On the occasion of the national holiday of the State of Israel, Mrs. Aliza Bin-Noun, Israel’s ambassador to France, visited the Mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, and the leaders of the Jewish institutions and associations of the city and the region.
Nice maintains and develops friendly and cooperative relations with Israel and its communities as part of the twinning relations with the city of Netanya.
A fine diplomat, Mrs. Bin-Noun expressed feelings of friendship with a city that has a large and socio-economically significant Jewish community. She took the opportunity to reiterate her government’s stance on the availability for direct negotiations with the Palestinian National Authority to establish a peace agreement under the formula “two peoples, two countries.”
On the eve of the opening of the Paris conference to restart this process, which will take place without Israel, the message held political significance for the attendees, French Jews whose hearts were… as one could hear during the national anthems.
Capitalizing on this “assist”, Christian Estrosi launched into an opportunistic, ideological, and politicized speech.
Opportunistic because it flattered an audience that holds weight in city life and is an important electoral support,
ideological because it was out of context to declare “amidst an ocean of intolerance, you are the refuge of freedom of expression, freedom of religion, of worship, of conscience, of opinion” and also “in the face of hatred, of the fanaticism unleashed against a small country in terms of area, the Israelis have shown that they are indeed a great people, worthy of a history spanning thousands of years.”
Partisan assertions that do not take into account the complexity of a situation that has been the subject of several United Nations deliberations, which do not always align with the stance advocated by the Mayor of Nice.
Politicized finally, because speaking critically against an initiative of the French government and other countries solely to please his visitor should not be the practice of someone who holds public office and formerly held ministerial responsibilities.
But it is known that the two mainstays of Christian Estrosi’s international policy are relations with Israel and Russia. So be it.
