Israeli leaders facing isolation over the Gaza war are increasingly pointing the finger at Muslim populations in the West to explain rising anti-Semitism and a string of diplomatic defeats.
They claim the West's Muslim population is engaged in an organised push to incite hatred against Israel and Jews, using their votes to influence policy and colluding with far-left politicians. It comes as a number of close Israeli allies have recognised a Palestinian state.
Critics of the trend have told The National it is a racist attempt to absolve politicians of responsibility for Israel’s current position and make sense of a massive drop in global support for the country, as it bombs Palestinians and inflicts famine on Gaza.
Amichai Chikli, Israel's Minister of Diaspora Affairs, has repeated the claim throughout 2025. In one interview he described some European leaders as “useful idiots” for trying to “appease” Muslim voters by adopting anti-Israel policies.
It has also been taken up by more senior ministers. Foreign Minister Gideon Saar told The Wall Street Journal last month that Muslims were affecting European foreign policy. “Europe today has huge Muslim communities,” he said. "There are already cells of radical Islam there. It has an effect."
A week before several western states recognised Palestine, including the UK, France and Canada, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said “unchecked immigration” to Europe was turning allies against his country. “To a large extent, politically, it’s happening,” he said.
Even Israel’s opposition, currently attempting to unite and brand itself as a responsible alternative to Mr Netanyahu’s far-right coalition, has said the same. “I think there’s a lot of domestic pressure from growing Islamist populations and politicians are pandering to their base,” Naftali Bennett, a front-runner to be Israel’s next prime minister, told Sky News on the day the UK recognised Palestinian statehood.
Former Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas told The National that the argument is “a cleanse-your-conscience type of nonsense” and “sheer dumbness”.
“It absolves the self-righteous Israeli politicians from responsibility of what’s going on,” Mr Pinkas said. He added Israel had initially found support in the West after Hamas's October 2023 attack on Israel.
“People forget that in the first month after October 7, the entire world supported Israel," he said. "The Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower, the Brandenburg Gate were lit in blue and white in support of Israel. Were there no Muslims then?
“Israelis can’t really come to terms with what they by now understand Israel is doing in Gaza” Mr Pinkas added. "That’s a problem for them."
He added that many of the country's citizens are “living in denial over how criticism of Israel, whether you agree with it or not, has become a mainstream issue in all these countries, rather than a politician caving into domestic pressures”.
Palestinian-Israeli politician and historian Sami Abou Shahadeh told The National that Israel’s extreme right is fear-mongering by using anti-Muslim rhetoric to “prevent any objective and rational discussion”.
Mr Abou Shahadeh said the idea peddled by politicians was accepted by the public because of “Israeli society being one of the most racist I’ve seen”.
But Mr Pinkas said he thought the public did not believe the idea and that people are rather “motivated by confusion, fatigue, a still-lingering devastation by what happened on October 7”.
He added that Israelis who do believe the argument “buy into it because it lets them think that the world is normal again, that you can explain everything”.
