Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy says boycott efforts are counterproductive as well as silly, due to Israel’s prowess in science and technology.
“Israel’s greatest victory was not achieved by the force of arms but by the force of intelligence,” he says at the Herzliya Conference. “Boycotting the start-up nation makes no sense politically, economically and morally.”
The security of Israel “is not a subject on which the smallest compromise can be made […] since we are talking about hundreds of years of persecution of Jewish people — it’s in the books… after the Holocaust, which was not the fault of Arabs but of Europeans, and which did not happen in the Middle Ages but in the 20th century… this is not hundreds of years, it is yesterday. Israel is the realization of a promise,” says the former president, who is aspiring to be reelected.
Sarkozy later discusses anti-Semitism in France. While “France is not anti-Semitic,” he acknowledges there are displays of anti-Semitism, which he describes as “a stain on the tricolor flag.”
Nicolas Sarkozy (center) attends a meeting in Asnieres-sur-Seine, in the northwestern suburbs of Paris, on June 3, 2015, flanked by Senator Roger Karoutchi (left) and Manuel Aeschlimann (right), the Les Republicains party mayoral candidate in Asnieres-sur-Seine. (AFP/Lionel Bonaventure)
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