The president of France's Assemblée Nationale accused left-wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon on Monday, October 23, of having put "a new target on my back" after she made a solidarity visit to Israel this weekend. Yaël Braun-Pivet, a member of President Emmanuel Macron's party Renaissance, traveled to Israel in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on the country this month. On Sunday, Mélenchon accused Braun-Pivet of "camping in Tel-Aviv to encourage the massacre" in Gaza. "Not in the name of the French people!" he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Speaking to the radio station France Inter, Braun-Pivet said she was "very shocked" and accused Mélenchon of using provocative language. She insisted Mélenchon had deliberately chosen the term "camping" – which she alleged was a reference to concentration camps. "I am convinced that the word 'camping' was not chosen by chance and the claim that I favor massacres is once again a new target being put on my back," she said. "This is very serious."
Braun-Pivet said she has been the target of a number of anti-Semitic insults and threats over the past years. "I don't understand why it's the Jewish identity that stands out: I'm French, I don't practice [religion], I'm not religious, but some people only see that," she said. "When I read certain tweets, when I receive threatening letters directly, of course I feel in danger, when I can't leave my house without police protection."
Mélenchon reacted shortly after her interview on the radio, denying having made anti-Semitic remarks. "With Braun-Pivet, the degradation of political polemics has reached unprecedented levels," he wrote on X. "An apologist for 'unconditional support for the government of Israel,' she came back without a word of compassion for the people trapped in Gaza. And now she attributes an anti-Semitic content to the word 'camping'. This absurd word police is a pitiful diversion to redirect attention from her grave political error."
In Israel, Braun-Pivet visited Kibbutz Be'eri in the south of the country, as well as the site of a rave party where Hamas militants killed hundreds of people. "I never said that I unconditionally support the government of Israel, but I unconditionally support the existence of Israel," she said. She added that neither the security of Israel nor the existence of the Palestinian state were ensured "today."
The refusal by Mélenchon, the leader of the radical left La France Insoumise party, to describe Hamas as a terror group has caused a crisis within France's left-wing NUPES coalition, which also includes Socialists, Greens and Communists.
Before Mélenchon, several left-wing figures had denounced Braun-Pivet's trip to Israel. The leader of the Socialist Party (PS), Olivier Faure, criticized Braun-Pivet for traveling to Israel with the president of the right-wing Les Républicains party, Eric Ciotti, and the LR MP representing French citizens living in Israel, Meyer Habib. Faure said the two politicians are "hawks, on a line without nuance", adding that Braun-Pivet had spoken of "unconditional support for Israel" in the wake of the Hamas attack on October 7.
Macron himself has expressed concern that the war between Israel and Hamas could create divisions in France, which is home to large Muslim and Jewish populations. Thousands of people rallied in Paris on Sunday demanding an end to the Israeli military operation in Gaza following the Hamas attack.