Inviting a denier of genocide to an antisemitism conference brings shame on Israel

The Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, won’t go because of the “attendance of a number of far-right populist politicians”.

The government’s adviser on antisemitism Lord Mann, along with Bernard-Henri Lévy, David Hirsh – a veteran activist against antisemitic boycott here in the UK – and many others looked at what Chilki was planning and recoiled.

The Israeli government packed the conference with representatives of Europe’s right-wing and far-right parties – from Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) in France.

You can imagine how grateful the RN, which was founded by a Holocaust denier, will be. Thanks to the Netanyahu reputation-laundering service, it will be able to reject all accusations of racism and say that the Israeli government, no less, accepts that the radical right is at the forefront of the battle against antisemitism.

It is a shameful and dangerous moment. As Hirsh said: “It is clear to me that anti-democratic thinking is fertile ground for antisemitism and that the best way to undermine antisemitism is to support democratic thinking, movements and states.”

But it is not wholly surprising. Netanyahu is trying to build his personal power by imitating Orbán and Donald Trump. Like them, he undermines the checks and balances that tie leaders down. In that sense, the authoritarian right in Israel, Europe and the US have a common interest.

What the conference organisers did next, however, was authentically shocking – even to an old hand like me, who thought he had seen it all.

They invited Milorad Dodik, president of Bosnia’s Serb-led Republika Srpska to speak.

Never heard of Dodik or his Balkan statelet? Let me enlighten you. Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the closest Europe came to reliving the Holocaust was in the wars of the former Yugoslavia. The country fell apart in the early 1990s, as nationalists began tearing off chunks of territory. Slobodan Miloševic incited the Serb assault on Bosnia’s Muslims and helped pushed “ethnic cleansing” – that euphemism for mass displacement and murder – into everyday use.

Miloševic died in his prison cell. He was on trial at the time, accused by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia of 66 crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes against Croats and Bosnian and Albanian Muslims

While the massacres were under way, my colleagues Ed Vulliamy at The Guardian and Penny Marshall from ITN exposed Serb concentration camps in Bosnia. Emaciated men stared out at the world from behind barbed wire. In 1995 the Bosnian Serb Army of Republika Srpska under Ratko Mladić murdered 8,000 men from Srebrenica. As soon as the crimes were revealed, the denialism began. British far leftists – who in a perfect vindication of the horseshoe theory, ended up on the radical right – denounced the pictures of the camps as fakes.

The Serb authorities claimed that all reports of genocide at Srebrenica were lies.

Dodik has built his power and popularity by ramping up the genocide denial. He told Serbs in his corner of Bosnia what they wanted to hear – that the Srebrenica genocide “did not happen”. As the lies about the crimes against Bosnian Muslims poured out in the 1990s, I remember saying to Vulliamy that this must be what it was like when Nazi sympathisers first denied the news from Auschwitz.

There is a special cruelty in the deceits of denialists. They say to the families of the dead that there were no murderers and therefore no victims. They mock them with the cruellest lies they can invent.

Jean-Paul Sartre was right to say of the antisemites of the Nazi era that “they delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.”

He might have been speaking of Milorad Dodik and all the Western far leftists who jeered at the dead Muslims of the Balkan wars.

Such is the man the Israel deems worthy of an invitation to a conference denouncing antisemitism. Imagine the malicious effort the Netanyahu government put into scouring Europe to find him.

What on earth are Muslim people – or anyone with common decency – meant to make of this? That the Israeli government is now such an extreme right-wing enterprise that it regards ghouls who deny the mass murder of Muslims as comrades in the struggle against antisemitism?

Seriously, I would love to hear the Israeli government’s explanation because as things stand its behaviour appears to be disgraceful beyond words.