How Islamophobia has become Israel's Trojan Horse to win over westerners
Israel's Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli has explained his own strategy more candidly than any critic could.
Antisemitism, he told an interviewer, does not much interest the average European or American, whereas fear of "radical Islam" interests them "very, very much", and Israel therefore needs "to take advantage of that".
Here is a senior cabinet minister admitting that Islamophobia has become a Trojan Horse for Israel to win over European and American hearts and minds.
And it is the clearest account yet of what his ministry has become under Benjamin Netanyahu; an office that once existed to protect Jewish communities abroad now works to turn European fear of Muslims into political capital for the Israeli government.
His ministry was built for the opposite work.
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Diaspora affairs meant supporting Jewish communities, taking their guidance, defending them against the forces that genuinely threaten them.
But while his predecessors asked what would keep Jews safe, Chikli asks what narrative can be weaponised to make an easier sell. The most effective selling point, he has concluded, is not Israel at all but fear of somebody else.
A civilisational war
Since its genocide in Gaza, the old case for Israel on its own merits has grown harder to make, and a new one has slipped into its place. Support Israel, the argument runs, because Israel is fighting the people coming for you next.
In this narrative Israel becomes the forward operating base of a civilisational war, the frontier of what Chikli, in a 2024 interview with Jewish Insider, called the "Judeo-Christian world" set against a "red-green alliance" of the progressive left and Islam.
He deliberately blurs the line between confronting violent groups and Islam tapping into the playbook of far-right populism, which is on the rise across the West.
The company he keeps confirms as much.
Chikli has courted Marine Le Pen's National Rally in France, Spain's far-right Vox party, the Sweden Democrats, and Dutch populist Geert Wilders, every one of them a party built on hostility to immigration and to Islam.
Paradoxically, the ministry designed to protect Jews from antisemitism has become a ministry of subversion, ripening the very audiences and networks on the far right that have been on the very forefront of Jew hate globally.
In October 2025, days after two Jews were killed, one of them by police during armed response, outside a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur, Chikli invited the English agitator Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and who has accumulated multiple criminal convictions and prison terms over the past two decades, to Israel, and hailed him as "a courageous leader on the front line against radical Islam".
Those protesting the visit at the time were not the progressive left Chikli likes to blame, but British Jews themselves.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council called Robinson "a thug who represents the very worst of Britain", and they dismissed Chikli as "a diaspora minister in name only" who had ignored the community he claims to serve. Jews in whose name he claims to act wanted no part in this endeavour.
One prejudice in two coats
What Chikli followers often miss is that antisemitism and Islamophobia do not compete for a fixed ration of public sympathy.
They are the one prejudice in two coats. Each rests on the same premise that a minority may be judged and feared and shut out for its religion.
So a serious campaign against antisemitism would widen the taboo against demonising anyone at all, because that taboo is the only thing that has ever kept Jews safe.
Netanyahu's government collects politicians who will defend its war in Gaza and stand against Palestinian advocacy. Fear of Muslims is the coin they trade in
Instead, Chikli has been narrowing it. His bargain invites his own minority to buy the illusion of a little safety by leasing itself to the forces massing against another.
History is unkind to any bargain with fascists. Minorities rarely prosper once a society begins sorting itself by who truly belongs, and the movement aimed at Muslims today has no reason to stop there.
Europe's far-right traditions have a habit of circling back to the Jews. Robinson proved the point within the week, railing online against "elitist Jews". My bogeyman’s enemy turns out to be still my enemy.
Then there are the values he claims to guard. Chikli casts Israel as the custodian of "Judeo-Christian civilisation", of truth, free choice and human dignity.
Take him at his word, and the case falls apart on his own terms. A state cannot preach the sanctity of civilisation while it normalises the dehumanising and mass slaughter of Palestinians.
It cannot raise the banner of religious liberty while it feeds movements whose appeal begins and ends in suspicion of another faith.
Israel’s "Ministry of Subversion" now sits closer to an illiberal, nationalist Europe than to the liberal order that once made Jewish life in the diaspora secure.
The useful idiots
Meanwhile, those on Europe’s far right are more than just useful idiots played by Israel. Europe's populists collect an asset money cannot buy - namely a Jewish endorsement that shields them from the charge of antisemitism and lets them dress hostility to Muslims as plain realism.
Netanyahu's government collects politicians who will defend its war in Gaza and stand against Palestinian advocacy. Fear of Muslims is the coin they trade in.
In his interview Chikli did not suggest Europeans need to fight antisemitism, but swap one fear for another to fill a deep-seated European yearning for a significant other against whom to define its identity.
An institution built to bind Israel to Jewish communities has decided that the easy road to defending the undefendable rhetoric and action of the Netanyahu's government runs not through making Israel more persuasive but through making Europeans more afraid.
And it asks Jews to hand their safety to the very politics of collective suspicion their own history should have taught the West to dread.
No one has ever defeated the hatred of one people by bankrolling the hatred of another.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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