Already in full conversion to Judaism – “The only thing missing is the blood pact,” he said last week – the elected president of Argentina, Javier Milei, seems to have placed Jewish orthodoxy in the same place in his ultra-conservative ideology as evangelism in the case of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
Two days after his resounding victory in the presidential elections, Milei was blessed in Buenos Aires by Franco-Moroccan rabbi David Pinto, leader of a mystical branch of Sephardic Judaism who, incidentally, has received million-dollar donations from Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Donald Trump.
Then, last week, during a visit to the United States, the president-elect combined meetings with Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor to the Biden Administration; leaders of the International Monetary Fund and dignitaries such as Bill Clinton, with a visit to the grave of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, in New York. Wearing a kippah, Milei gave thanks for her victory in the cemetery in the Queens neighborhood where Schneerson was buried in 1994, today a pilgrimage destination for thousands of Orthodox Jews. It is the third time Milei has paid tribute to the rabbi since he began his conversion two years ago.
The tributes have a geopolitical reading. Schneerson is one of the most influential ideologues for the Jewish colonization movement in the West Bank, and before that in Gaza. From his base in Brooklyn, he rejected all the agreements – of Camp David and Oslo – and attacked the recognition of the territorial rights of the Palestinians. His warning in the 1960s that “giving up territory threatens Jewish lives” has been cited in far-right Israeli media in recent weeks. “Of the religious settlers in the occupied territories, Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic people constitute one of the most extreme,” Alan Brownfield of the American Council of Judaism explained in a recent article.
So that there was no doubt in the New York Jewish community – strongly divided over the massacre perpetrated in Gaza by the Government of Beniamín Netanyahu – Milei gave an interview to the Israeli weekly Kfar Chabad a few days before his visit to the US. He defended “without blink” Israel’s right to “protect its citizens by all means necessary.” The president-elect's next visit will be to Tel Aviv.
Already subscribed to Netanyahu and Schneerson's Greater Israel project, Milei has committed to moving the Argentine embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, just as the two former hemispheric presidents he most admires did: Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro.
Milei waved the Star of David at his election rallies. “The new administration of Javier Milei promises to be the most pro-Israel in the history of Argentina,” predicted the New York agency Bloomberg.
But Milei's conversion goes beyond unconditional support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It is the first example that the messianic Judaism of the new extreme right in Israel – represented by neo-fascist ministers such as Itamar Ben-Gvir or Bezalel Smotrich – can be a political vehicle in other countries as well.
Like the evangelical leaders of the Christian extreme right in the US or Brazil, Milei uses a messianic and vengeful discourse based on the Old Testament. When he gave up his deputy allowances, he compared it to “what Moses did when he (...) sent the ninth plague to Egypt.” One of his most repeated phrases is: “Victory in combat does not depend on the number of troops, but on the strength that comes from Heaven.”
“In Milei's head, religion and spirituality form a central theme; “He got into politics because he believes that God appeared to him,” said Juan Luis González, author of the biography of Milei Loco. By choosing these ultra-Orthodox rabbis as his prophets, Milei is choosing a Judaism that “patents the messianic conception,” he added in an interview with La Vanguardia.
Beyond spirituality, the elected president of Argentina has convinced important businessmen close to Jewish orthodoxy in Buenos Aires of the value of the libertarian revolution. Eduardo Elsztain, real estate magnate and owner of the Libertadores hotel, where Milei has established his base of operations, is a close ally who accompanied him on his visit to the United States.
But there is a problem with Javier Milei's conversion to Judaism: many of his most fanatical followers are neo-Nazis who do not even try to hide a visceral anti-Semitism. Martin Krause, the economist whose name was being considered to head the Ministry of Education, provoked indignation during the electoral campaign by ironizing the inefficiency of the Argentine State with a gratuitous reference to the Holocaust: “If it had been the Argentine Gestapo instead of the German one, it would not “Six million Jews would have died,” he said.
Nazism appears in the parliamentary ranks of Milei's coalition, La Libertad Avanza. Rocío Bonacci, elected representative for Santa Fe, is the daughter of the Nazi José Bonacci, who can be seen on social networks holding a copy of Mein Kampf. Lilia Lemoine, another deputy who described the neo-Nazi Carlos Pampillón as a “patriot”, has this week appointed Rodolfo Barra to a senior position in the Treasury, who in his youth belonged to the neo-Nazi group Movimiento Nacionalista Tacuara and participated in an attack on a synagogue in Buenos Aires in the early sixties. Barra was then photographed giving the Nazi salute.
The worst example, however, concerns some of the youngest followers of the Milei phenomenon. For example, the punk group Una Bandita Indie from La Plata. “Javier Milei, superhero of freedom, the last punk,” goes the lyrics of one of his songs that asked the libertarian with the chainsaw to vote, and then adds: “I carry the book of Bochaca,” the denialist historian, author of a book titled The Myth of the Six Million.
It is not advisable to be tolerant of neo-Nazi anti-Semitism or Holocaust denial in Buenos Aires, the scene of two attacks against Jews in 1992 and 1994, leaving 113 dead. But Javier Milei did not seem worried. He declared himself a fan of Una Bandita Indie de La Plata in a video and thanked them for the praise.
