Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has called on the city’s police to prohibit a pro-Palestinian demonstration organised by extreme leftists groups Saturday afternoon in the center of Paris, after Jewish groups demanded a ban of the rally.

The organizers of the rally, which police approved, call for a boycott of Israel ahead of the protest – an action that is illegal in France under 2003 legislation that proscribes discrimination against countries or their citizens. It is organized by by anti-Zionist groups CAPJPO-EuroPalestine and Droits Devant (Rights First), “to celebrate the Palestinian resistance to the occupation and to the settlements” and to urge sanctions against Israel.

“No to blackmail by means of anti-Semitism,” the groups wrote, implying that criticism of Israel is being unfairly labeled anti-Semitic. “No to the dictates of the Israeli lobby. No to attacks on freedom of expression. No the attacks by the fascist thugs of the Jewish Defense League.”

The protesters wrote that they will “demand sanctions instead of the current collaboration of the French government with Israeli apartheid.”

The International Solidarity Movement — an extreme-left group that, like CAPJPO, supports the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel – wrote on its website that the protest was for a “separation of CRIF and state.”

CRIF is the umbrella representative group of French Jewish institutions. Its president, Francis Kalifat, this week wrote a letter to French Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, urging that the demonstration be called off.

On Friday, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo backed the call. Warning of disturbances to public order, she wrote that the protest “could be considered as a public, anti-Semitic act to French Jews.”

The call for a “separation of CRIF and state” is “some of the worst anti-Semitic clichés that exist and it may provoke severe disturbances to public order,” said Hidalgo.

“Anti-Semitic calls have no place in Paris and must be fought firmly,” she wrote in a series of tweets.