Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blasted French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday after the European leader insulted Israel by suggesting that it would not have existed except for the United Nations.
France, the former colonial power in Lebanon, has demanded a ceasefire there for the past several weeks, as Israel has made advances against the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist organization.
As Breitbart News reported earlier this month, France also called for an arms embargo against Israel, calling for an end to the war against Hamas in Gaza. Netanyahu responded by saying that Israel would win regardless, but that France’s shame would endure.
On Tuesday, Macron insisted that Israel should respect the United Nations, despite its pronounced anti-Israel bias. His reason: he claimed that Israel would not exist but for the United Nations.
As Politico’s Europe edition reported:
French President Emmanuel Macron warned Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to “ignore United Nations decisions” during a weekly meeting with his ministers Tuesday, according to French media reports, confirmed by a participant in the meeting.
“Mr. Netanyahu must not forget that his country was created by a U.N. decision,” he is quoted as saying, referencing the U.N. General Assembly’s November 1947 vote that terminated the British mandate of Palestine and split the land into a Jewish and an Arab state.
Netanyahu responded in a statement:
A reminder to the French President: It was not a UN decision that established the State of Israel but the victory that was achieved in the War of Independence with the blood of our heroic fighters, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, including from the Vichy regime in France.
It would also be worthwhile to recall that in recent decades, the UN has approved hundreds of antisemitic decisions against the State of Israel, the purpose of which is to deny the one and only Jewish state’s right to exist and its ability to defend itself.
In a separate statement, reporting on a conversation with Macron earlier in the day, Netanyahu criticized the French leader for continuing to insist on an arms embargo, and for calling a “peace conference” in Paris to discuss the Lebanon War that included South Africa and Algeria, two harsh critics of Israel.
He said:
The Prime Minister told President Macron that he opposes a unilateral ceasefire, which would not change the security situation in Lebanon and would return the country to its previous state. He emphasized that Israel is operating against the Hezbollah terrorist organization to prevent it from threatening Israel’s citizens on the northern border and to enable them to return to their homes safely.
Prime Minister Netanyahu clarified that Israel would not agree to any arrangement that does not provide this and which does not stop Hezbollah from rearming and regrouping.
The Prime Minister also said that he was taken aback at President Macron’s intention to host a conference in Paris on the issue of Lebanon, with participants such as South Africa and Algeria, which are working to deny Israel its fundamental right of self-defense and, in effect, reject its very right to exist.
France supplied arms to Israel in the first two decades of its existence, but ended arms sales to Israel in the late 1960s as part of a pivot toward appeasing the Arab states, a posture that France has since maintained. Many Jews have fled France in recent decades due to the growth of antisemitism associated with radical Islam.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
