The essential idea of Israel among its supporters, domestic and foreign, is that it’s exceptional. Not only does it supposedly have ‘Most moral army in the world’ and is allegedly ‘A beacon of freedom for the whole world’, international laws don’t bind it nor do resolutions in support of it mean that other states and groups aspiring to similar goals as Zionism would as a result be entitled to them.
The French parliament voted 154-72 to adopt IHRA definition and declare thus that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. Based on this, using common sense thinking, all territories under France’s control which have independence movements should be entitled to their goals and all opposition to their independence considered racist.
An independence referendum in New Caledonia was narrowly defeated recently and new one is excepted in the early 2020s, when the percentage of indigenous population is expected to have increased and the French settler population decreased. Logically, the state of France should now consider all opposition to independence in that future referendum racism.
Same goes, of course, not just French-controlled territories outside Europe like the French Guyana, New Caledonia or the French Polynesia, but also to territories closer, like Corsica. Corsica had no historical or cultural ties to France when it was conquered by France in 1768 after a brief independence from the declining maritime power Genoa. Corsica has a, some times violent, independence movement and, again based on the new vote, all opposition to Corsican independence should be now considered racist.
This should be true also with Brittany, which had over thousand years of de facto independence before French kings Charles VIII(1483-98) and Louis XII(1498-1515) tied Brittany to France via enforced matrimonial alliances. In 1532 the parliament of Brittany in Rennes signed off Brittany’s status as de facto independent realm, but Brittany to this day has its own independence movement and it’s own culture and language are still threatened by the French central government, whose acceptance of even the use of the Celtic Breton language is recent and reluctant.
The remnant of the kingdom of Navarre was annexed by France in 1620, after having been in personal union with it since 1589. The originally Basque kingdom, founded in 824, had lost its territories south of the Pyrenees in 1512, but in 1620 still had a huge majority of Basque and Gascon population. And as we know, Basque independence movement is still a potent force. Again, logically it should now result that all opposition to an independent Basque homeland stretching across the Pyrenees should now be considered racist in France.
Yet, according to the government and parliament of France, Brittany, Corsica, New Caledonia and the Basques are not entitled to independence nor is opposition to their aspirations of regaining status as independent people among the nations of the world racism in France. Not to speak of Palestine, whose recognition president Macron opposes because, according to him, it would harm France’s good ties with Israel.
Why? Because Israel is considered an exception, and according to its flag-bearers, what it is given to Israel doesn’t mean that others should be entitled to the same rights. According to them, and now also according to the state of France, Israel stands raised on a pedestal, above both the rest of the world and all criticism in its Olympian heights, beyond international laws and without equals.