On Saturday, a delegation from the Palestinian camp visited the French town. To immortalize the meeting, the mayor posed alongside her guests with a map of Israel dotted with Palestinian flags, provoking strong reactions.

The mayor of Strasbourg, Jeanne Barseghian, announced  her intention to twin her city with the Palestinian refugee camp of Aida located in the West Bank,  south of Jerusalem, in “support of the Palestinian people”.

“It’s a strong act of support for the Palestinian people. It’s truly an act of international solidarity”, she said. She hopes that the twinning decision will be adopted at the June municipal council meeting.

On Saturday, a delegation from the Palestinian camp visited the French town. To immortalize the meeting, the mayor posed alongside her guests with a map of Israel dotted with Palestinian flags, provoking strong reactions.

“It’s not a call for two states, or even a difficult compromise. It’s an implicit endorsement of a project of destruction, that of a vision where the Jewish people would once again be denied, displaced, erased”, deplored Anne-Pernelle Richardot, a Socialist politician from the city, on her X account.

Strasbourg has also been twinned with Ramat Gan in Israel for over 30 years, a partnership contested by pro-Palestinian activists who demonstrated during the city council meeting on Monday.

“At present, this twinning is frozen, as I consider that the conditions are not right for us to invest in it”, Barseghian declared. ‘’But it’s a door that exists and that could be reopened.’’

Since October 7, 2023,  the date of the unprecedented Hamas attacks on Israel, anti-Semitic tags have been found in the Alsatian city, notably on the university campus and near a Shoah memorial site. Around 20,000 Jews live in the city.