It’s Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day. On this day each year, Israel honors its fallen. The government of France would like Israel to spend the day dishonoring its fallen.
At some point in the post-Oslo period, Europe’s sense of entitlement toward Israel outgrew any moral restraints or limiting principles it may once have had. The result is a ridiculous loop of provocation and carping.
The latest diplomatic tiff concerns a current fad sweeping Western Europe in which lawmakers aligned with Israel’s enemies travel to the Jewish state and are denied entry, at which point their government throws a tantrum complaining that the Jews won’t politely assist in their own destruction.
Media tend to cover this petty display as a legitimate complaint rather than what it is: a childish expectation to treat Israel the way the lawmakers’ home country would never allow it to be treated—by friends or foes.
Last month, two British parliamentarians tried this scam, going so far as to falsely claim they were part of an official government delegation. It was reprehensible behavior, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer should have been embarrassed by it. Instead, he came to the MPs’ defense.
This time it was a French delegation—two, actually—and Israel did everyone a favor by canceling the trip ahead of time. As Israelis began observing Yom HaZikaron last night the French government was still fuming at them.
“The decision… is regrettable, unhelpful, and potentially harmful to France-Israel relations,” a spokesman said of the cancellation of 27 entry visas for French officials. The delegations were “led by associations working toward cooperation.”
Unsurprisingly, Israel disagreed, citing those associations’ apparent links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a proscribed terrorist organization.
Paris came back with a non-denial: “The public allegations made by the Israeli Embassy in France, which imply a possible link between these associations and terrorist organizations, are unacceptable.”
But the Israeli officials appear to be in the right. One of the two spearhead organizations, the France-Palestine Solidarity Association, has a pretty rancid history. As NGO Monitor notes, AFPS—which has received money from the French government itself—has partnered with an organization with a PFLP “comrade” on its roster and which attended PFLP political events. It allegedly served as a pass-through for PFLP-connected NGOs. And the organization advocates for the removal of the PFLP and Hamas from the European list of designated terrorist entities.
Because it is Yom HaZikaron, let’s review why it matters a great deal if there’s any hint of a connection between an ornery horde of French lawmakers and the PFLP.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was created in the 1960s as a Marxist alternative to the more Islamist Palestinian nationalist groups. Its ideology is one reason it remains so popular with progressives abroad.
Among the PFLP’s more infamous attacks is the 1976 hijacking of an Air France plane that was diverted to Entebbe, Uganda—site of Israeli forces’ spectacular rescue raid a week later. The raid was commanded by Yoni Netanyahu, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s older brother, who was killed during the rescue.
In 2001, the PFLP assassinated Israeli Minister Rehavam Ze’evi in Jerusalem. Decades earlier, a PFLP splinter group pulled off a massively disproportionate prisoner swap with Israel, nearly overnight reshaping the Israeli-Palestinian conflict around a policy of kidnapping innocent Jews. That road led directly to Oct. 7.
But the PFLP didn’t merely bring us to the Oct. 7 status quo. It actively participated in that day and everything that followed. Most significantly, the PFLP appears to have held the Bibas family in captivity in Gaza, a particularly barbaric episode in a series of barbaric episodes.
From there, the PFLP has played on outsized role in the anti-Semitism crisis and the pro-Iran, China-backed meddling in domestic U.S. politics.
Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was a keynote speaker at a conference in Detroit last year that was little more than a PFLP confab. This year’s version of that conference is using clips of PFLP terrorists in its advertisements.
And of course, the PFLP and its cutouts were a regular presence in the tentifada movement, the pro-terror encampments throughout American higher education that supported Hamas’s mass rape and slaughter on Oct. 7.
All of which raises a question: What country, besides Israel, is expected to welcome with open arms those who side with its enemies—enemies with whom it is currently still at war? It is difficult for me to understand why sending to Israel a delegation of government officials who want to see Israel destroyed isn’t a scandal for France rather than the Jewish state. The only explanation is the obvious: Israel, alone among the nations of the Western alliance of democracies, is simply expected to accept repeated public abuse from its friends. Even on Yom HaZikaron.
