The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has denounced France’s collaboration in the Holocaust, criticising those who negate or minimise the country’s role in sending tens of thousands of Jews to their deaths.
After he and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, attended a Holocaust commemoration, Macron also appealed for renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Worried that Netanyahu is backing away from commitment to a two-state solution, Macron assailed Jewish settlement construction as a threat to international hopes for peace.
Commemorating 75 years since a mass roundup of Jews during the darkest chapter of modern French history, Macron insisted “it was indeed France that organised this”.
“Not a single German” was directly involved, he said, but French police collaborating with the Nazis.
Holocaust survivors recounted wrenching stories at the ceremony at the site of Vel d’Hiv stadium near the Eiffel Tower in Paris, where police herded 13,000 people on 16-17 July 1942 before they were deported to camps. More than 4,000 were children. Fewer than 100 survived.
They were among about 76,000 Jews deported from France to Nazi camps.
It was a half century later when then-President Jacques Chirac became the first French leader to acknowledge the state’s role in the Holocaust’s horrors.
Macron dismissed arguments by French far-right leaders and others that the collaborationist Vichy regime didn’t represent France.
“It is convenient to see the Vichy regime as born of nothingness, returned to nothingness . Yes, it’s convenient, but it is false. We cannot build pride upon a lie,” he said.
French Jewish leaders hailed Macron’s speech on Sunday — even as critics railed at him online, where renewed antisemitism has flourished. Macron pledged to fight racism, and called for a thorough investigation into the recent killing of a Parisian woman believed to be linked to anti-Jewish sentiment.
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 ... The zealots of militant Islam, who seek to destroy you, seek to destroy us as well. We must stand against them together.”
Pro-Palestinian and other activists protested against Netanyahu’s appearance in Paris, criticising Jewish settlement policy and the blockade of Gaza.
Macron condemned an attack last week that killed two Israeli police officers at a Jerusalem shrine revered by Jews and Muslims, and said he was committed to Israel’s security — but warned that continued Jewish settlement construction threatened peace efforts.
“I call for a resumption of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in the framework of the search for a solution of two states, Israel and Palestine, living in recognised, secure borders with Jerusalem as the capital,” Macron told reporters.
At his side, Netanyahu said, “We share the same desire for a peaceful Middle East,” but didn’t elaborate on eventual peace talks.
While Macron has been flexing his diplomatic skills by reaching out to President Donald Trump and others, he did not indicate any eagerness for France to spearhead such negotiations, after a lacklustre French Middle East diplomatic effort under his predecessor early this year.
Macron and Netanyahu also discussed fighting extremism in Syria and elsewhere, and improving economic cooperation.