Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Benjamin Netanyahu Rebuked by Rabbi for French Emigration Plea

(Reuters) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu managed to ruffle a few feathers while taking part in the “Charlie Hebdo” rally in Paris on Sunday, an event his office initially said he would not be attending for security reasons.

Perhaps most awkward was his invitation to French Jews – alarmed by the Paris attacks and the killing of four people at a kosher supermarket – to migrate to Israel if they wanted, leaving French Prime Minister Manuel Valls scrambling to reassure the community it was safe and an integral part of France.

Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the head of the European Jewish Association, was particularly stern, saying Aliyah – the process of Jews migrating to Israel – was not the answer to everything, even if it was an important policy for the state of Israel.

“Anyone familiar with the European reality knows that a call to Aliyah is not the solution for anti-Semitic terror,” he said.

Only a small number of French Jews move to Israel each year – last year 7,000 out of the 550,000-strong community. But that number is expected to rise to 10,000 in 2015, in part because of last week’s attacks. Helping more of the Jewish diaspora migrate to Israel remains a central policy of the right-wing government, which faces elections in March.

Netanyahu’s “move to Israel” rhetoric was in fact no different to what he frequently says on the topic. But coming on the day of a three-million-person march designed to show the world standing as one with France, it came across as divisive.

It wasn’t the only uncomfortable episode.

A video posted on Facebook, the news footage mockingly set to the Looney Tunes cartoon music, showed Netanyahu maneuvering his way to the front of the rally with the help of several bodyguards, allowing him to be photographed arm-in-arm with other leaders, including French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

FRONT ROW

Those pictures were quickly posted on Netanyahu’s Twitter feed, while the banner on his Facebook page was changed to a photograph of him in the front row, shoulder-to-shoulder with Hollande, Merkel, Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita and EU leaders Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk.

Not shown in the picture was Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who was standing alongside Tusk, six feet (two meters) from Netanyahu. The two broke off peace talks last April and tensions between them have risen since, with Netanyahu accusing Abbas of inciting violence against Israelis.

The irony is that neither Netanyahu nor Abbas initially planned to be in Paris.

Sources in Netanyahu’s office said that in a phone call on Friday evening an adviser to Hollande had suggested it would be “complicated” and “uncomfortable” if the Israeli leader attended the Sunday march, largely because of security concerns.

As a result, the first word was that Netanyahu would not go. Around the same time, Abbas’s office said he also would not be attending because of bad weather.

But then it emerged Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, both leaders of far-right nationalist parties and both gearing up for the March 17 elections, were going of their own accord.

It is not clear when the situation changed, but by Saturday evening Netanyahu had decided he would attend, and shortly afterwards Abbas said he had been invited too. Asked in Paris on Monday about the back-and-forth, Netanyahu played it down.

“It was important I come here and therefore I did,” he said, adding that security had been the initial hurdle. On Sunday evening, he spoke at the main synagogue in Paris, an event that Hollande pointedly left before Netanyahu began his speech.

While the images on Facebook and Twitter are likely to buoy Netanyahu domestically, despite some criticism of his gauche behavior, going to Paris served Abbas less well. He has been vilified on social media and in newspaper cartoons for going to the French capital rather than visiting Gaza, which he has not been to since before last summer’s war with Israel.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.