Jordan Bardella, president of France’s National Rally party, is due to speak in Jerusalem on Thursday at a conference on anti-Semitism organized by the Israeli government, sparking debate within the Jewish community worldwide.
The first National Rally leader to be officially invited by the Israeli government, . Bardella visited sites where the attacks by Hamas took place in the south of the country on October 7, 2023.
‘’Israel and France have the same adversaries”, declared French far-right leader Jordan Bardella who drew a parallel between the 7 October attack and the November 13, 2015 jihadist attacks in France.
Bardella, who is President of the National Rally party in France and leader of the Patriots group in the European Parliament, is in Israel where he has been invited by the Israeli government to address on Thursday an international conference on antisemitism in Jerusalem.
This is the first time that a leader of the National Rally is officially invited in Israel. The party, formerly known as the Front National, remains associated with the Holocaust denial remarks of its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, which led to his conviction. Asked about these events on the bangs of his visit, Mr. Bardella said he “doesn’t play politics in the rear-view mirror”.
The leader of the party Marine Le Pen had distanced herself from her father, who was expelled from the party in 2015 for his remarks on the Holocaust.
‘’I came here first of all because I believe it’s vital for us never to forget what happened on October 7, 2023 here in Israel, what Islamism and the Hamas terrorist movement were capable of,” Bardella said in Re’im, where he visited the memorial to the Nova music festival massacre in which more than 370 people were killed, including French citizens.
He listened to a 25-year-old survivor, telling him that “it’s important that people in France realize what happened here”.
Bardella also visited the nearby Netiv Haasara, where he met French-Israeli woman whose husband and eldest son were killed on October 7th.
During the conversation,he said he believed Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip was one of “civilization against barbarism”.
Bardella also visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem.
Organized by Israeli Minister for Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli, the conference on anti-Semitism will include representatives of several far-right parties, mainly European, including French MEP Marion Maréchal.
As a result of the presence of the far-right representatives, several Jewish personalities have cacelled theior participation as guests in the conference, including Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Ephraim Mirvis, the head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Jonathan Greenblatt, and the French philosopher and writer Bernard-Henri Lévy.
“Jordan Bardella is not an extreme right-wing man, but an extreme friend of Israel,” said the Diaspora Ministry, in a statement.