En viewing the images of the two French gendarmes expelled from the French Pater Noster church in Eleona by the Israeli police in East Jerusalem, we cannot help but think of the precedents. In 1996, President Jacques Chirac had very sharply refocused the Israeli police forces while he was going towards the national domain of France in Jerusalem, which consists, let us remember, of three main places, the tomb of the Kings, the Basilica of Sainte-Anne and its swimming pool, where Jesus is said to have healed a paralytic, and this church of Eleona, where Christ is said to have taught the Our Father to his disciples, prayer reproduced on the walls in 170 different languages.
In 2020, it was in front of Sainte-Anne church that President Macron was blocked by the Israeli police who patrolled the premises, which was the source of a muscular exchange with the president, who had had all the trouble people asking them to leave.
French possessions
This time, the images are cruel for the French forces taken out manu militari from one of the three French possessions. Let us recall that as part of a European competition for the protection of Christian holy places in Jerusalem, France, under the Second Empire, had received these three sites: Sainte-Anne, from the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, in thanks in 1856 for the support provided in the Crimean War against the Russian Empire, Eleona, in 1868, from the Princess of the Tour d’Auvergne who had built a convent there for the Carmelites still present, the tomb of the Kings, in those same years, of the Pereire brothers, famous French Jewish businessmen who had acquired the surrounding places.
It is in Sainte-Anne that one of the two July 14 celebrations takes place, offered to Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In Jerusalem, France’s religious mission is twofold: to protect French Catholic congregations and to enforce, via the French consul, the status quo between the three great patriarchates.
However, these French possessions do not make them “diplomatic holdings” in the same way as the French embassy in Tel Aviv or the consulate in Jerusalem governed by the Vienna Convention of 1961. This provides in particular that the host country waives the exercise of its police rights in diplomatic premises. What we summarize, erroneously and abusively, by the expression “extraterritorial status”. A French possession is not a French territory where particular legal protection would be exercised, even if there are customs, in good agreement, to be respected. These are the customs that Israel did not respect yesterday.
A political gesture from Israel and a response to Macron
To Discover
Kangaroo of the day
Answer
For Gérard Araud, former ambassador to Israel, the altercation which has just taken place “is in any case not of a legal but of a political nature”. So the question is not: did Israel have the right, but why did it do it? “France has never recognized Israel’s sovereignty over East Jerusalem since 1967. This is why, moreover, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Noël Barrot, went to Eleona with the consul and not with the French ambassador. If this had been the case, it would have been implicit recognition on the part of France of Israeli sovereignty. However, if one day a solution is found for the Palestinians, it is inconceivable that they will not receive East Jerusalem. »
For their part, the Israelis, by intervening in Eleona, showed in a muscular manner that East Jerusalem does indeed belong to Israel. They reminded this with all the more firmness and pleasure of a government which, for several weeks, has repeatedly withdrawn its support in its military operations in Gaza and South Lebanon or has made very poor declarations. received on the creation of Israel by the UN or the barbarity sown by Israel. Minister Barrot of course acted as he should by publicly protesting, the fact remains that this carefully calibrated and carefully prepared action is a gesture of retaliation, of punishment, not to say humiliation. A snub to a country, France, which has lost a little more of its international prestige. Where in 2020, Israeli forces ended up withdrawing from the Sainte-Anne basilica, this time it was French soldiers – gendarmes – who were expelled from the places they were supposed to protect.
