Planned march in Paris against antisemitism exposes deep divisions in France

Call for weekend event sparks bitter political squabbling amid surge in antisemitic incidents since October 7

By AFP and ToI Staff 8 November 2023, 4:22 pm Edit
A man walks next to a building the façade of which was covered with Stars of David painted during the night, in the Alesia district of Paris, on October 31, 2023. (VAN DER HASSELT / AFP)
A man walks next to a building the façade of which was covered with Stars of David painted during the night, in the Alesia district of Paris, on October 31, 2023. (VAN DER HASSELT / AFP)

A call for a weekend march in Paris against antisemitism sparked bitter squabbling between political parties Wednesday despite a surge in antisemitic incidents in the country.

The hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) party said it would boycott the “great civic march” called by the speakers of the country’s two houses of parliament for the French capital Sunday.

At the same time, the participation of the far-right National Rally (RN) is creating a headache for the left and center-left, who argue that the renamed National Front (FN) founded by convicted Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen has no place in such a gathering.

Olivier Veran, the spokesman of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist government, said Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne would take part but insisted the RN “did not have a place” in the march.

Communist leader Fabien Roussel said he would “not march alongside” Marine Le Pen’s RN, accusing it of being descended from people who were “repeatedly condemned for antisemitic remarks” and who “collaborated” with Nazi Germany.

“It’s important that there is a march against antisemitism,” Roussel told public broadcaster France 2.

French President Emmanuel Macron speaks at Elysee Palace in Paris, Monday, Oct, 23 2023 ahead of his visit to Israel. (Christophe Petit Tesson, Pool via AP)

“It is not a question of being absent from a march against antisemitism. We will perhaps march in another place, but not with them,” he insisted.

The two speakers of the French legislature, Yael Braun-Pivet of the National Assembly and Gerard Larcher of the Senate, announced a “general mobilization” late Tuesday against the upsurge in antisemitic acts in France.

But the LFI’s firebrand leader, Jean-Luc Melenchon, immediately dismissed the idea, describing it in a post on X, formerly Twitter, as a meeting of “friends of unconditional support for the massacre” in Gaza.

Far-right leader Marine Le Pen said she would not be deterred from taking part.

French far right leader Marine Le Pen adresses a speech during the party congress in Paris, Nov. 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Lewis Joly)

“I call on all our members and voters to come and join this march,” she said Wednesday.

“The more people there are, the better,” she said, adding that she was ready to march “at the back” if her attendance was such a problem.

Tensions have been rising in Paris, home to large Jewish and Muslim communities, in the wake of Palestinian terror group Hamas’s shock October 7 attack on southern Israel, in which terrorists killed 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and took some 240 hostages. Vowing to dismantle Hamas, Israel responded with widespread aerial attacks and an ongoing ground offensive to destroy its terror capabilities.

France has recorded more than a thousand antisemitic acts since the deadly October 7 attack, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said Sunday.

Paris prosecutors are already investigating the daubing of dozens of Stars of David on buildings around the city and its suburbs in late October, seen as threatening Jews. In another nearby town of Saint-Ouen, they were accompanied by inscriptions such as “Palestine will overcome.”

A man enters a building whose facade was covered with Stars of David painted during the night, in the Alesia district of Paris, on October 31, 2023. (Geoffroy Van der Hasselt / AFP)

The recent daubing of dozens of Stars of David on buildings in Paris and its suburbs, widely condemned as antisemitic, may have been carried out at the “express demand” of an individual residing abroad, the Paris prosecutor said Tuesday.

An investigating magistrate will now probe the intention behind the mass daubing of buildings with the stars, prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement, following the arrest of two Moldovans who told investigators they were acting at the behest of a third party.

A woman walks along a building whose facade was covered with Stars of David painted during the night, in the Alesia district of Paris, on October 31, 2023. (Van der Hasselt / AFP)

Beccuau said that around 60 Stars of David had been found daubed on walls in Paris on the morning of October 31 and similar stars also found in outlying regions.

Video footage showed that the inscriptions were made by a woman and man during a single trip, watched by a third person who took photographs. The two individuals swiftly left French territory.

But a link was established with similar images daubed four days earlier, which led to the arrest of the two Moldovans in the 10th district of Paris on October 27, she said.

“They said they acted on the command of a third party for remuneration, which was backed up by a Russian-language conversation on their telephone,” she said.

In the city of Lyon, prosecutors said this weekend they suspected that antisemitism may have been behind an attack on a young Jewish woman, who was stabbed in her home there.

Police are treating the attack as attempted murder, they said, adding that the woman’s wounds were not life-threatening and no arrest had been made. French media reported that the assailant, who fled the scene, also defaced the door to the woman’s apartment with a swastika.

France’s Jewish population, estimated at over 500,000, is the largest in Europe and the third-biggest in the world, after Israel and the United States.

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