French National Assembly Votes Down Bill Denouncing Israel As ‘Apartheid’ State

“Apartheid” seems to be the epithet of choice these days for the enemies of Israel. For Francesca Albanese, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Israel and the Palestinian Territories, for the spokesmen of the Palestinian Authority, for Rashida Tlaib and Linda Sarsour, there is no more fitting description for Israel than “the apartheid state.” Not everyone is on board. The other day, the French Parliament rejected a resolution put forth by a Communist MP, Jean-Paul Le Coq, which would have denounced Israel as an an “apartheid” state. And the consequences could have.been dire, for the resolution also called for an arms embargo on the Jewish state, as well as a boycott of goods produced in settlements in Judea and Samaria. The vote was 199 against, with 71 in favor. More on this vote be found here: “Majority of French Parliament Votes Down Resolution Denouncing ‘Apartheid’ Israel,” by Ben Cohen, Algemeiner, May 4, 2023:

France’s National Assembly on Thursday [May 4] firmly rejected a resolution tabled by a Communist Party MP that denounced Israel as an “apartheid” state and called for the imposition of an arms embargo and other sanctions.

The motion — tabled by Jean-Paul Le Coq, one of the leaders of the far left NUPES alliance — was roundly defeated by 199 votes against 71 in favor.

Jean-Paul Le Coq is not merely on the “far-left.” He’s an unreconstructed Communist, pining for the days of Maurice Thorez, still hoping for the overthrow of the capitalist system though quite happy to pocket his extravagant salary as a member of the National Assembly. And as a Communist, he naturally takes the side of the brown-skinned, and therefore exploited people of the world – which for some reason he thinks includes the Palestinians, though their exploitation has nothing to do with Israel, which has tried mightily to help them improve their standard of living, and their healthcare, and everything to do with their colossally corrupt leaders, including Mahmoud Abbas, with his $400 million family fortune, and two leaders of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal and Mousa abu Marzouk, each of whom has managed to squirrel away the scarcely believable sum of $2.5 billion. Meanwhile, ordinary Palestinians are suffering from a 33% unemployment rate, while 36% of them live below the poverty line. Of course, their fellow Arabs in the Gulf oil states could simply write the Palestinians a check for several billion dollars, but instead they prefer to have the Western countries support the Palestinians.

The resolution accused Israel of having “institutionalized an apartheid regime” over the Palestinians in eastern Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It called for recognition of the “State of Palestine,” the imposition of a “strict arms embargo” upon Israel and the boycott of goods produced in West Bank settlements. The text also stressed the right to condemn the “illiberal and colonial drift of this state” without being accused of antisemitism. However, on the question of Israel’s right to exist — which the campaign to subject Israel to a regime of boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) rejects outright — the resolution emphasized that its sponsors held a “deep attachment” to the Jewish state’s continued survival.

Let’s unpack this resolution sentence by sentence. First, Israel is accused of having “institutionalized an apartheid regime” in eastern Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. How does the state of Israel impose an apartheid regime in eastern Jerusalem? The Arabs are thriving, enjoying all the economic and social benefits Israeli citizens receive. They live wherever they choose, unlike the South African blacks, who were squeezed into squalid townships. The numbers tell a tale of sustained improvement in the Arabs’ lives: in 1967, when Israel came into possession of eastern Jerusalem, there were 66,000 Arabs living there; now there are 344,000, an enormous increase. In Gaza there is no apartheid, because the Gazan Arabs will not allow any Jews to live the Strip, after the formal withdrawal of all Israelis in 2005. In the West Bank, the Palestinians in Areas A and B, where 90% of the West Bank Palestinians live, have almost complete control over their lives, save for Israel’s continued role in security matters in Area B. Between 1967 and 1994, when Israel had responsibility for the health care of the Palestinians, the life expectancy of the Palestinians rose from 48 to 74 years; at the same time, infant morality among the Palestinians sank from 150 to 17 per hundred thousand. These results are as good as any to be found anywhere in the world where Western medicine has been introduced.

