One police officer for every five spectators. Four thousand agents for 20,000 tickets sold in a stadium which could have accommodated 80,000 people. The French government does not want to leave anything to chance before the Blues’ match against Israel this Thursday at the Stade de France. And he makes it known.
It must be said that the event falls a week after the attacks on Maccabi Tel-Aviv supporters in Amsterdam and the “Free Palestine” banner at the Parc des Princes for a Paris Saint-Germain match. The very right-wing Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau had threatened sanctions and condemned this enormous banner covering an entire platform, notably showing a man with his face hidden by a keffiyeh. He also insisted that Thursday’s match be played at the Stade de France because, for him, any step back “would amount to giving up in the face of anti-Semitism.” The Israeli authorities still called on their fellow citizens not to go to the match and “not to display recognizable Israeli or Jewish signs”.
The presence once announced in Paris of the far-right Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich at an annual gala “mobilization of French-speaking Zionist forces in the service of the power of Israel”, organized the day before the match, also provoked indignation many left-wing intellectuals and politicians. The police chief who agreed to the holding of this event despite requests for a ban suggested that the supremacist politician would ultimately not make the trip, information confirmed by the latter’s spokesperson. But the right-wing international Jewish movement Betar announced a rally this same Wednesday in Paris in reaction to the violence in Amsterdam. “We are proud Zionists and have no apologies […] We will gather on Wednesday in Paris and Thursday at the football match which is also threatened by jihadists,” said a leader.
Real risks of massive anti-Semitic attacks from French residents or alarmism which serves the narrative of the Israeli government (and the French right) well? One thing is certain: the tension surrounding this sports week in Paris confirms a form of importation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Import by whom? This is where the problem lies: a little bit of everyone, the radical left and the hard right having both surfed on emotions. Tensions which must delight the Russian destabilization networks suspected of having sponsored the “tagging” of Stars of David in the streets of the French capital as well as all those who find it in their interest to add fuel to the fire.
