Reconquista: Christian far-right joins Zionism in a neo-crusade

Reconquistas in Europe are back — and mobilising like it’s 1492AD. Convening under the banner of “Patriots for Europe”, two months ago the European extreme right met in Madrid, bringing political leaders of the Trumpist current together like some budget, fascist Avengers. 

Marching under the flags of ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and neo-fascism, representatives from France, Italy, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Austria, Estonia, Greece, and Poland were hosted by Santiago Abascal of Spain’s Vox on February 8.

In addition to the often-repeated “Make Europe Great Again,” the summit’s other prominent slogan was “Reconquista,” or “re-conquer,” an ideologically charged term referencing the European military and cultural efforts to expel Islamic influence, culminating in the late 15th century.

Viewed by its supporters as a victory for Christianity, the Reconquista involved the forced conversion of Muslims and the expulsion of Jews, while coinciding with the onset of Spanish colonisation in the Caribbean and the Americas.

And while it’s easy to see why the slogan is used by a European ultra-right obsessed with reclaiming its colonialist past and expelling the ‘infidels’ from Europe, the presence of right-wingers from Venezuela and Israel seems less natural. But Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado and the Israeli Likud party were present, and present themselves as frontline fights of the same Western civilisational battle. 

Israel’s ruling Likud party joined the Patriots as an observer member. Likud already had observer status in the European conservative parliamentary group.

Building ties with European far-right parties, including those with a notorious antisemitic record, is part of the Netanyahu government’s policy. The Israeli foreign ministry held meetings in February with several of these parties, previously banned for their links to Nazis and Holocaust deniers, and even invited them to an antisemitism summit in Israel in late March.

But in addition to their unconditional support for genocide against the Palestinian people, these European parties share with the Zionist government their Islamophobic racism and their positive assessment of the emigration of Jewish Europeans to Israel, while using their ties to Zionism to try to cover up their anti-Semitic positions.

Milei and Machado are part of a Latin American far right that is subordinate to the US, sympathetic to Trump and a fervent supporter of the Zionist apartheid regime.

The Argentinian president, beset by a lingering economic crisis and the scandal of his involvement in the biggest cryptocurrency scam in history, has been trying to reap token successes outside Argentina. A few days after the Patriots summit, to which he sent a very short message screaming “Long live liberty, damn it!”, he took part in the Conservative Political Action Conference in the US, where he gifted Elon Musk with a chainsaw, the emblem of state spending cuts in Argentina. He also plans to travel to Tel Aviv on March 23 and speak at the Knesset.

Fascism and Israel: Thick as thieves

Milei, who is a notorious enthusiast of Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship, intends to sign a memorandum “against terrorism and dictatorships” with Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and war crimes.

In fact, Israel has historically been an ally of right-wing dictatorships in Latin America, including the antisemitic Argentinian junta. Milei declared Hamas a terrorist organisation in 2024 and before that had announced he would move the Argentine embassy to Jerusalem. The move has not materialised.

Trump and Patriots’ xenophobic and racist politics highlight Machado’s contradictions. Venezuela has one of the largest forced migrations in the world, with more than 7 million people displaced by economic crisis, criminal violence and repression.

Trump negotiated at the beginning of his administration with Maduro the resumption of deportation flights to Venezuela in exchange for extending the licence for Chevron’s Venezuelan oil operations, surprising and disappointing Machado’s supporters who expected a reissue of the ‘maximum pressure’ policy of his first administration, when the financial and oil sanctions were initiated.

Trump backed off the deal a few weeks later, under pressure from Republican lawmakers in Florida, but nonetheless his administration has eliminated Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans and plans to place Venezuelans under a travel ban in the coming weeks. The Venezuelan gang known as the Aragua Train has been classified by Trump alongside Mexican drug cartels as a terrorist organisation, opening the door for Venezuelan migrants to be criminalised and even sent to Guantánamo and Nayib Bukele’s infamous jails in El Salvador, without having been convicted of any crime or even faced trial.

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Instead of defending Venezuelan migrants, Machado herself uses them to build a case for foreign intervention in Venezuela.

She did so in her speech at the Patriots summit, where she asserted that “Venezuela today is the greatest threat facing the West on our continent (…) criminal networks (…) have intentionally promoted migration as a mechanism to weaken our society and our families and hemispheric destabilisation (…) This is a global war and you are our allies”.

Undoubtedly, Maduro’s dictatorship is primarily responsible for the socio-economic crisis that has fuelled the emigration wave over the last decade, but explaining this phenomenon in terms of a conspiracy to destabilise the region feeds persecution against forced migrants.

In the ‘global war’ that Machado envisages, she places herself defending the West’s values on its ‘frontier’. This partly explains her fascination with the genocidal state of Israel.

In 2020 Machado’s party, Vente Venezuela, formalised a pact with Likud “to forge an alliance between our two parties to cooperate on issues related to strategy, geopolitics and security, among others, in order to create an operational partnership”. “The goal is to bring the people of Israel closer to the people of Venezuela while advancing, together, the Western values to which both parties subscribe: freedom, liberty, and a market economy”, reads the document signed by both organisations.

In 2018, Machado asked Netanyahu to intercede with the UN Security Council to bring about intervention in Venezuela. Machado has insistently stated that if she gains power she will restore diplomatic relations with Israel.

Relations were severed in 2009 in the context of Israel’s brutal ‘Operation Cast Lead’ against Palestinians in Gaza. In January this year, former presidential candidate Edmundo González and Machado held a teleconference with Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar, and on February 15, González and Sa’ar met in Germany, where González announced his intention to travel to Israel.

It is therefore all the more ironic that the Israeli espionage industry is assisting Maduro in the repression of Venezuelan opposition. The Chavista police State purchased spyware from the Israeli company Cellebrite in 2020.

The Venezuelan right-wing opposition, despite having won the 2024 presidential elections, did not have a strategy for the day after the anticipated electoral fraud. Its impotence has translated into a permanent invocation of foreign intervention, which is as undesirable as it is improbable.

This strategy leads to a slow but inevitable attrition, such as that experienced by Juan Guaidó, the opposition leader who claimed to be ‘interim president’ in 2019. Moreover, when Machado claims ‘Venezuela’s struggle is Israel’s struggle’, she contributes to isolating the genuine struggles of the Venezuelan people. There is a left-wing opposition that stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people but it is heavily persecuted inside Venezuela and little known outside of it.

Certainly genocide, racism and apartheid are inseparable from Western imperialist and colonialist history.

By embracing the Reconquista and supporting Israeli genocide, the European and Latin American ultra-right prove these are the Western values it defends.

For Venezuelans, who will always be outside the guarded walls of the West, the conclusion must be that in order to free ourselves from Maduro, we will also have to rid ourselves of the burden of the likes of Machado.

Simón Rodríguez Porras is a Venezuelan Socialist and writer. He is the author of “Why did Chavismo fail?” and editor at Venezuelanvoices.org.

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.