Possible visit of Bezalel Smotrich to Paris causes controversy

The announced visit to France on Wednesday, November 13, of Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister who also has authority over the occupied West Bank, has sparked controversy. The openly supremacist politician is expected to take part in a gala evening in Paris organized by Israel is Forever, a French Jewish association close to the far right. The event is presented by its organizers as “the mobilization of Zionist French-speaking forces in the service of Israel’s power and history.” A pro-Palestinian organization, CAPJPO-EuroPalestine, has filed a request to have it banned.

Paris Police Prefect Laurent Nuñez announced, however, that he would not stand in the way. “I will not ban this demonstration. I have no reason to do so,” he declared on BFM-TV on November 10. “We’re obviously going to protect this gala.” A French court ruled on November 9 that there was no reason to ban the event. According to the court, as “the existence of a defined and imminent threat” had not been established, the conditions required to order a ban had not been met.

Some politicians also called for the event to be canceled. On October 16, Thomas Portes of La France Insoumise (LFI, radical MP) asked the prefect to ban the gala “while the Israeli government is carrying out genocide in Gaza,” he wrote on X. He also recalled Smotrich’s remarks in August during a conference at Yad Binyamin, in which he said it was “justified and moral” to let the inhabitants of Gaza starve to death to promote the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas.

‘Irresponsible and unacceptable remarks’

LFI parliamentary leader Mathilde Panot raised the visit in a question to the government at the Assemblée Nationale on November 5. Prime Minister Michel Barnier replied that “the French authorities are in no way associated with this trip,” but that “Smotrich could, in compliance with international law, travel to Paris in a private capacity.” He also rejected any “form of governmental contact” with the Israeli minister, recalling Paris’s condemnation of the “irresponsible and unacceptable remarks” that Smotrich made at a previous gala organized by Israel is Forever in March 2023. On that occasion, Smotrich had said “the Palestinian people are an invention of less than 100 years. Do they have a history, a culture? No, they don’t.”

In an op-ed published in The World on November 10, leading figures of Jewish faith and culture denounced the visit of Netanyahu’s minister to France. A few days earlier, on November 7, pro-Palestinian associations and the French Jewish Union for Peace (UJFP), a far-left anti-Zionist organization, had also called for demonstrations against his visit.

You have 38.62% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.