Look in the mirror, suggested Marine Le Pen
It seems that Marine Le Pen’s transformation is not yet complete. But she’s come a long way on her journey of de-demonisation. Israel, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction. It has become an Apartheid state, normalising Kahanism and even working towards enshrining it. It is a country that’s lost all moral conscience as well as any right to criticise those who were once considered its worst enemies, carrying on the genocidal mission of their forebears.
By Adar Primor • Translated by Keren Rubinstein
Him: Jean-Marie, the “great demon” of French politics. “Mr racism”. European nationalists’ beloved big brother. Her: his daughter, Marine, or “the clone” as her mother called her. “Le Pen (the father), only with more hair”, as she once presented herself.
I conducted two extensive interviews with each of them, one a joint interview of both leader and heir. The first meeting with the father, who died on 7 January, took place on the eve of the French presidential elections in April 2002. Then, against all forecasts (except his own), he defeated Socialist candidate and prime minister Lionel Jospin, made it to the second round against President Jacques Chirac, shocking France and the world. Meeting him was a kind of culture shock. The antisemitic provocateur, bane of his victims, scary xenophobe, and dangerous Europhobe had a unique sense of humour and an intoxicating, overpowering charisma the likes of which I had never met. It wasn’t for nothing that a Jewish leader in Paris told me that were it not for the antisemitic context, he might be persuaded to vote for Le Pen.
From the daughter I’m left mainly with what Haaretz picked to headline one of her interviews: “You reckon we are racists? Look in the mirror”. This headline referenced Marine’s statement about the rabbis’ declaration back in 2011 demanding that apartments not be rented out to Arabs. Having just taken over from her father as leader of the National Front, Marine had said: “They’re referring to Israeli Arabs, no? And if so, they must be treated in the same way all citizenship holders are treated. The state must decide whether it grants citizenship to its residents. But from the moment it does, it must treat them equally”. When asked about the way Israel deals with migration and the intention to open a detention centre in the south for asylum seekers, she said: “If we said in France just a fraction of what people say in Israel about the subject (of migration), we would be thrown into jail for incitement and racial hatred”. Regarding the Occupation and settlements, she said: “I don’t understand this idea of expanding the settlements. This is a political mistake, and I seek to make clear on this matter that we should have the right to criticise Israel’s policies without it being considered antisemitic”.
All this was said long before Benjamin Netanyahu’s warning that “Arabs are rushing en-masse to the polling booths”, before Bezalel Smotrich asked for his wife in labour to be placed in a separate ward from the “mass sing-song gatherings for the Arab women”, This was before Miri Regev, later deemed suitable to manage our ministry of culture, diagnosed Sudanese refugees as “a cancer in our body”. All this was said long before the Nation-State Law relegating non-Jews as inferior citizens, preventing reunification of families of Arab citizens of Israel and residents of the West Bank, and before the lawmakers here went into overdrive in their spectacular legislative reform.
Legislative reform such as the suggestion to make it easier to reject Arab candidates and parties from running for the Knesset; the initiative to permit the denial of medical care or any other service (for reasons of “religious belief”) to Arabs; the demand to cancel the automatic rejection of a party ticket or candidate inciting to violence from running for election; the proposal to criminalise flying the Palestinian flag in academic institutions; the proposals to oversee Arab schools and teachers; initiatives to Judaise the Negev, even if it means Bedouin villages that have been vying for recognition for decades will be displaced; and of course before the decision of defence minister Israel Katz to legislate separately for Jews and Arabs and to stop using administrative detention but only against Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
Israel has become an apartheid state, and has lost any moral conscience as well as any right, to criticise the successors of the annihilators of its forebears.
The mirror held up to Israel by Marine Le Pen reflects a pariah country rapidly undergoing fascisation. It has become such a pariah that it keeps seeking its kin everywhere, courting not only Le Pen herself and later Hungarian Viktor Orban, but even the Spanish ultranationalist Vox party, itself drawn from the ranks of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera’s fascist Falange; it seeks the company of the Freedom Party of Austria and the Sweden Democrats with their neo-Nazi origins; it courts the radical Right Rumanian leader Calin Georgescu, not being put off knowing that he’s an admirer of the regime that killed Rumanian Jews during the Holocaust.
It seems that Marine Le Pen’s transformation is not yet complete. In her first two interviews with Haaretz she fervently objected to condemning the crimes of Vichy France. But she’s come a long way on her journey of de-demonisation. Israel, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction. It has become an Apartheid state, normalising Kahanism and even working towards enshrining it. It is a country that’s lost all moral conscience as well as any right to criticise those who were once considered its worst enemies, carrying on the genocidal mission of their forebears.
What was meant to be a great light has descended into total darkness. Darkness unto the nations.
