The symbolic vote today in France’s National Assembly supporting Palestinian statehood is “a grave error” according to French-Jewish lawmaker Meyer Habib. Habib, who represents French citizen in eight Mediterranean countries including Israel, also said that the vote “will remove France from any position in which it can participate in any negotiations in the Middle East.”

The Times of Israel reports:

Unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian state at the current juncture will invite more anti-Semitic attacks such as the March 2012 Toulouse shootings or the May 2014 shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, Habib said in an interview last week.

“The government is importing the conflict to France,” the first-time center-right lawmaker charged, adding that a yes vote would legitimize all kinds of Islamic terrorism. “We’ll have embraced terrorism and lost our soul with a decision like this.”

While Habib expressed support for a demilitarized Palestinian state, in a speech before lawmakers he said that such an outcome isn’t possible now “due to the Palestinian leadership, which is ‘half-corrupt, half-jihadist.’” He also told the Times previously that “[p]assing this resolution is akin to handing a prize to terrorism,” on account of the Fatah-Hamas unity government.

An upsurge in anti-Semitic incidents has prompted an increasing number of French Jews to Israel in recent years. Commenting on the news in September that France had become the leading source of immigrants to Israel, Ariel Kandel of the Jewish Agency for Israel observed that in France the “climate of anti-Semitism that is losing its taboo.”

Last week, former French president Nicholas Sarkozy spoke out against any unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state.

[Photo: Orionx / Flickr ]