Anti-Semitism never prevented Bibi from covering Allied affairs.

Elon Musk visited Israel on Monday. He toured Kfar Azza, a kibbutz that Hamas attacked on October 7, killing dozens, and was photographed alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The two then recorded a conversation on X, the social media platform owned by Musk, where he spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Just this month, for example, Musk wrote: “You I just said The absolute truth” in response to a post that said:

Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of polemical hatred against white people that they claim they want people to stop using against them. I’m not at all interested in giving a little sh*t now about the Western Jewish population coming to the uncomfortable realization that the hordes of minorities who support the flooding of their country don’t like them very much.

This was not mentioned in Musk’s conversation with Netanyahu, a conversation that mostly revolved around defending Israel’s warfare tactics in Gaza, which Musk vaguely promised to help rebuild. Neither man mentioned Musk’s other posts from earlier this year, e.g When semi Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros spoke to Magneto and said that Soros hates humanity, or when Musk blamed the Anti-Defamation League, which was founded to fight defamation of Jews, for advertisers leaving his social media platform.

It’s tempting to look at these comments and compare them to, say, Anti-Defamation League Chairman Jonathan Greenblatt’s recent statements. Praise decision “For his leadership in the fight against hate” after Musk said using the terms “decolonization” and “river to sea” would be considered a violation of his platform’s terms of service. But there is another context in which to consider Musk’s visit to Israel: The Israeli prime minister, the head of the world’s Jewish state, has a long history of laundering money from far-right figures as long as they support him and ignore his anti-Semitic comments.

Perhaps the most famous is Netanyahu’s position Long-term political alliance With Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. For many years now, Orban has been promoting smear campaigns against Soros. (More recently, the Prime Minister has taken to attacking Alex Soros, the billionaire’s son, who has taken over Soros’s Open Society Foundations.) In 2018, after promoting the idea that Soros was flooding the country with immigrants, Orbán passed the “Stop Soros Legislation,” which Make it illegal For individuals or groups to try to help illegal immigrants seeking asylum. Just months ago, it was Quoted as saying“, at a re-election rally, “We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hidden; Not obvious but subtle. Not sincere but mean; Not national, but international; He does not believe in work, but rather speculates with money. She does not have a homeland of her own, but she feels that she owns the whole world. Later the same year, Orbán I took a trip To Israel, where he visited Yad Vashem and was praised by Netanyahu for opposing Budapest anti-Semitism.

Netanyahu also offered former US President Donald Trump protection from accusations of anti-Semitism. This was true not only during his presidency, when Trump moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, but he also failed to condemn those chanting “Jews will not replace us,” in 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, but also after leaving office. In 2022 Posted by the former president and a social media campaign against “ungrateful” American Jews, whom he advised to “work together before it is too late.” (Trump has repeatedly expressed the idea that, given his support for Israel, more American Jews should have supported him.) Asked in an interview about allegations that Trump — who, in addition to regularly describing liberal American Jews as disloyal, has a long history of using it in his political rhetoric — what It is widely considered As anti-Semitic tropes – anti-Semitic, Netanyahu offer“He has a Jewish son-in-law, a daughter converted to Judaism, and his grandchildren were raised as Jews: I don’t think so.”

Other members of Netanyahu’s government have shared his practice of laundering their allies’ anti-Semitic views. For example, Amichai Shikli, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs, took on this task in May To defend Musk From accusations of anti-Semitism after he attacked Soros. Eli Cohen, Israeli Foreign Minister, I pushed for change His country’s policy towards the far-right party in Romania and establishing relations with it, despite this party’s history of denying the Holocaust.

There are many speculations as to why Netanyahu and his associates take this stance towards far-right figures around the world. Netanyahu once bragged He transformed close ties with strongmen like Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in order to signal that he belonged to a different political league than his domestic opponents. But there may be more than just a shared admiration for power: In an interview last year, Jelena Subotic, a political science professor at Georgia State University, said right-wing figures in Israel and around the world relate to each other. Anti-Muslim sentiment The idea that nationalism is good while multiculturalism is bad. (Or as Slate magazine’s Ben Mattis Lilly put it in October, Netanyahu, Orban, Trump and other right-wing leaders have found solidarity in “racial purity, cultural conservatism, and the decline of democratic institutions.” There’s also the fact that Netanyahu is Israel’s right-wing leader — not Leader of Jews, both liberal-leaning and otherwise, around the world.This helps Netanyahu accept and use those who support ethnic nationalism but don’t mind Jews – as long as they are in the Jewish state.

Musk’s visit meant continuity, not change. Netanyahu may talk about combating anti-Semitism, but he has repeatedly embraced people who use rhetoric widely considered anti-Semitic as long as it serves his political purposes. He must know that those he meets will exploit these meetings to denounce accusations of anti-Semitism. “Look at my relationship with Netanyahu and Israel,” Musk might say, like Trump and many Hungarian officials before him. we will. We’ll look at his relationship with Netanyahu, and we’ll look at his anti-Semitic posts, and we’ll see that one does not preclude the other. It never happened and it never happened will.