A restaurant at a shopping centre in Les Flanades neighbourhood, in Paris’s Sarcelles suburb, is seen damaged after a rally on Sunday against Israel’s Gaza offensive.
Reuters/AFP
France’s interior minister promised yesterday to crack down on anti-Semitism after violence marred pro-Palestinian rallies in and around Paris to protest against Israel’s role in the two-week-old Middle East conflict.
Meanwhile, in Germany the Jewish community condemned an “explosion of evil and violent hatred of Jews” at a recent string of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the country.
France has both the largest Jewish and Muslim populations in Europe and flare-ups of violence in the Middle East often add to tensions between the two communities.
Local media showed the burnt-down front of a kosher grocery shop in the heavily Jewish Parisian suburb of Sarcelles after a non-authorised protest on Sunday.
Last weekend pro-Palestinian marchers clashed with riot police outside two Paris synagogues.
“It is unacceptable to target synagogues or shops simply because they are managed by Jews,” Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told reporters during a visit to Sarcelles, which is also home to large non-Jewish immigrant populations.
“Nothing can justify anti-Semitism, noting can justify that kind of violence. This will be fought and sanctioned,” he said.
Local media said youths in Sarcelles clashed with police and cars were burnt amid widespread looting that also hit non-Jewish targets.
Clashes had marred another non-authorised protest in Paris on Saturday, while other rallies around France went ahead peacefully with the permission of local authorities.
Some protesters and even ruling Socialist politicians criticised the bans on the Sarcelles and Paris rallies as counter-productive. But Cazeneuve said he would react the same way if mosques or churches were targeted.
In the first three months of 2014 more Jews left France for Israel than at any other time since the Jewish state was created in 1948, citing economic hardships in France’s stagnating economy but also rising anti-Semitism as a factor.
Since fighting in the Middle East started on July 8, the death toll has passed 500, with 484 Palestinians among the casualties as Israeli jets and tanks pound Gaza.
The UN Security Council has called for an immediate ceasefire.
Some pro-Palestinian protesters have accused France of siding with Israel in the conflict, citing the rally bans and a statement by President Francois Hollande’s office saying Israel was justified in taking action to assure its citizens’ security.
France has rejected any bias and Cazeneuve said decisions on any future rallies would be taken on a case-by-case basis.
In Germany, protesters waving Palestinian flags and signs of late leader Yasser Arafat have in recent days shouted anti-Semitic slogans at rallies against Israel’s Gaza offensive, according to German media.
Exclaiming “Allahu Akbar”, crowds in Berlin have reportedly yelled “Death to Israel” and chanted “Zionists are fascists, killing children and civilians”.
A Berlin imam has openly called for the annihilation of Zionist Jews, asking Allah to “kill them to the very last one,” according to a video published online by Israel’s Haaretz daily.
The president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Dieter Graumann, said: “We are currently experiencing in this country an explosion of evil and violent hatred of Jews, which shocks and dismays all of us.”
“We would never in our lives have thought it possible anymore that anti-Semitic views of the nastiest and most primitive kind can be chanted on German streets,” he said in a statement.
He demanded “clear and loud condemnations from politicians, the media and civil society” against the hatred in the country that perpetrated the Holocaust.
“Jews are once again openly threatened in Germany and sometimes attacked, synagogues are being defaced and declared as targets,” he said. “This new dimension of anti-Semitism has received far too little attention. Anti-Semitism must not be concealed, it must be addressed and combatted resolutely! Freedom of speech yes, but no to hate speech!”
The centre-left Social Democrats party in a statement agreed, declaring: “Anti-Semitism, in whatever form, is in no way acceptable. Whoever supports or propagates is not in their right mind.”
Berlin police, meanwhile, told Berlin daily Tagesspiegel that officers would from now take action if protesters repeat certain phrases from past rallies, including “Jew, Jew, cowardly pig, come out and fight alone”.
The American Jewish Committee meanwhile demanded that German prosecutors investigate the reported statements of the imam, identified by the committee as Bilal Ismail, in the sermon delivered last Thursday.
“It must bring down the weight of the law against the preacher. Incitement to murder cannot be justified,” said Deidre Berger, director of the committee’s Ramer Institute for German-Jewish Relations.