The Elysee Palace had warned: this first trip by Emmanuel Macron to Israel would be dedicated to memory. That of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps, celebrated at Yad Vashem. The president's visit to the Holy Land finally concluded Thursday evening in an intertwining of anti-Semitism, politics and diplomacy, at the end of a day designed to support a demonstration.
First at the edge of the Roglit forest, west of Jerusalem, where the memorial to the deportation of Jews from France is erected. Their 73,853 names are inscribed on a white stone wall. There, it was discussed the need to remember, an injunction hammered many times by the Head of State, the first to go to this symbolic place.
Second step of reasoning - as much as displacement - the importance of transmission. The president thus exchanged with young people from the Blanqui high school in Saint-Ouen (Seine-Saint-Denis), obviously "touched" after having met survivors of the camps, and discovered the Holocaust, which they had previously known "vaguely" , according to one of them.
"Anti-Semitism is not the problem of the Jews"
Remember and pass on… before learning a few lessons. In front of the French community, Emmanuel Macron repeated his will to fight the hatred of the Jews. "Anti-Semitism is not the problem of the Jews, it is a fight for the Republic," said the president.
He also drew on this painful past, that provoked by Nazi Germany, to sketch other situations, during an astonishing comparison. "This whole story we were talking about (Editor's note: the Shoah ) is the crazy story of people who thought that their future would be built in the negation of another," he said. And to warn these French people of Israel: "There will be no future here that will be built in the negation of anyone. The future will be built in the construction of all with all. Palestinians and Israelis alike.