This month’s second International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem will again provide a platform for far-right activists from racist organisations – some with a history of antisemitism.
Last year’s conference proved a watershed moment exposing a deep divide between the man behind the conference – Amichai Chikli, Israeli Minister for Diaspora Affairs – and the leaderships of communal organisations in Jewish communities abroad that he is meant to engage with.
Fascism’s heirs
Following the blueprint set in 2025, this year’s summit from 26–27 January, billed as “Generation Truth”, confirms that Chikli didn’t just make a diplomatic blunder last year. For the second year in a row, he is facilitating the mainstreaming of the ideological heirs of Europe’s darkest corners of pre-war fascism and post-war racism.
The first “International Conference on Combating Antisemitism” held in March 2025 triggered anger when the guest list revealed that Chikli was hosting figures like Jordan Bardella of the French National Rally and representatives from the Sweden Democrats.
As news broke in advance of speakers who had been invited, mainstream Jewish leaders withdrew from participating and pulled their support. These included the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), and the World Jewish Congress.
‘Stab in the back’
In the UK, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis cancelled his attendance, stating he could not share a platform with “far-right and populist figures.”
The Israeli President Isaac Herzog was forced to distance himself, hosting a separate reception for Jewish communal leaders to avoid being photographed with Chikli’s controversial guests.
Ariel Muzicant, president of the European Jewish Congress, described the event as a “stab in the back” to European Jewry.
Hand in glove
The reason that Chikli can work hand in glove with far right activists from abroad is that he sees them as kindred spirits to unite with against radical Islam and “neo-Marxist” woke ideology.
He first entered the Knesset (Israeli parliament) with Yamina (“Rightwards”). Israel’s electoral system means that coalitions have to be formed with minority parties to form governments.
For Chikli, the breaking point came when the party joined a 2021 coalition that included Ra’am, an independent Arab party.
Chikli viewed sharing power with Arab-Israeli representatives as a fundamental heresy, and defected to Likud to align with Benjamin Netanyahu’s populist machine.
The Chikli doctrine
In Likud, he found a platform for the “Chikli Doctrine”: the belief that the traditional Diaspora leadership is both “weak” and “woke” and that Israel’s true allies are the international far-right “strongmen”.
Chikli believes that he is leading a conflict between Judeo-Christian values and a “red-green alliance” (radical Islam and the left). For him the Western “woke” left is a more immediate threat to Israel’s survival than the “reformed” far-right.
The ‘Tommy Robinson’ connection
Searchlight readers who have tracked Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, alias Tommy Robinson, over the years, will find Chikli’s embrace of the Luton-born thug of particular interest.
Last year, Chikli acted as a personal tour guide for Robinson, granting the convicted criminal and former BNP member the kind of state-level legitimacy he could never achieve at home.
Despite being branded a “thug who represents the very worst of Britain” by the Board of Deputies and Jewish Leadership Council, Chikli doubled down, attacking the Board as “woke” for daring to oppose the visit.
This year’s list of speakers is another rogue’s gallery. Chikli has curated a ‘Who’s Who’ of the far right for “Generation Truth”, offering them a podium to normalise their reputations at a conference which marks Holocaust Memorial Day, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
Perhaps the most telling addition to this year’s conference is a posthumous tribute to the late Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder who was killed in a shooting in September 2025.
Antisemitic dog whistle
By presenting an “Award of Honour” in Kirk’s name, Chikli is effectively canonising a figure who was often accused of flirting with the “Great Replacement” theory and white nationalist rhetoric.
The “Great Replacement” is a white supremacist conspiracy theory which claims that “globalist” elites (often a dog-whistle for Jewish people) are deliberately orchestrating mass migration to replace white, Christian populations.
While Chikli frames his alliance as a defence of “Judeo-Christian” values, many of his guests promote a worldview that identifies ‘the globalist Jew’ as the primary architect of the very “invasion” they fear.
This year’s speakers include:
- Fabrice Leggeri (MEP National Rally, France): Leggeri represents a party rebranded from the National Front (FN), a movement co-founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen and Pierre Bousquet, a former member of the Waffen-SS. While now led by Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen, the party is still haunted by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s infamous dismissal of the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of the history of the Second World War.” Now an MEP, Leggeri is a former director of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex), hit by scandals in his time of office.
- Jimmie Åkesson (MP Sweden Democrats): A party co-founded by Waffen-SS veteran Gustaf Ekström. It emerged from Sweden’s post-war fascist movements.
- Dominik Tarczyński (MEP Law and Justice – Poland): Tarczyński represents a movement that has been involved in a long-term feud with Israel and Jewish communities over Poland’s “Holocaust Law” which sought to criminalise mentions of Polish complicity in Nazi crimes in spite of the fact that the country was the site of extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka.
- Herman Tertsch (Vox Spain): A key figure in Vox’s efforts to rehabilitate Franco Fascism. He has a history of attacking “Globalist” Jewish figures (specifically George Soros) who he believes are orchestrating “population replacement”.
- Dinesh D’Souza (USA): Born in India, D’Souza is major figure in the American conservative movement and a convicted felon and conspiracy theorist who gained a 2018 presidential pardon to become a primary propagandist for the MAGA movement. He argues that anti-fascists are the real fascists.
- Seth Dillon (USA): The CEO of The Babylon Bee, who has turned the site into an engine for the “culture war,” using “comedy” to mainstream “Great Replacement” rhetoric and mock marginalised groups.
The 2026 “Generation Truth” conference confirms that the Chikli Doctrine is no longer a fringe experiment, but a cornerstone of current Israeli policy.
By offering a platform to figures like Fabrice Leggeri and Jimmie Åkesson on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Chikli is effectively laundering the reputations of parties that have spent decades trying to escape the shadow of their fascist origins.
For Jews and their allies fighting antisemitism abroad, this isn’t just a diplomatic blunder – it is a fundamental betrayal.
In his pursuit of a “Judeo-Christian” front against the left and Islamism, Chikli is trading long-standing alliances with the Jewish world for a seat at the table of the global populist right, opening the gates to the very forces that Jewish communities have spent the last eighty years trying to keep at bay.
