“Israel has long refused any contact with the Freedom party, which was partly founded by former Nazis in the 1950s and whose former leader Jörg Haider praised Hitler’s employment policies and is seen as whitewashing Austria’s Nazi history.”
“Many Israelis were dumbfounded when, on a trip to Israel last month, Heinz Christian Strache, the party’s leader, paid a private visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance centre in Jerusalem.”
“Strache visited Israel at the invitation of Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightwing Likud party. While there he attended a conference organised by settlers in the Jordan Valley seeking to roll back EU guidelines on labelling of goods produced in illegal Jewish settlements.”
“In words apparently aimed at rewriting his party’s record on Israel and the Jews, he spoke of “the Judeo-Christian West” and said: “If Israel fails, Europe fails. And if Europe fails, Israel fails.””
Read more: Israel finds strange bedfellow in Austria’s far-right (archived)
2021-week12
