Bardella, Leader of France’s Far-Right National Rally, Heads to Israel

Jordan Bardella, the young president of France’s far-right National Rally, plans to visit Israel this month in a powerful symbol of his party’s shift from the home of French antisemitism to the country’s most vociferous friend of the Jews.

“Antisemitism is a poison,” Mr. Bardella told Le Journal du Dimanche, a Sunday newspaper, announcing that he plans to attend a Jerusalem conference on that subject in late March and visit areas of Israel attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. “Our engagement in this combat is absolute.”

No leader of the far-right party, including its perennial presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, has previously made an official visit to Israel. But the party’s stand against what it calls “Islamist ideology,” has led it to a sweeping embrace of Israel and the country’s fight against Hamas and Hezbollah. At the same time, the National Rally’s vehement anti-immigrant ideology, aimed particularly at Muslims, has earned it the support of some French Jews.

Many French Jews, however, remain steadfast in their opposition to the party. Bernard-Henri Lévy, a prominent intellectual and author last year of the book “Israel Alone,” an impassioned paean to Israel in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack, immediately announced that he had dropped out of the Jerusalem conference because Mr. Bardella is going. He informed President Isaac Herzog of Israel of his decision.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front, which became the National Rally in 2018, famously dismissed the Holocaust as a “detail” of history and called the Nazi occupation of France “not particularly inhumane,” despite the deportation of more than 75,000 Jews to Hitler’s death camps.

Over many years his daughter, Ms. Le Pen, aided of late by her 29-year-old protégé, Mr. Bardella, has sought to distance herself from her father’s antisemitism as part of a campaign for broader acceptance of a party long seen as a direct threat to French democracy. A French verb, “dédiaboliser,” became the epithet for the drive to end the National Rally’s “demonization.”

Serge Klarsfeld, a renowned Nazi hunter and a prominent French Jew, last year gave a significant stamp of approval to the party’s image makeover when he said he was prepared to vote for the National Rally against a far left he characterized as antisemitic.

“It’s quite normal given the activity I’ve had over the past 60 years, that between an antisemitic party and a pro-Jewish party, I’ll vote for the pro-Jewish one,” he said.

The far-left France Unbowed party has been vehement in its denunciation of Israel’s military operation in Gaza as a “genocide.” Its de facto leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, turning to antisemitic tropes, has impugned the loyalty to France of the president of the National Assembly and a former prime minister, both of Jewish descent.

Many French Jews, troubled by enduring anti-Muslim xenophobia among National Rally members, had severe misgivings over Mr. Klarsfeld’s new position and his equivocation. In 2022, he had co-signed an article in the Libération newspaper headlined, “No to Le Pen, daughter of racism and antisemitism.”

The National Rally, all taboos apparently shattered, now holds 123 of the 577 seats in the French Parliament.

Mr. Bardella met last month in the United States with Israel’s Diaspora Minister, Amichai Chikli, when both attended the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington. In a statement on X, Mr. Bardella said they had “fruitful discussions” on “the international fight against Islamic terrorism and antisemitism.”

The Israeli invitation to Mr. Bardella to attend the conference in Jerusalem on March 26 and 27 followed that meeting. A second prominent figure of the French far right, Marion Maréchal, the niece of Ms. Le Pen and a member of the European Parliament, will also attend the conference.

In the newspaper interview, Mr. Bardella said a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents in France was attributable to “Islamist ideology, reinforced by the naïveté of our immigration policy, the laxness of our laws, and the complicity of a left that has become the voice in France of Hamas beliefs.”

Widely seen as a potential presidential candidate in 2027, Mr. Bardella vowed to “reduce immigration drastically, promulgate a law banning Islamist ideology, expel extremist foreigners, close fanatical mosques and dissolve all Islamist offices in France.”

He said “the fight against antisemitism must be implacable,” and accused the French far left of “exchanging the French flag for the Palestinian.”

There were clear echoes of the Trump Administration in the policies put forward by Mr. Bardella. His own party and others on the far right across Europe have been emboldened by Mr. Trump’s first weeks in office.

Ms. Le Pen, 56, along with other party members, is on trial charged with the embezzlement of funds from the European Parliament between 2004 and 2016. She has denied any wrongdoing, but a conviction could complicate her presidential aspirations, or even lead to her becoming ineligible, and so give a boost to Mr. Bardella’s bid for the presidency. Up to now, they have skirted conflict over the potential clash of their ambitions.

Mr. Bardella’s announcement of his plans to go to Israel came as Bruno Retailleau, the interior minister, called for “extreme vigilance” during the upcoming Jewish holidays of Purim and Passover, in light of the “elevated level of terrorist threats.”