“We will not let anything pass” and “we will continue to fight anti-Semitism by all means”, Prime Minister Michel Barnier promised Monday evening during a ceremony in Paris in tribute to the victims of Hamas on October 7, 2023.
“We will not let anything pass”: one year after October 7, Prime Minister Michel Barnier promised Monday evening that the government would continue to “fight anti-Semitism by all means” during a ceremony in tribute to the victims of the The attack in Israel which still causes shock waves in France.
“You can count on the President of the Republic, on the Prime Minister (…) on all members of the government to protect our compatriots of the Jewish faith,” said the Prime Minister, during this ceremony organized at the Dôme de Paris , at the invitation of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (Crif).
Evocation of Head of State Emmanuel Macron elicited boos from a few rows of the audience. Some in the room shouted “weapons” after the French president called on Saturday for a halt to arms deliveries to Israel.
4,000 people for the tribute ceremony
Emmanuel Macron, for his part, assured Monday that France was doing “everything possible” to free the two Franco-Israeli hostages still held in Gaza. The families of these hostages were first received in the afternoon at Matignon, before meeting the Head of State.
Emmanuel Macron promised them that France was “doing everything possible to obtain a ceasefire and an agreement allowing the release of Ohad Yahalomi and Ofer Kalderon as a priority, and that it was pressing all parties to move forward in this sense without further delay”. In addition to the families of the two hostages, he met those of victims residing in France.
Some 4,000 people responded to Crif’s call for the tribute ceremony. Many personalities made the trip such as the former president Nicolas Sarkozy, the former Prime Minister Manuel Valls, the president of Medef, Meyer Habib, the writer Bernard-Henri Lévy, the president of the Ile-de-France region Valérie Pécresse or the president of the National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet.
La France insoumise, whose initial reaction after the attacks of October 7, 2023 in Israel had been widely criticized, paid tribute to the victims. In a press release sent Monday evening, LFI calls for the “immediate release” of the Hamas hostages and denounces a “terrorist act”.
“Hysterize” the debate
The president of Crif Yonathan Arfi launched Monday evening a violent charge against the movement of Jean-Luc Mélenchon which is in “the camp of dishonor” because LFI “sees resistance fighters where universal conscience recognizes terrorists” and “chooses to hysterize our public debate, by cultivating clientelism and identity assignments.”
“That LFI still finds allies within the Republican left is an outrage, a betrayal,” he lambasted.
Across France, hundreds of people paid tribute to the victims of October 7. In Strasbourg, 500 people gathered in front of the town hall despite the rain at the call of Jewish associations. “One year. One year since our lives stopped,” declared Alexandre Levy, spokesperson for the organizers.
In Lyon, 2,100 people, according to the prefecture, gathered at the end of the day on Place Bellecour, without slogans or acronyms, but carrying numerous French flags and photos of the victims. “I came for support”, the massacre of October 7 “it breaks our hearts”, affirmed Fabienne Duc, “Catholic”.
In Marseille, which has the second largest Jewish community in France, several hundred people also gathered to commemorate the victims of October 7. In Paris, the Eiffel Tower will go out this Monday at 11:45 p.m., as it did a year ago.
Massacre
The tributes began on Sunday with a rally in Paris at the initiative of the Jewish National Fund (KKL). Other gatherings took place in France. The leaders of French religions, for their part, launched on Monday a united call “for peace and fraternity” and pleaded for “not to import the conflict into France”.
Because in a country which is home to the largest Jewish community in Europe (with nearly half a million people) and one of the largest Muslim communities, the shock wave remains strong.
The unprecedented Hamas attack on October 7 in Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures, including hostages who died or were killed in captivity in the Gaza Strip. Of the 251 people kidnapped then, 97 are still hostages in Gaza, including 34 considered dead.
More than 41,870 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli military campaign of retaliation on the Gaza Strip, the majority civilians, according to data from the Hamas government’s Health Ministry for Gaza, deemed reliable by the UN.
