Continuity and change in far-right discourse: The case of far-right support for Israel

Much has been written about the changing nature of far-right discourse in Europe, with many scholars suggesting that many of today’s successful far-right parties embody a new type of politics, one that sets it apart from the ultranationalist and explicitly racist far-right politics of old. In many ways, the pro-Israel discourse of numerous West European far-right parties, including inter alia the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid, the Flemish Vlaams Belang and the German Alternative für Deutschland, would suggest these parties have moved out of the shadow of their ideological predecessors and need to be understood in new ways, indeed ‘unreformed’ far-right parties such as the Neo-Nazi Greek Golden Dawn or German Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands remain very hostile towards Israel. However, through an in-depth theoretical discursive analysis of parliamentary debates, both at the European and national level, my paper shows how the discourse of several ‘modern’ far-right parties, whilst no doubt novel in its celebration of ‘our’ Judeo-Christian values, nonetheless contains a set of logics that is as extreme and exclusionary as that propagated by many ‘old’ far-right parties, albeit it focused on a more ‘acceptable’ enemy, the Muslim ‘other’. As such, I argue that the far right’s discourse on Israel needs to be seen as a novel manifestation of ‘classic’ far-right politics, rather than as evidence of a fully revamped ideological transformation.