World Jewish News

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and French President Emmanuel Macron at the ceremony marking in Paris the 75th anniversary of the roundup of French Jews by the French police acting on the order of the Nazis.

Emmanuel Macron: 'We will not surrender to anti-Zionism, because it is a reinvention of anti-Semitism'

“We will not surrender to anti-Zionism, because it is a reinvention of anti-Semitism,” said French President Emmanuel Macron at a ceremony in Paris marking the 75th anniversary of a roundup of French and foreign-born Jews by the Nazis.

On July 16 and 17, 1942, the French police arrested an estimated 13,000 Jewish people in Paris, including thousands of children. They were detained for four days in horrible conditions in the Vélodrome d'Hiver (Vél d’Hiv), a stadium originally built for cycling races, before being deported to Auschwitz. Less than a hundred of those arrested in the raid would survive the Holocaust.

President Macron reiterated a declaration that the French state bore the responsibility for the arrest and deportation of about 13,000 Jews in 1942.

“We will never surrender to the messages of hate,” Macron said.

Former President Jacques Chirac, in 1995, became the first sitting president to acknowledge the country’s complicity and collaboration in the Holocaust, during which 76,000 Jews were deported from France.

In his own remarks at the site of the Vel d’Hiv, Chirac, in 1995, put it this way: “France, on that day, committed the irreparable. Breaking its word, it handed those who were under its protection over to their executioners.”

Macron echoed those remarks during the ceremony on Sunday at the Shoah Memorial in the French ca pital. “I say it again here,” he said. “It was indeed France that organized the roundup, the deportation, and thus, for almost all, death.”

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended the ceremony. In a speech, Netanyahu said that ‘’recently we have witnessed a rise of extremist forces that seek to destroy not only the Jews, but of course the Jewish state as well, but well beyond that. They wish to destroy anyone that stands in their way – Jews, Christians, Muslims, who suffer the brunt of their savagery.’

‘’Militant Islam wants to destroy our common civilization. The militant Shiites led by Iran, the militant Sunnis led by ISIS – both seek to vanquish us. They seek to destroy Europe,’’ he said.

‘’It is completely obvious for anyone who listens to what they say, what they preach, what they teach their disciples, what they teach their children. They must vanquish, overcome, subdue, and ultimately eliminate European civilization. Israel is merely the first Western target that stands in their way. Militant Islamists do not hate the West because of Israel. To the contrary, they hate Israel because of the West, because they rightly see in Israel a forward bastion of our common values of freedom, humanism, democracy.’’

‘’Your struggle is our struggle,’’ Netanyahu told Macron. ‘’The zealots of militant Islam, who seek to destroy you, seek to destroy us as well. We must stand against them together and we must defeat them together,’’ he added.

Attending the commemorative ceremony were hundreds of invited guests and Holocaust survivors including Noah Kliger and his wife, who were specially invited by the Israeli Prime Minister. Kliger (92) is a Holocaust survivor who was born in Strasbourg.

EJP