But the easiest way to give the lie to this “apartheid” canard is to look at how Israel’s Arab citizens fare in every aspect of their existence. Arabs sit on the Israeli Supreme Court, and serve in the Knesset. Arabs go abroad as diplomats, including as ambassadors for their country. The chairman of the largest bank in Israel, Bank Leumi, is an Arab. Jews and Arabs work in the same factories and offices. Jewish and Arab medical personnel treat both Jewish and Arab patients. Jews and Arabs play on the same sports teams and in the same orchestras. Jews and Arabs own businesses together — everything from restaurants to high tech start-ups. Only in one respect are Jews and Arabs treated differently, and it is to the advantage of the Arabs: Jews must, while Arabs may, serve in the military How does any of this smack of “apartheid”?

In a statement accompanying the resolution, Le Coq argued “whether the reasons are political, security or religious, the colonization policy is contrary to international legality.” He insisted that the current Palestinian predicament “amounts juridically to a situation of apartheid” — the Afrikaner term for the enforced legal segregation of South Africa’s Black majority by a white minority regime for most of the twentieth century.

Le Coq can keep repeating this nonsense as often as he like, but he cannot point to any form of apartheid in Israel. There is no legal segregation anywhere in Israel. There is no “colonization” policy, where Israelis are in the role of European colonizers and the Palestinians play the role of the colonized. Israeli Jews are not foreign to the Land of Israel, arriving as the “colons” from a distant foreign power, like the French in Algeria or the British in India. The Land of Israel has been lived in by Jews uninterruptedly, save for one 19-year interregnum, for the past 3500 years, and they have the overwhelming archeological evidence to prove it. And during those 3500 years, the only time Jews did not live in the Old City of Jerusalem was between 1949 and 1967, when the Jordanians held it and refused to let Jews in, not even to pray at the Western Wall.

The motion was supported by Green and far left MPs but rejected by the center-left Socialist Party, which said that it would table a separate resolution on the issue in the coming days. Jérôme Guedj, a Socialist MP, said that he objected to the term “apartheid,” as this “racialized what is a territorial dispute.”

The Communists, like Le Coq, and the others on the far-left, of course are anti-Israel, for all sorts of reasons, including their dreamy belief that Israel is a colonial power, rather than the ancient homeland of the Jews. Anyway, Jews are subliminally perceived as “white” and the Palestinians as “brown.” Apparently the Falasha, the Jews of Ethiopia, or the Indian or Arab Jews, despite their dark skin, don’t count.

Both the center-and the left parties, it is pleasing to report, were not merely against the resolution, but furious about it. They are tired of this anti-Israel cabal on the left, constantly trying to harm Israel in the eyes of the French public.

MPs from center and right-wing parties angrily criticized the resolution. Aurore Bergé, president of the centrist Renaissance Party, asserted that the text was a “gesture of detestation against the State of Israel,” while the right-wing MP Meyer Habib, a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, opined that the resolution proved that “antisemitism today is mainly on the left.”

Both are correct. The words of the resolution do indeed express a deep animus to the Jewish state, far beyond the customary condemnations that other countries must endure. There is a real “detestation” that can only be explained, as Meyer Habib says, as “antisemitism,” and that today comes not from the historically antisemitic right, as in the days of the cagoulards in the 1930s and decades before, during the taking of sides over the Dreyfus Affair, with the right (Edouard Drumont, Charles Maurras, Caran d’Ache the caricaturist) universally accepting Dreyfus’ guilt, and the left (Emile Zola, Jean Jaurès, Clemenceau) just as completely, were on the side of the wrongly-convicted Jewish army captain. Another factor, of course, is that the Muslim population in France, so deeply antisemitic, is always defended by the Left, whose members see Muslims only as downtrodden, the victims of a baseless “Islamophobia,” and therefore, worthy of the Left’s sympathies. The actual behavior of Muslims in France, their refusal to integrate, their high rates of criminality, their reluctance to seek gainful employment, their eagerness to live off the many benefits that the generous welfare state of France provides – none of that matters to the Left and, of course, neither does Muslim antisemitism, which the political Left supports.

The resolution was first proposed in July 2022 and approvingly quoted from several international human rights organizations in support of its contention that Israel practices apartheid, among them Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israel-based B’tselem.

All three of these viciously anti-Israel NGOs keep accusing Israel of practicing apartheid, but not a single one of them has produced a shred of evidence to support their charge. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch continue to be taken seriously, though when it comes to how they treat Israel, they haven’t merited any respect for decades. HRW was for nearly twenty years run by the deeply anti-Israel Kenneth Roth, who has just retired and is now spreading his venom at Harvard’s Kennedy School; Amnesty International’s Middle East staff consists of such haters of the Jewish state as Raed Jarrar and Laith Abu Zayed. The Israel-based B’tselem has the state of Israel perennially in its sights. Its stated goals are “to document human rights violations in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, combat any denial of the existence of such violations, and help to create a human rights culture in Israel.”

