After the Hamas attack against Israel this Saturday, October 7, the entire French political class expressed its emotion, almost unanimously condemning a “terrorist attack”.
The executive thus denounced “with the greatest firmness” the attacks suffered by the Jewish state, which left hundreds of dead and injured. “I strongly condemn the terrorist attacks which are currently hitting Israel. I express my full solidarity with the victims, their families and their loved ones,” declared on X (ex-Twitter) Emmanuel Macron, who also spoke with the Prime Israeli Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and with his counterpart Isaac Herzog.
The right and the far right, for their part, have clearly denounced Hamas’s attacks against Israel. “The strikes by the Hamas terrorist group against Israeli territory are an unacceptable act of war which pushes further and further away every day any hope of peace. In these difficult hours, we are more than ever on the side of Israeli democracy,” he said. written about X Marine Le Pen, the leader of the deputies of the National Rally. “Total support for Israel, heavily attacked by Hamas. France’s duty is to be more strongly alongside the Hebrew State, the only democracy in the Middle East”, wrote on the same social network the Republican boss Éric Ciotti.
A less clear speech at LFI…
On the left of the board, certain representatives of La France insoumise (LFI), and in particular their leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, have marked their difference. “All the violence unleashed against Israel and in Gaza only proves one thing: violence only produces and reproduces itself,” lamented Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the X platform. “Horrified, our thoughts and our compassion go to all the distraught populations who are victims of all this. The ceasefire must be imposed,” he added. In a statement, the LFI parliamentary group added: “The armed offensive by Palestinian forces led by Hamas comes in a context of intensification of the Israeli occupation policy in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”
A position further supported by LFI deputy Louis Boyard: “For too long has France turned a blind eye to colonization and abuses in Palestine. Too long has France returned back to back the violence of the Israeli state and that of Palestinian armed groups.
…widely criticized on the left
These LFI statements at a time when the political class almost unanimously condemned the Hamas attacks aroused the anger of elected socialists, allies of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party within the New Popular Ecological and Social Union (Nupes). “The Jews are always responsible for what happens to them. It is a constant in anti-Semitic discourse,” responded PS senator Laurence Rossignol to Louis Boyard.
“To the useful idiots of the Hamas terrorists who exonerate them by putting them into perspective in the name of the political impasse of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the continuation of colonization, Netanyahu… You disgust me. That we find them on the left is unbearable” , exclaimed the socialist deputy Jérôme Guedj. Among the rebels, deputy François Ruffin, one of the potential candidates for the 2027 presidential election, distinguished himself from his party comrades by expressing “total condemnation of the Hamas attack”. The communist Fabien Roussel also expressed his “unreserved condemnation of the Hamas attack, which directly attacks Israeli civilians and adds war to war. They are unacceptable and unjustifiable.”