Israel’s historic right to exist surpasses that of France Article by The Washington Times

US-based The Washington Times has published an article addressing the issue of anti-Semitism in France. Caliber.Az offers its readers select excerpts from the piece.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s announcement that France will recognize a Palestinian state is another chapter in the long, lamentable history of French antisemitism, which includes the Dreyfus affair, Vichy’s complicity in the Holocaust and the current wave of Muslim antisemitism rocking the republic.

On the bright side, as President Trump puts it, “What Macron says is irrelevant. It won’t change anything.”

The French have a saying: The more things change, the more they remain the same. This is most applicable to them.

The French have always had difficulty dealing with reality. They thought the Maginot Line would stop the German advance in 1940. Instead, the Germans were in Paris in a month.

Mr. Macron’s move displays a profound ignorance of the Middle East.

Neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority has ever recognized Israel’s right to exist within any borders. Macron’s push for a Palestinian state is in keeping with his country’s execrable treatment of Jews.

In the Dreyfus affair (1892), a Jewish officer in the French army was framed for treason. This had Parisian mobs howling, “Death to the Jews.” The demonstrations, witnessed by Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, convinced the father of modern Zionism that Jews could never assimilate into European society.

How ironic that French antisemitism helped fuel the drive for a Jewish state.

In 1940-1944, the collaborationist Vichy regime, installed in southern France by Germany, aided the Nazis in sending more than 75,000 French Jews to the gas chambers.

Guy Milliere, a researcher for the Gatestone Institute, discloses, “France is the only country in the 21st century where Jews have regularly been murdered simply because they were Jews.”

Mr. Milliere notes, “For more than 20 years, it has been impossible to talk about the Holocaust in French schools.”

In the 2024 election, to keep the right-wing National Rally party from power, Mr. Macron forged an alliance that included the far-left New Popular Front, whose leader, Jean-Luc Melenchon, calls French Jews an “arrogant minority” and October 7, 2023, “an armed offensive of Palestinian forces.”

If demography is destiny, France is down for the count. The overall French fertility rate (the number of children the average woman will have in her lifetime) is 1.79, substantially below the replacement rate of 2.1. The fertility rate for French Muslims is 2.9, well above replacement. France’s Muslim population is augmented by illegal immigration from North Africa.

Israel has more of a right to exist than France. The Bible wasn’t written in Marseille. The patriarchs and prophets did not walk the streets of Lyon.

The French did not spend 2,000 years praying for a return from exile.

When France was a land of warring barbarian tribes, Israel was a thriving kingdom and the site of Solomon’s Temple and its successor. Christianity did not develop on the Left Bank of Paris.

By Vafa Guliyeva