05-08-2025
Importing more anti-Semites is the last thing France needs
Emmanuel Macron's surprise announcement on July 24 that he would formally recognise the 'State of Palestine' at the United Nations 80th General Assembly in September should come as no surprise.
Once a supporter of Israel as the model of la start-up nation, the French president now believes in ensuring his legacy among the bien-pensant Left – or, more practically, that he now stands a chance of being elected as the next UN secretary-general after he finishes his last presidential term.
Closer to home, with his personal polling in the doldrums, Macron has watched with keen interest the younger troops of the French Left, his original home, turning the issue of Gaza into a hot national button.
In hierarchical France, following up le Chef 's decisions with some gesture demonstrating your allegiance is de rigueur. France's foreign secretary, Jean-Noël Barrot, soon announced that following a month-old ruling by the National Court of Asylum all Gaza residents qualify for entry in France as full refugees. And 292 of their top students would be admitted in French academic institutions, with benefits and housing allocations extending up to three years depending on their degree program.
A list of suitable names was compiled within hours by the French Consulate in Jerusalem, which, unlike the one in Tel Aviv, only concerns itself with Palestinian territories matters.
The fiasco that followed was perfectly predictable. Nour Atallah, a student from Gaza in France, allegedly shared a video in October 2023 of Hitler with the caption: 'kill the Jews everywhere. I don't want a Jewish lineage on this earth, you must kill them before they kill you.'
Miss Atallah's acceptance into the prestigious Sciences-Po Lille for a master in media and business, complete with housing in the university's own president's accommodation, has now been rescinded.
The case of Fady Hossam Hanona is similar. His experience as a journalist in Gaza and as a stringer for, among others, the New York Times and the Guardian meant that when he arrived in France in July a job already awaited him in the Arabic Service at France 24. But Hanona reportedly said on social media in August 2022: 'The Jews are sons of dogs, and I am with killing them and burning them, like Hitler did to them – I would be extremely happy.' (He has deleted the post).
All 292 Palestinians asylum guests are belatedly being screened, and the programme has been suspended. But some of their bloodthirsty language – which has been for decades the vernacular in Palestinian school manuals, mosque preaches and the Internet – has long been present in France.
It is evident first among the country's resentful clusters of unintegrated and jobless youths; and now among the hard Left. It is no wonder that ten days after the October attacks, an employee of the foreign ministry called Sophie Pommier was caught on camera and seemed to be ragefully tearing down posters of Israeli hostages.
Since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000, French Jews have been subject to a number of horrific attacks and murders. In 2012, a man named Mohamed Merah went on anti-Semitic rampage and killed seven people in southern France; salesman Ilan Halimi was tortured and murdered in 2006; Sarah Halimi was beaten and defenestrated in 2017.
Macron's warm words of sympathy to the Jewish community, meanwhile, are invariably followed by strange decisions, such as declining to take part in a march against anti-Semitism in Paris in November 2023.
Thinking himself attuned to the Zeitgeist, the once-youngest president of the Fifth Republic, now a middle-aged 47, hankers after the political youth cred he believes he once enjoyed. He finds it at home among the keffiyeh-wearing crowd that Jean-Luc Mélenchon's France Insoumise seems to effortlessly mobilise. And he finds it abroad at the UN, where his last decision is definitely popular.
