Jerusalem, 4 August, 2022 (TPS) — Late last month, 37 members of La Nouvelle Union populaire écologique et sociale (New Popular Environmental and Social Union – NUPES), a union of French left-wing parties by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, signed a resolution condemning Israel’s “apartheid regime” and called for the boycott of Israeli products.
The group claimed in the Assemblée Nationale (National Assembly), France’s lower house, that Israel has established a “system of oppression and systematic discrimination with the intention of maintaining the domination of one ethnic-national-racial group over another.”
Titled “Institutionalization of an Apartheid Regime Against the Palestinian People,” the resolution alleges that “since it was created in 1948, Israel has pursued a policy aimed at establishing and maintaining a Jewish demographic hegemony and expanding its control over the territory for the benefit of Israeli Jews.”
The lawmakers called to endorse the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign and called for the “imposition of a strict arms embargo.”
Resolutions in France are opinions issued in the French parliament on a given subject, without being laws.
Rabbi Moshe Lewin, Senior Advisor to the Chief Rabbi in France and Vice President of the Conference of European Rabbis (CER), stated Thursday that “the dangerous obsession of the leftist parties against Israel is breaking new records.”
He accused Mélenchon of “feeling an inexplicable phobia towards Israel.”
“While France is facing a deep economic crisis, a war in Ukraine, and diplomatic tensions in Taiwan, the members of the left-wing parties found it proper to propose for the first time a scandalous bill that has never been seen before. The Palestinian lobby is working behind the scenes to incite and fan the flames. This proposal could increase the manifestations of hatred and anti-Semitism towards the Jewish community throughout France,” he warned.
The Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme (LICRA), the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism, rejected the “scandalous and misleading” resolutions, put forward by a group of deputies who “dared to qualify a people as a ‘racial group.’”
“We will not allow this obsessive anti-Semitism of a certain ‘left’ to express itself, which dishonors the Republic and seeks to inflame public opinion,” they stated.
