By Daniel Frost
Something has quietly shifted in how the far right in Europe and the hardline wing of the Israeli government do business together. It used to be that Western policy toward the Middle East was built on shared democratic values and institutional alliances. That foundation is giving way to something else: an open trade in civilisational anxiety. As Israel’s campaign in Gaza draws scrutiny unlike anything it has faced before, key state actors are betting on a different pitch, one that frames kinetic destruction as the frontline defense of Western civilization against a common Islamic threat.
The calculation is cold and explicit. For a great many voters across the West, historic antisemitism simply doesn’t land the way anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment does. It carries less political resonance, less heat, less vote weight. So the play is to work that domestic anxiety, to convert it into Western alignment. Reframe the operations not as a territorial dispute or an occupation but as a clash of civilizations, and suddenly you’re speaking the language of the far-right populist movements that have been gaining ground across Europe and North America. The strategists know exactly which notes to hit.
Look at who Israeli officials have been courting. France’s National Rally. Spain’s Vox. The Sweden Democrats. Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. These aren’t accidental contacts; they are a deliberate effort to build a coalitional shield. Amichai Chikli, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs, spelled out the logic himself when he boasted of breaking the political boycott around these far-right parties and their activist networks. The bet is that political endorsement flows both ways: these groups get legitimacy, and the hardliners get unconditional support for military action in the Middle East, with the far-right taint conveniently laundered out of the transaction.
Reframing Middle Eastern conflicts into broad civilisational clashes serves to build transactional coalitions with far-right populist movements across Western nations.
The courtship of Tommy Robinson shows how deep this bridge now goes. In late 2025, Chikli extended an official government invitation to the British agitator, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, praising him as a courageous figure on the front line against radical Islam. Robinson is a street agitator with multiple criminal convictions, and the invitation was designed to launder that record, recasting years of anti-Muslim rhetoric as a noble defense of Western Judeo-Christian heritage. These parties and these agitators share a core ideology: strict border security, anti-immigration politics, and a deep suspicion of Muslim integration in Western societies.
All of which rests on a dangerous historical paradox. The very movements being courted grew out of traditional, right-wing bigotry. Xenophobia has never shown much discipline about staying on one target. The ideological machinery that paints Muslim minorities as an existential threat to European culture runs on the same logic of collective guilt and cultural exclusion that once fueled systemic antisemitism. The playbook is older than any of the current actors.
Mainstream Jewish organizations on both sides of the Atlantic have been sounding the alarm for a while now. When Robinson accepted the invitation, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council issued sharp joint condemnations. Their language was blunt: they dismissed Chikli as a minister in name only, a man who actively ignored the community he was appointed to protect, and warned that legitimizing violent agitators damages community safety. Community leaders grasp something the strategists don’t want to confront: partner with ethno-nationalist agitators and you weaken the taboo against religious discrimination. When political figures praise far-right provocateurs as allies, local minority populations take notice, and diaspora communities end up less safe, not more.
Legitimizing ethno-nationalist agitators risks dismantling foundational norms against religious discrimination and compromises diaspora security.
There’s a strategic failure buried in all of this too. Substituting tactical prejudice for genuine diplomatic persuasion is what you do when you can’t defend the policy on its legal or moral merits. Relying on civilisational fear is an admission. It turns international diplomacy from a debate over international law and human rights into a zero-sum battle of identities, which is exactly the battlefield the far right wants.
The fallout inside Europe is just as corrosive. The EU is already split down the middle over immigration and national identity. Millions of refugees arrived over the past decade, economic uncertainty never really went away, and the populist ground has been well fertilized. Inject Middle Eastern conflict dynamics directly into those domestic debates and you accelerate the polarization. European voters start seeing their own Muslim neighbors not as fellow citizens but as an internal national security threat. That framing travels fast.
The civilisational narrative also distorts what international law actually is. The order built after World War II exists to prevent the dehumanization of civilian populations, whatever their ethnicity or creed. When state actors argue that military operations should be exempt from standard humanitarian constraints because they’re fighting a broader civilisational war, they aren’t making a clever legal argument. They’re attacking the entire architecture of global governance.
Exempting military actions from humanitarian standards under civilisational narratives directly undermines the global legal order.
The damage is already visible. Trust in Western democratic institutions is eroding, at home and across the Global South alike. International observers increasingly read the selective application of human rights principles as simple Western hypocrisy. Align state policy with reactionary movements and you end up isolated from liberal democracies, from international legal bodies, from the regional partners who would rather have diplomatic stability than endless confrontation.
Security built on the systematic demonization of a religious or ethnic group is not security at all. Alliances grounded in shared animosity are inherently unstable and morally compromised. Weaponizing Islamophobia to buy short-term political support in Western capitals will not deliver long-term safety; it only legitimizes the forces of division and exclusion that threaten democratic societies from within. Real national security still comes down to something unfashionable: respecting international law, protecting human rights, and building alliances on shared principles rather than shared fears.
About the Author
Daniel Frost is a Foreign affairs columnist specializing in global geopolitics, European security, and strategic policy.