In France’s runoff presidential election, held on Sunday, the incumbent Emmanuel Macron beat out the far-right Marine Le Pen. Le Pen has changed her party’s tone since taking the reins from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen—an anti-Semite who has dabbled in Holocaust denial and defended the Vichy regime. But Ariel Kandel, writing on the eve of the election, argued that she represents a danger to both French Jewry and the Jewish state:
Marine Le Pen . . . is more sophisticated than her father. She understood that ahead of the election, it would benefit her to moderate her comments about Jews and Israel, letting others do the work—mainly . . . the Jewish former French TV pundit Eric Zemmour, who ran in the first round of the election and won 7.1 percent of the votes (which translates to nearly 2.5 million voters). Zemmour, who was convicted of inciting hatred in the past, claimed during the campaign that the Vichy government actually “protected Jews,” that Alfred Dreyfus was perhaps wrongfully exonerated, and called on his supporters to vote for Le Pen in the runoff.
Although Marine Le Pen kept silent in recent months in relation to Israel and Jews, she only did so because it served her temporary interests. Her views are established: she champions ridding the public sphere of all religious symbols, including Jewish symbols; she has supported a ban on kosher slaughter in France; declared she would prohibit Jews from holding dual citizenship; and contrary to the official position of the French government, she also doesn’t recognize France’s role in collaborating with the Nazis and sending its Jewish citizens to the concentration camps. . . . She has not abandoned her views, rather she has “hidden” them for the time being to appear less extreme.
There are those who claim that Le Pen is a friend of Israel, but this is a grave mistake. She espouses turning Jerusalem into a city with a special international status that would serve as the capital of the three major religions. For all intents and purposes, this means Jerusalem would no longer be under Israel’s control, rather subject to the whims of the United Nations.
Read more on Israel Hayom: https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/marine-le-pen-a-danger-to-israel-and-jews/