Netanyahu's visit is a reminder that Israel's hard-right regime has much in common with our own

Demonstrators on Whitehall in London, following Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at 10 Downing Street

"This is a summit of hypocrites.

The roadmap trumpets Britain’s eagerness to “promote fact-based knowledge about the history of the Holocaust” while the same country arms a Ukrainian regime that celebrates mass-murdering Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and deploys explicit neo- Nazi units in its military.

For its part, pious references to “Holocaust remembrance” by an Israeli administration whose finance minister describes himself as a fascist
can only come across as offensive.

From an Italy that prosecutes mariners for rescuing refugees from drowning to a France using presidential decrees and police violence to attack retirement rights,
the march to a more authoritarian future is clear."

HUGE crowds of protesters met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his visit to London.

The summit between two “freedom-loving, innovative and thriving democracies,” as this week’s “roadmap” for relations described Britain and Israel, takes place as both engage in a systematic assault on democratic rights.

Protests have dogged Netanyahu for months over his legislative assault on the judiciary — the bargain the old crook having struck with his far-right coalition partners being immunity for himself in return for a weakening of the courts that will help accelerate the brutal colonisation of occupied Palestine.

Britain’s attacks on civil liberties are no less marked. Many of the huge strikes which have forced bosses to the table over the last year could not have taken place had the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill progressing through Parliament already come into force. The government is attacking the right to protest and the right to vote.

The Tory approach to securing a freedom-loving democracy is indeed innovative.

And that comes into the roadmap, which commits Britain to suppressing boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns “including through legislation” and dangerously elides anti-semitism with what it deems “a disproportionate focus on Israel in the UN” and “the singling out of Israel in the Human Rights Council.”

This is a summit of hypocrites. The roadmap trumpets Britain’s eagerness to “promote fact-based knowledge about the history of the Holocaust” while the same country arms a Ukrainian regime that celebrates mass-murdering Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and deploys explicit neonazi units in its military.

For its part, pious references to “Holocaust remembrance” by an Israeli administration whose finance minister describes himself as a fascist can only come across as offensive.

If these two governments are “natural allies” (the roadmap’s words) it is because they are both hard-right, authoritarian and racist. But they are not outliers.

From an Italy that prosecutes mariners for rescuing refugees from drowning to a France using presidential decrees and police violence to attack retirement rights, the march to a more authoritarian future is clear.

Some years ago fears were focused on “populists,” a term that allowed liberals to paint insurgent leftwingers like Jeremy Corbyn or Jean-Luc Melenchon as akin to right-wing rabble-rousers like Donald Trump or Viktor Orban, equal threats to our “freedom-loving democracies.”

Now the assault on freedom is the centrists’ revenge.

The drab Rishi Sunak pushes legislation as wildly draconian as anything planned by the bombastic Boris Johnson. On the opposition benches Keir Starmer decides the week of an excoriating report on police misogyny, sexism and homophobia is the ideal time to reheat 1990s “law and order” soundbites as Labour’s signature message.

The same is true abroad, from Emmanuel Macron’s rioting police to the Democrat administration of Joe Biden scaremongering over security to try banning the only big digital platform, Tiktok, that is not owned in the US and beholden to US intelligence.

The war on Tiktok is partly simple protectionism, a bid to shut out a commercial rival to US home-grown giants like Facebook and Instagram. But the boundary between corporate interest and public policy is porous in capitalist states.

Ultimately protecting ruling-class profit is the reason for the new authoritarianism: increasingly unruly citizens need to be put back in their place.

It’s the reason too for the drive to war which reinforces that authoritarianism: China’s growth threatens the long global dominance of the imperialist states of Europe and North America. It also provides a foreign threat to justify rolling back democratic rights at home.

Defending our rights is inseparable from challenging Britain’s foreign policy: our role in a predatory gang of “natural allies” led by the US, who arrogate to themselves the right to make and break the rules, but whose pretensions are increasingly rejected by the majority of countries.

For our sake and the world’s, it’s time to break free.