent revelations have reopened questions about far-right politician Jordan Bardella’s antisemitic statements made between 2013 and 2015. “Banks are all controlled by Jews,” “The Jew must dominate other peoples, crush them and rob them,” and “a Zionist is necessarily Jewish, and deeply so” are among the statements he reportedly made.
Despite irrefutable evidence, the president of the far-right National Rally (RN) has denied these accusations, citing his support for Israel, including an official visit in 2025, as a defence.
Amichai Chikli, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs, who hosted him during last year’s trip, also publicly defended him.
A history of collaboration
Bardella’s case is taking place against the backdrop of the RN’s attempts to whitewash its links to antisemitism in recent years. But many doubt there has been a fundamental change, especially given its foundations.
Originally, the party was called the National Front (FN) when it was founded in 1972 by veterans of the Nazi Waffen-SS, the collaborationist Milice (the paramilitary organisation set up by the Vichy regime to fight French resistance during World War II), and the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS).
Since then, alongside its name change in 2018, it has worked hard to revamp its image to become electable. Its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen – for whom the Holocaust was a “point of detail in history” – was even expelled by his own daughter Marine Le Pen in 2015. The party has also since regularly purged additional ‘bad apples’.
Louis Aliot, a former RN vice-president, explained the party’s intentions clearly in 2013: “It’s antisemitism that stops people from voting for us. That is all there is to it. Once you remove that barrier, you free everything else.”
Now, the RN even claims to be a shield for Jews, notably through support for Israel.
Anti-Muslim politics
But the party did not simply shed its fascist/racist past. It strategically shifted its focus to Muslim, migrants and the left, with the support of an Islamophobic bloc spanning France’s political class and media.
Support for Israel was increasingly conflated with support for Jews, which enabled the weaponisation of antisemitism against all those who expressed solidarity with Palestine, or were visibly associated with the movement.
In fact, the RN started to spew the rhetoric of a “new antisemitism” casting Islam, non-white communities and the left as its principal agents. This was a borrowed strategy that has long been used by Israel to discredit Palestinians and their allies when faced with criticism over its crimes.
The party also found that there was an appetite for such narratives across Western political classes that were particularly invested in fuelling the fire of anti-Muslim sentiments and politics.
What changed since October 2023 is the speed and scale of this process. As scholars Adam Hanieh, Rafeef Ziadah and Robert Knox have argued, the genocide in Palestine has exposed the moral bankruptcy of Western states closing ranks to support Israel, defending the indefensible, and ultimately turning Palestine into a “lightning rod for a much deeper rage about the state of the world” and a “radicalising impulse for political elites” themselves.
Repressing solidarity, legitimising the far-right
In France, solidarity protests have systematically been met with repression and criminalisation. The state’s unconditional support for Israel is equated with defending Jews, and any anti-Zionism that expresses itself on the streets, within political movements, and institutions, is labelled antisemitic.
French President Emmanuel Macron even officially declared this in 2017, which further legitimised the far-right’s targeting of the left.
This was all too visible during a state-sponsored march against antisemitism in November 2023, which was widely seen as a march in support of Israel. Those in attendance included the RN and members of the far-right student organisation Groupe Union Défense (GUD), and members of the French branch of the Jewish Defence League (LDJ).
Those on the left who had taken part were booed and accused of complicity with terrorism.
This was not the only surreal political moment in the last three years of the Gaza genocide, however. Holocaust survivor Serge Klarsfeld, a lawyer who spent his life pursuing Nazi criminals, met Marine Le Pen in 2024 and declared he would vote for her “without hesitation” over the ‘radical’ left.
In 2025, on an official visit to Israel, Bardella knelt inside Yad Vashem, the world’s largest Holocaust memorial. He was also invited to attend a conference ostensibly convened to fight antisemitism, alongside Spanish far-right Vox Party politician Hermann Tertsch, whose father was a Nazi Party member.
Normalising far-right politics
Over the past decade, the left has been progressively isolated and demonised whilst the far-right has been gaining legitimacy. For example, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed Party (LFI), which has built its electoral success in opposition to a reactionary consensus of neoliberalism, austerity, state racism, and authoritarian politics spanning from parts of the socialist left to the far-right, has faced relentless campaigns accusing it of antisemitism.
Palestine solidarity expressed by LFI and others on the left is seen as pandering to a “Muslim vote” and stoking antisemitism in the poor suburbs.
Disturbingly, the Islamophobic rhetoric being used by the political class and media is not so dissimilar to old antisemitic imagery regarding the infiltration and demographic danger posed by a “foreign” racial group. Muslims in France are painted as endangering a supposedly white, Judeo-Christian civilisation, and terms like “Islamo-leftism” echo the historic fascist conspiracy of “Judeo-Bolshevism”.
Of course, none of this means the far-right is actually cleansed of antisemitism. Just last year, Le Pen stated that she regretted expelling her father and “will never forgive herself.” Also, Bardella recently met with far-right Polish politician Krzysztof Bosak, whose party promotes a “Jews-free Poland.”
Support for Israel and antisemitism are not mutually exclusive, as Bardella’s reported statements remind us: both can rest on the same premise, that Jews form a single, essentialised body whose place is not in Europe but in a Jewish state.
The only difference now is that in France, the same racist matrix once targeting Jews has been redirected to Muslims and non-white people, with Palestine cast as the front line of terrorism and Israel recast as a civilisational and security partner.
Indeed, despite its rebrand, the RN has not broken with its foundational project: a racial-national regeneration through purification, a politics that would crush the labour movement, stop migration and repress any politics that opposed this agenda.
Nevertheless, Israel has found strategic allies among far-right parties across Europe, with whom it shares a fantasy of racial domination, and it seems unbothered by the long-standing history of antisemitism rife within their ranks. It benefits from the image that it is a successful ethnonationalist outpost fighting barbarism and terrorism in the Middle East.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz clearly explained this relationship when he declared Israel was doing “the dirty work for us.”
What is deeply concerning, however, is that the weaponisation of antisemitism and ongoing attempts to discredit those on the left who organise anti-racist and anti-fascist efforts amidst rising hate and oppression only further endanger Jewish communities.
Sylvain Henry is a writer based in Samos, Greece, and a master's graduate in sociology and political philosophy. He recently worked with the Cyprus Refugee Council.
Follow Sylvain on Instagram: @sylvainhenry_ or X: @SylvainHenry_
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.
