The Israeli ultranationalist Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister in Netanyahu's government and open Jewish supremacist, participated on Sunday, March 19, in a gala evening in Paris, organized by "Israel is Forever," a French Jewish association close to the far right.
Although it had been announced 10 days beforehand, Smotrich's arrival on the banks of the Seine was a surprise. In the middle of the previous week, following protests from pro-Palestinian movements and human rights organizations, Israeli media reported that the 43-year-old leader of the Religious Zionist Party had given up on the trip.
Smotrich, who arrived from the United States, where he had no official meeting, only stayed a few hours in Paris and did not meet with government officials. The French Foreign Office had made it known last week that it had no intention of receiving the controversial Israeli minister.
During the ceremony, Smotrich spoke from behind a lectern decorated with a map that included not only the Jewish state and the occupied Palestinian territories but also the territory of present-day Jordan: the Greater Israel area for the proponents of an expansionist ideology.
He gave a speech in which he urged French Jews to settle in Israel, a common call from Israeli leaders visiting France. But Smotrich (who recently called for the Palestinian village of Huwara in the West Bank to be "wiped out" in retaliation for the murder of two Jewish settlers) also made remarks full of contempt for the Palestinians.
'There are just Arabs'
"Do you know who the Palestinians are?" Smotrich asked at the start of his diatribe, which was streamed live on Facebook. "I am Palestinian," he replied to the cheers of the audience, about 100 people, judging by the images on Facebook. "My grandfather, a 13th-generation Jerusalemite, was Palestinian. The Palestinian people are an invention of less than a hundred years. Do they have a history, a culture? No, they do not. There are no Palestinians, there are just Arabs."
The evening took place in Les Salons Hoche, a luxurious reception center near the Champs-Elysées, decorated for the occasion with Israeli flags. The event was dedicated to the memory of the founder of "Israel is Forever," Jacques Kupfer, a controversial figure in French Judaism. This former leader of the Likud of France and ex-member of the leadership of the World Zionist Organization died in 2021 in Israel. A supporter of the annexation of the West Bank, known for his anti-Arab racism, Kupfer distinguished himself after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 by declaring that he regretted that the late Israeli prime minister had not been tried by a military tribunal for high treason, as a signatory of the Oslo peace agreements.
You have 53.62% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.