The French government on Monday rebuked U.S. ambassador to France Charles Kushner after he published an open letter condemning French president Emmanuel Macron’s government for fueling anti-Semitism and failing to protect Jewish citizens.
Macron’s foreign ministry said in a statement that it “firmly refutes” Kushner’s allegations, accusing the U.S. ambassador of violating “international law, particularly the duty not to interfere in the internal affairs of states.” The ministry has summoned Kushner, a move that implies a formal protest or reprimand, the New York Times reported.
In his Sunday letter, addressed to Macron and published in the Wall Street Journal, Kushner—the son of Holocaust survivors and the father-in law of President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka—expressed his “deep concern over the dramatic rise of antisemitism in France and the lack of sufficient action by your government to confront it,” writing that “in France, not a day passes without Jews assaulted in the street, synagogues or schools defaced, or Jewish-owned businesses vandalized.”
Anti-Semitic physical and verbal attacks have surged in France, which has Western Europe’s largest Jewish population, since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel, as the French foreign ministry’s statement acknowledged. A 2023 report by France’s human rights commission CNCDH found that anti-Semitic acts rose that year by 284 percent. The number of anti-Semitic incidents remained high throughout 2024, accounting for 62 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes in France, the Associated Press reported based on numbers released this year by the French interior ministry.
“Today, many French Jews fear that history will repeat itself in Europe,” Kushner wrote in his letter, calling on Macron to formulate a “serious plan” to crack down on anti-Semitism.
Kushner in the letter also blasted Macron’s decision last month to recognize Palestinian statehood in September, saying it would “embolden extremists, fuel violence, and endanger Jewish life in France.” The United Kingdom and Canada have followed France’s footsteps in announcing plans to recognize a Palestinian state.
The U.S. ambassador isn’t the only official to have taken aim at Macron over France’s rising anti-Semitism. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a letter to Macron on August 17 criticized the French president for failing to rein in anti-Jewish hate, which he said has been “ravaging French cities,” according to a translation by the Times. Netanyahu said Macron’s call for Palestinian statehood “rewards Hamas terror, hardens Hamas’s refusal to free the hostages, emboldens those who menace French Jews and encourages the Jew-hatred now stalking your streets.”
A senior Hamas official also credited his group’s terrorist attack with European and Canadian calls for Palestinian statehood, saying the calls are “the fruits of October 7.”
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Author: Matthew Xiao
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