This article originally appeared in Israel Hayom on January 12, 2025.
During the 1970s, as part of my journalistic activities in France, I met JM Le Pen during his meetings, his electoral campaigns and press conferences. He embodied the dark years of France, those of collaboration and Vichy. With his black eye patch covering his right eye, like a privateer, the fascist tribune inflamed the crowds with hateful ultranationalist messages, and clearly rehabilitated Petain’s policy. The day after the death of General De Gaulle, who was sentenced to death in absentia by the Vichy regime, Le Pen criticized the victor of Verdun for having signed the armistice but he judged favorably the marshal, the one who had signed anti-Jewish decrees, violated the principles of freedom and justice on which the French Republic is founded. Le Pen contemptuously described the Shoah as: “a detail of the Second World War”. How could he ignore that the French administration and police had facilitated the task of the Gestapo? Did he erase the great Paris roundup, the participation of 9,000 police officers with a detailed file of 27,388 names, men, women and children? How can one forgive such unworthy, such blatant cowardice?
It is inconceivable that Jacques Chirac waited until 1995 to acknowledge, for the first time, the responsibility of the French state during the Vichy period. Chirac had also introduced the study of the Holocaust into school textbooks. Let us emphasize that De Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard and Mitterrand did not have the courage to do so before.
JM Le Pen is one of the Holocaust deniers who denounce “the imposture of the Jewish genocide”. The one-eyed politician had shown violent and aggressive hostility towards the Jews of France. On every occasion, particularly abroad and in Arab capitals, he spoke quite naturally of the “Jewish lobby”, of the “world Jewish power”. He had supported FANE, a neo-Nazi organization founded by Marc Frederiksen. It published, by subscription only, a magazine, Notre Europe. Its ideology: “defend and rebuild the white race for a strong and united Europe, deny the existence of the Holocaust; rehabilitate French collaborators during the occupation, fight against Zionism throughout the world and for the Palestinian people.”
To destroy the Jewish state, all means are therefore permitted, including collaboration with Islamist terrorists.
Le Pen refuted any anti-Semitic statements on his part: “I don’t like the paintings of Modigliani and Chagall, I am also opposed to Mendes France, that doesn’t mean I’m an anti-Semite” he told me… To justify himself, he told me with pride that in 1956, he had already participated in the Suez campaign with the IDF troops… In reality, he was in Cyprus within the HQ of the French army… He never set foot on Israeli soil, he was completely persona non grata.
Le Pen adopted the broad outlines of a racist, anti-Semitic and populist ideology. He refused to condemn the ignoble UN Resolution 3379 of November 10, 1975, which equated Zionism with racism. He always worked for the Arab cause: “Israel cannot continue to occupy with impunity territories that do not belong to it. He denounced the “illegal control” of Jerusalem by proposing “a special status for this thrice-holy city.” He met several times with the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, supported the “butcher of Damascus” Hafez el Assad and his son Bashar, as well as the head of the PLO Yasser Arafat, and condemned all the operations of the IDF against Hamas. On Iran, he said: “it’s incredible, those who forbid Iran from developing nuclear energy themselves possess the atomic bomb.”
Le Pen has left his mark on French politics and was the catalyst for the rise of far-right parties in Europe. The National Front that he founded remains an essential party, a movement that is officially part of the French political spectrum, capable of presenting a candidate in the second round of the presidential elections. We can no longer ignore it but fight it. We respect the choice of millions of French people to vote according to their choice.
Certainly, we do not have the right or the pretension to intervene in the internal affairs of France, or indeed of any other country, but our duty is to alert and to set the clocks of History to the hour of truth. We must condemn Holocaust deniers and fascism in Europe but also the extreme left which has aligned itself with Hamas since the massacre of October 7, and for electoral interests, indirectly encourages the Islamists and works for the boycott of the State of Israel.
Yesterday, anti-Semitism was unleashed through vile, bestial acts and pogroms; today, anti-Zionism is part of political parties and offers a framework that encourages international terrorism against the Jews of the diaspora and of Israel.
In this context, we must be very careful and vigilant before establishing relations with leaders of European far-right political parties who wish to establish friendly relations with Israeli parties.
These European parties do not correspond with the American political chessboard. The Republican Party represented today by Donald Trump is not anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist and we share with America the same democratic and universal values. On the other hand, European politics, particularly French politics, goes back to the Dreyfus affair, to the end of colonialism, to Vichy France and their relations with the Arab world and Iran. Europe’s colonial history is at the origin of its frequent obsessions with trying to solve the problems of the Middle East. This history is also at the origin of the double game and the ostrich policy.
The state of the Jewish people cannot be on the agenda when a foreign politician distorts or rewrites history, or even collaborates with all those who try to arrest and judge our soldiers, those who courageously defend our homeland and our existential and strategic interests.
