The eldest son of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has found himself an unlikely poster boy for David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, and the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer.
It depicts an Illuminati-like figure and a reptilian creature controlling the world through money and dark arts. Alongside them are a cabal of conspirators, their faces altered to show Netanyahu’s main opponents. They include George Soros, a Holocaust survivor who has invested billions in pro-democracy movements, and Ehud Barak, a former Israeli prime minister turned government critic.
These might be dismissed as the immature rantings of a wayward son, had Yair not been groomed by his father as Israel’s “crown prince”. Netanyahu Jnr was supposedly behind an online media strategy that steered Netanyahu to electoral victory in 2015. He can be seen at his father’s side at meetings with world leaders.
Yair’s choice of targets was revealing, particularly the image’s “Grand Jew” – George Soros.
As leader of a Jewish state professing to be the world’s only refuge against anti-Semitism, Netanyahu ought to have rushed to Soros’s defence. Instead he echoed Orban’s incitement. Soros, he said, had “undermined” and “defamed” Israel too – by funding human rights groups opposed to the occupation.
Gorka, another American-Hungarian and Trump’s former terrorism adviser, is a figurehead of the alt-right, a term for US white supremacist groups. Gorka told the conference that Israel and the US were “founding members of the Judeo-Christian civilization” and would defeat their “common enemies”.
The affinity between Netanyahu’s Israel and the west’s far-right is understandable. Both detest a human rights discourse they have yet to crush. Both mobilise their supporters with dog-whistle Islamophobia. Both prefer militarised, fear-based societies. And both share an obsession with Jew hatred.
For an alt-right bristling with hatred for all semites, Jews and Muslims alike, this is manna from heaven. It too wants an apocalyptic battle against Islam, and it too is happy to see the west cleared of Jews by herding them into the Middle East.
The Israeli prime minister has repeatedly called on all Jews to come to Israel, claiming it as the only safe haven from an immutable global anti-semitism. And yet Netanyahu is also introducing a political test before he opens the door.
The paradox may turn out to be more apparent than real, however. For Netanyahu may believe he has much to gain by abandoning liberal Jews to their fate, as the alt-right asserts its power in western capitals.
Guided by this cynical convergence of interests, Jewish and white supremacists are counting on a revival of anti-semitism that will benefit them both.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.