France
Updated 2024-02-26
2024-02-11 DIANA JOHNSTONE: Genocide Meets French Devotion to Israel Israel’s loyal supporters in the West combat rising world indignation over the suffering of the Palestinian people by changing the subject. When Gazan families are buried under the rubble of their homes, it’s not about the plight of the dispossessed Palestinians; it’s about eternal Jewish victims; it’s about “Islamic terrorism;” or it’s about a threat to “Western values.” That is the line taken by most of the French media and political class.
Skeptical France is very far from such fantasies. French support to Israel is longstanding and political, but tinged with semi-religious devotion rooted in recent history. France is officially, even ostentatiously, a secular nation, considerably de-christianized over the past two hundred years. To a unique extent, over the past half century, this religious void has been filled by the sacred remembrance of the Shoah, as the Holocaust is usually called here.
When the Nazis invaded France, there were approximately 320,000 Jewish people living in France, including a large number of foreign nationals who had fled from anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe. Those unfortunate exiles made up the bulk of the 74,000 Jews who were brutally rounded up and deported under German occupation. These deportations are the principal factual basis for what developed into a sense of national responsibility for the Shoah comparable to that of Germany itself.
However, of all Nazi-occupied countries, France is the country where the largest percentage of Jews escaped Nazi deportations. An estimated 75 percent of Jews survived the occupation without being deported, including around 90 percent of Jews with French citizenship. The reasons for this are controversial, but one result is that France has the largest Jewish population in Europe today — around half a million, the third largest Jewish population in the world, although far behind Israel or the United States (with around 7 million each). https://consortiumnews.com/2024/02/11/diana-johnstone-genocide-meets-french-devotion-to-israel/
2024-02-04 Stop the War: French Lawmakers in Egypt, on Way to Rafah Crossing A delegation of 16 French opposition lawmakers demanded an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza on Saturday during a visit to Egypt. Emphasizing the health and humanitarian crises in the region, Coquerel announced that the delegation plans to visit the Rafah border crossing on Sunday, becoming the first foreign parliamentary group to do so since October 7.
The delegation is also set to meet personnel from the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees, or UNRWA. Coquerel emphasized the critical role UNRWA plays in conducting humanitarian aid operations in the region and expressed concerns that a failure in its functioning would be catastrophic. Thomas Portes highlighted the importance of maintaining pressure on Israel for the enforcement of ‘precautionary measures’ ordered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).https://www.palestinechronicle.com/stop-the-war-french-lawmakers-in-egypt-on-way-to-rafah-crossing/
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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict
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