February 21 2019, 7:32 p.m.
Since anti-Semitism is prohibited hate speech punishable by up to one year in prison under French law, critics of Israeli policies that discriminate against non-Jewish citizens and that deny basic civil rights to millions of Palestinians living under military rule could be at risk of prosecution. Supporters of a binational state, with equal rights for Arabs and Jews, and proponents of the right of Palestinian refugees to return to homes they were expelled from when Israel was founded could also be in legal jeopardy.
When Macron visited the cemetery, in the Alsatian village of Quatzenheim, on Tuesday, a French television channel was forced to end a live broadcast on Facebook after their moderators became overwhelmed with vile anti-Semitic comments. "We are not talking about stupid or off-topic comments," the channel explained, "but explicit calls for murder, overtly anti-Semitic and racist comments, like 'Heil Hitler,' or 'dirty Jews.'" The same night, thousands attended protests against anti-Semitism in Paris and other cities.
Although the president's words were greeted with applause by leaders of France's Jewish community, some were reportedly disappointed by Macron's statement that there was no need to change the French penal code to define anti-Zionism as a crime. Instead, Macron said, police officers and magistrates would be encouraged to take complaints about anti-Zionist remarks seriously as possible hate crimes.
Under the leadership of Netanyahu, Israel has leant its full support to conflating all criticism of Israeli actions with anti-Semitism. Last year, for instance, as accusations of anti-Semitism were leveled at the British Labour Party for refusing to accept the full IHRA definition, Israel's ambassador in London, Mark Regev, told Channel 4 News that, in his view, anti-Zionism was motivated by anti-Semitism.
Netanyahu's own claim to anti-racist credentials has been severely undercut by his efforts to boost the election prospects of an openly racist, far-right party called Jewish Power, which he hopes to include in his next coalition government. The party's leaders are former followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the virulently anti-Arab founder of the Jewish Defense League, whose extremist Kach party was designated a terrorist organization in 1994 after one of its members, Baruch Goldstein, killed 29 Muslims praying at the Tomb of the Patriarchs shrine in the West Bank city of Hebron.
One of the Jewish Power leaders Netanyahu has courted was known for organizing celebrations of Goldstein's massacre. Another leads a direct action group dedicated to preventing romantic relationships between Jews and Arabs and was accused, in 2014, of an arson attack against a Jewish-Arab bilingual school in Jerusalem.
Before he was assassinated in 1990, Kahane served in the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, where he introduced legislation to strip non-Jews of their citizenship and called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the occupied territories. "At the time," Barak Ravid of Israel's Channel 13 news noted, "senior members of the Likud attacked Kahane's policies and said they were similar to the Nuremberg Laws passed by the Nazis before the Holocaust." When Kahane spoke, the other members of the Knesset, including the Likud party Netanyahu now leads, would boycott him by walking out of the chamber.