Anti-Israel Protests Planned For Paris Holocaust Memorial Event
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PARIS (JTA) — A Muslim website called on pro-Palestinian activists to crash a Holocaust commemoration ceremony in Paris to protest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attendance.
On Friday, the Le Muslim Post urged readers to show up in large numbers at the July 16 state ceremony at the Vel d’Hiv former stadium, where French police in 1942 rounded up 13,000 Jews for deportation to death camps. Its article noted the Netanyahu government’s “treatment of Palestinians in camps, deprived of freedom and liberty of movement.”
Unnamed associations were organizing the protests, it said. The article did not say whether police approved the planned protest.
Netanyahu’s planned visit to attend the 75th anniversary of the deportations “a rare opportunity” by the unnamed organizations “to make their voice heard.”
The call for protest followed an assertion by the head of France’s pro-Palestinian lobby that Netanyahu should not attend the ceremony because Jews in prestate Israel did not save their brethren during the genocide.
Bertrand Heilbronn, president of the France Palestine Solidarity Association, who is Jewish, made the assertion in an op-ed published Monday on the website Mediapart that he co-authored with the French-Jewish historian Dominique Vidal.
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