Emmanuel Macron and Michel Barnier will attend, Thursday, November 14, the football match between France and Israel at the Stade de France, in Saint-Denis. The executive couple, but also Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande, Gérard Larcher and many political figures, side by side to send a “message of fraternity”, and absolute rejection of anti-Semitism, after the outbreak of violence suffered by supporters of the Israeli club Maccabi Tel-Aviv on Thursday evening in Amsterdam. They say at the Élysée, after the intolerable anti-Semitic acts”, which followed Thursday in Amsterdam, the match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel-Aviv.
Classified as high risk, the match on Thursday, November 14 will mobilize 4,000 police and gendarmes and the Israeli authorities have advised their nationals not to go there. But for the French government, there was no question of canceling it, or moving it abroad, as Belgium did in September. To retreat was to capitulate in the face of the explosion of anti-Semitic acts in France.
This violence divides the French left. The PS denounced without qualms the “anti-Semitic lynchings” occurred on the eve of the anniversary of the “Kristallnacht”in the words of Olivier Faure, but several Insoumis elected officials worked to minimize the facts. Or even outright justifying them like the MP for Ille-et-Villaine, Marie Mesneur, according to whom “These people were not lynched because they were Jewish, but because they were racist and supported genocide.” A tweet reported to the courts by the Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau, for “apology of crime”. The LFI deputy for Vaucluse and antifa activist, Raphaël Arnault, affirms for his part that the Maccabi supporters were “racist and violent hooligans” came to fight. Clearly, they were looking for it… An argument as old as anti-Semitism which scandalized MEP Raphaël Glucksmann who launched “Shame on you“to the rebels who “put into perspective or justify this anti-Semitic violence”.
In Amsterdam, Maccabi supporters certainly burned a Palestinian flag and vandalized a taxi, but as the Dutch Prime Minister recalled “There is a big difference between destroying things and driving out Jews.”
This is not the first time that the left has been torn apart over anti-Semitism. The gap has been widening since October 7, 2023, since the massacres committed in Israel by Hamas, sorry “the armed offensive of Palestinian forces” intervened “in a context of intensification of the Israeli occupation policy”, according to the exact terms of the LFI press release. For Jean-Luc Mélenchon, marching, a year ago, against anti-Semitism in France, was even showing his “unconditional support for the massacre” in Gaza. Amalgams forcefully denounced by the PS, very often on the verge of rupture, except each time, when an election approaches, the time for patching up comes.
Just last week, the PS withdrew its candidate from the partial legislative elections planned for Grenoble in January, to line up behind LFI. As if on the left, the fight against anti-Semitism had become secondary to the essential unity to win a deputy seat.
