French President Emmanuel Macron spoke out harshly against anti-Semitism on Sunday, during a Holocaust memorial ceremony in Paris attended by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Discussing the 75th anniversary of the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup (in which French policemen rounded up more than 10,000 Jews and held them in a Paris stadium before being deported to concentration camps and murdered), Macron blasted those who would deny the French state's complicity in the murder of its Jews.
"There are those who say Vichy wasn't France,” he said, referring to the puppet state set up after the German conquest. "It's true that Vichy wasn't all of France, but Vichy was the government of France and the French establishment It was responsible for deporting French Jews, and not the Germans."
"We have a responsibility to realize where and when we have failed. The underground and those who rescued Jews saved France's dignity, but the Vichy government was the reality. It's convenient and easy to see Vichy as something perpetrated by foreign agents but it was the reality. You can't build pride on a lie.”
“We will never surrender to the messages of hate; we will not surrender to anti-Zionism because it is a reinvention of anti-Semitism,” he added, in a statement directly addressing the concerns of many European Jews.
Responding to Macron’s comments, Netanyahu stated that “seventy-five years ago, a heavy darkness descended on this City of Lights” and “shattered the lives of thousands of French Jews at Vel’ d’Hiv.”
However, he said, France has taken steps to come to terms with, and take responsibility for its past and praised those in the French underground who, during the Holocaust, risked their lives to save their Jewish countrymen.
"There is heroism in battle, in pitting one’s life to save others. But the heroism of the people who saved Jews involved putting their families at risk, putting their children, their wives, their husbands, at the risk of execution.”
In a statement, Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky praised Macron’s willingness to link hatred of Jews with hatred of their state, saying that “when one of the most important leaders in Europe recognizes that modern antisemitism frequently cloaks itself with the veil of anti-Zionism, tearing the mask off the face of radical anti-Zionists, this is a highly significant development.”
"President Macron’s remarks serve to further clarify the nature of modern anti-Semitism and facilitate efforts to combat it. I call on all leaders, in Europe and elsewhere, to follow the United Kingdom and Austria in formally adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, which will help uproot all forms of this age-old hatred from within our midst.”