"The analysis suggesting that France’s decision to recognise the state of Palestine in September is behind the rise in antisemitic violence in France is erroneous, abject, and will not go unanswered."

"The current period calls for seriousness and responsibility, not generalisation and manipulation."

French President Emmanuel Macron 

 

"Mr. President, we are French citizens who respect the laws of the republic, but if you adopt a law against anti-Zionism, or if you officially adopt an erroneous definition of anti-Semitism that permits outlawing it, please know that we will break this law with our words, our writing, our art and our acts of solidarity."

"And if you decide to pursue us, to silence us, even to imprison us for that, well, you can come and get us."

"Anti-Zionism is an opinion, a current of thought born among European Jews at the moment when Jewish nationalism was taking off. It opposes the Zionist ideology that advocated [and still advocates] the installation of the world’s Jews in Palestine, today Israel."

"[The essential argument of anti-Zionism is] that Palestine was never an empty territory that a ‘people without land’ are free to colonize based on a divine promise, but a country populated with real inhabitants for whom Zionism would soon become a synonym for exodus, despoilation and the negation of all their rights."

More than 400 French intellectuals, artists and activists in open letter to Macron

People attend rally in support of the Collectif Urgence Palestine and La Jeune Garde Antifaciste groups targeted by a dissolution measure by French Interior Ministry, and in support with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, at the Place de Stalingrad in Paris, France, May 6, 2025. REUTERS/Abdul Saboor/

 

"UN Watch, the independent Geneva-based non-governmental organization that monitors the United Nations, today called on Canada, France, Spain, Norway, the Netherlands, Australia, the UK, and other democracies to explain why they joined in the election of serial abusers of human rights to key UN bodies that oversee human rights."

"On Wednesday, the UN’s 54-nation Economic and Social Council nominated the Islamic Republic of Iran to the UN’s Committee for Program and Coordination, which meets next month to shape policy on women’s rights, human rights, disarmament, and terrorism prevention. ECOSOC’s nomination is effectively decisive, as the UN General Assembly customarily rubber-stamps such nominations without a vote."

UN Watch  

Ah, yes, France. True to its traditions. During World War II, racial identity cards facilitated deportation of approximately 75,000 Jews in France to their deaths during the Holocaust. This is the land of liberty, equality, fraternity, which celebrates the universal rights of humanity. Exit the Jews and all is well. Well, hang on a minute; 500,000 Jews are citizens of today's France, though many among them think of leaving. Although the number of French Jews represents the third largest aggregation of Jews after the U.S. and Israel, they are vastly outnumbered by the number today of French Muslims, up to four million in number, 10 percent of the French population.

 

Oil and water. The persecution of French Jewry has advanced significantly in lock-step with the growing presence of French Muslims. Not that without the presence of Muslims there would be no Jew-hate in France; the defaming accusations in the 19th century of treason charges levied against Jewish Alfred Dreyfus, defended by none other than Emil Zola of popular French/global literary fame who was then himself accused of libel and forced to flee after his J'Accuse! was published where he charged the French government leadership of antisemitism and the unlawful imprisonment of French Army General Staff officer 35-year-old Alfred Dreyfus. Zola himself was forced to flee France for England, to avoid imprisonment.

 

France became the first Western country to formally recognize the 'state of Palestine', leading others like the U.K., Spain, Australia and Canada to join in that recognition at the U.N. General Assembly in April 2026. Despite that the Palestinian Authority had countless times turned down a peace agreement with Israel that would lead to a formal acknowledgement and a state of their own, adamantly refusing to recognize the right of Israel's existence.

 

United Nations General Assembly   Photo: UN Watch

 

So much for the piety of France's vaunted equality, liberty and fraternity. It must pay heed to the presence on its soil of a massive and growing Muslim-French population. Constant 'unrest' manifests from among many within that demographic, when the non-Muslim-unapproachable banlieues outside Paris and Lyon sporadically explode in violence. The kind of chaos that keeps official France on its toes in prevention, when and if possible. Areas strictly off limits to police, fire-fighting crews, ambulances, where no one who is not Muslim may enter without encountering personal danger.

 

Somewhat like Israelis accidentally straying into West Bank Palestinian towns, risking life and limb. Whereas Palestinians representing 20 percent of the Israeli population with full citizenship need not have any such fears. Israel, where liberty, equality and fraternity is practised as a reality, as much as is possible, given the frailty of human nature. Israel, where Israeli-Palestinians can aspire to and occupy positions in the Knesset, the judiciary, hospital medical communities, alongside Israeli Jews, Druze, Circassians, Christians, Kurds and B'hai, among others.

 

In France, a Code Noir remains on its law books, dating from the 17th century. When it was enacted three-and-half centuries ago, signed into law by King Louis XIV, the Black Code represented the architecture of the country's colonial slavery system. It formalized the legal basis for African captives to be transformed into property. Interestingly, the first article of the Black Code was to legalize the expulsion of Jews from French Caribbean colonies. 

 

The Black Code exemplified the French slave economy of forced labour in exchange for which enslaved Blacks received the benefits of Christian benevolence as members of the one true religion. The Jesuits, among other orders in the Catholic Church, educated the enslaved populations and operated slave plantations which financed their missions abroad. A Dominican priest managing a sugar plantation in Martinique in the 1690s ordered torture as a penalty for any Blacks caught taking part in African religious rites. Versions of the Code were practised in Indian Ocean colonies of Mauritius and Reunion and the Louisiana Territory.  During the Haitian Revolution,  an estimated 200,000 Black Haitians fighting for freedom in the late 18th and early 19th centuries perished for their own cause of liberty, equality and fraternity.