Two days after treating President Trump to a Bastille Day parade, Emmanuel Macron welcomed yet another world leader to Paris for a symbolic summit, reports The Washington Post.
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose hard-line politics have earned him few friends across the French ideological spectrum, arrived here for talks on Sunday, the French president condemned anti-Zionism as the new form of anti-Semitism.
The backdrop for their meeting was the 75th anniversary of an infamous Paris Holocaust roundup, and Macron used the occasion to reiterate his declaration that the French state bore the responsibility for the arrest and deportation of about 13,000 Jews in 1942.
“We will never surrender to the messages of hate,” Macron said, standing on the site where French police, on the night of July 16th, 1942, detained thousands of French and foreign-born Jews before facilitating their transports to Nazi concentration camps across Eastern Europe. “We will not surrender to anti-Zionism, because it is a reinvention of anti-Semitism.”
Following a string of devastating terrorist attacks in recent years, thousands of French Jews left France for Israel, encouraged in 2015 by Netanyahu himself. But as Macron vowed Sunday to fight anti-Semitism in all its forms, the Israeli leader changed his tone and spoke of solidarity with France.
“Your struggle is our struggle,” Netanyahu said, referring to Friday’s attack in Jerusalem, when Arab Israeli gunmen shot and killed two Israeli police officers. “The zealots of militant Islam, who seek to destroy you, seek to destroy us as well.”
The wartime roundup — known in France as that of the Vel d’Hiv, after the name of the now-demolished indoor stadium where Jews were temporarily held — featured prominently in France’s recent presidential election, in which historical revisionism and denial were constant themes.
In one of the campaign’s most controversial moments, Marine Le Pen, Macron’s far-right opponent and the daughter of the convicted Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen, insisted that the French state had not been responsible. Along the same lines, a French journalistreported that Le Pen’s principal deputy denied the use of the poison gas Zyklon B in the Nazi gas chambers.
In repudiating these assertions, Macron joined ranks with several of his recent predecessors.
After decades of government silence, Jacques Chirac, in 1995, became the first sitting French president to acknowledge the country’s complicity and collaboration in the Holocaust, during which 76,000 Jews were deported from France altogether.
In his own remarks at the site of the Vel d’Hiv, Chirac, in 1995, put it this way: “France, on that day, committed the irreparable. Breaking its word, it handed those who were under its protection over to their executioners.”
Macron echoed those remarks Sunday. “I say it again here,” he said. “It was indeed France that organized the roundup, the deportation, and thus, for almost all, death.”
Macron’s remarks come after a years-long wave of anti-Semitism — and a subsequent surge in the number of French Jews who have moved to Israel.