One point that has been overlooked in the discussions I’ve seen online about this resolution: Le Coq wants to pressure Israel by imposing an “embargo” on weapons sales. He does not realize that an “embargo” by the French on sales to Israel will scarcely be noticed. Between 2010 and 2019, the total value of French weapons sold to Israel was just under $250 million. A drop in the bucket. Meanwhile, Israel has been selling billions of dollars worth of weapons and weapons systems to the French. Israel currently sells France its cyber-surveillance systems, drones, and even robot soldiers. These are areas of weaponry in which Israel is a world leader.

Israel is also helping the French in a low-profile military program known as Scorpion, intended to be central to the strategy of the French army over the next few decades. The engine driving Scorpion is the development of a digital command system based on a shared interface that will connect soldiers on the ground to new military tools such as drones and robots, and allow them to anticipate enemy reactions. “How Israel is developing Scorpion, at the heart of France’s future defence system,” by Jean Stern, The New Arab, April 15, 2021:

“At the heart of the wars of the future,” one specialist explains, “there will be a soldier carrying less weight, today he typically carries up to 38 kilos, as opposed to 40 in WW1. So, there is enormous room for improvement. In the future, he’ll no longer have anything to carry but a GPS monitor, his weapon, and his water bottle. He’ll be piloted by an interface, assisted by drones for a wider view, and have robot mules carrying the heavy loads and evacuating the wounded if need be.”

Therefore, the information the soldier will receive on his GPS navigator via Scorpion will be decisive and the development of the interface is at the core of the top-secret collaboration between France and Israel.

“The main idea of Scorpion is a noiseless war and, if possible, a bloodless war, in other words, as few casualities as possible,” she continues.

Scorpion will organise the interoperability between a tank, a vessel, a motorcycle, a drone, a robot and a soldier on the ground. It’s a very important programme involving the participation of all the principal French arms manufacturers as well as the Israeli company, Elbit, which has wide experience in autonomous systems.”

Israel has acquired that expertise, which facilitates the detailed analysis of a given territory, through its ongoing war with the Palestinians. “Israel is one step ahead on three key points,” a French engineer has explained.

“First, in the silencing of drone engines. This is a major advance, we are getting close to acoustical invisibility, a subject which is receiving much attention in France.” Next, comes the miniaturisation of the drones. The insect drones which were entertaining in James Bond movies are already operational, tested by the Israeli army in Gaza. “They are integrating drone technology into nature,” she concludes.

And finally, the erasure of digital traces and detection of strategic “enemy” signals, since the main task of Scorpion is digital piloting. “Avoid having our signals intercepted while at the same time intercepting the other guys’ signals. The Israelis know how to conceal, locate, interpret, analyse and scramble. There again, the idea is to be invisible and profoundly quiet,” she continues.

“The basis of our partnership with Israel is all these inventions, simple enough, coming from their best engineers…

Were France to “embargo” weapons sales to Israel, which between 2010 and 2019 sank as low as $25 million in annual sales, the Israelis would hardly notice. But were Israel to retaliate and cut off defense sales to France, that could gravely damage the French advances, with Israel’s help, in digital piloting and other aspects of the Scorpion program.

The vote in the National Assembly was 199 to 71 to reject the anti-Israel resolution of the Left. Its tabling by the far-left has had the welcome effect of causing a fury among MPs of both the center and right, who have forthrightly accused the resolution’s supporters of blatant antisemitism. The resolution, now that it has been so overwhelmingly rejected, hasn’t hurt Israel; in fact, the whole contretemps has helped the Jewish state by infuriating so many, including some who until now were not known for their pro-Israel sympathies. Le Coq’s preposterous charge about Israel being .an “apartheid” and “colonizing” state was too much to stomach. The French were once Israel’s closest military ally, the main supplier of weapons to Israel long before the Americans. it was the French who were essential in helping Israel develop nuclear weapons. Perhaps the time for that Franco-Israeli military alliance to be strengthened further – given the fecklessness of the Bidenites — has come round again at last.