PARIS, Nov 15 — Israel and France played out a goalless draw in a Nations League football match in Paris yesterday surrounded by a huge security operation.
Around 4,000 police and members of the security forces patrolled inside and outside the Stade de France to prevent a repetition of the attacks on fans of Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam last week.
A further 1,600 civilian security personnel were also on duty.
Stewards had to intervene at one point to stop fans of both nations from clashing in the stands, an AFP reporter saw.
Videos taken by spectators and posted on the X social media platform showed fans, some with Israeli flags, running along the rows of seats at the stadium while other supporters whistled and booed.
Members of the stadium security team moved between the two groups to separate them and the incident was over within minutes.
The tension surrounding the fixture caused many fans to stay away with just 16,611 in a stadium that holds up to 80,000.
Around 100 Israeli fans attended the match despite calls from Israeli authorities to avoid the fixture. Around 600 members of the Jewish community in France travelled to the stadium in buses with a police escort.
French authorities mounted a huge security operation after the government defied calls from some French lawmakers to postpone the match or move it to another city.
“We will not give in to anti-Semitism anywhere, and violence — including in the French Republic — will never prevail, nor will intimidation,” President Emmanuel Macron, who attended the game, told BFMTV.
Macron called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before the game to assure him that French authorities had taken the necessary security measures for the match to pass off smoothly, the president’s office said.
An elite police unit guarded the Israeli team from the moment they arrived on French soil. Israel coach Ran Ben Simon said the security had been “extraordinary”.
“We want to thank the security people for protecting us,” he said in a post-match press conference.
The incidents in the Netherlands took place with anti-Israeli sentiment and reported anti-Semitic acts across the world soaring as Israel wages wars against Iran-backed Islamist militants in Lebanon and Gaza.
The violence in Amsterdam flared after Maccabi fans in the city for a match against Ajax set fire to a Palestinian flag and vandalised a taxi 24 hours earlier, authorities said.
Following the match, Maccabi fans were chased by men on scooters and beaten.
Amsterdam’s mayor Femke Halsema called it a “poisonous cocktail of anti-Semitism and hooliganism”.
Dutch far-right lawmaker Geert Wilders blamed the violence on “Muslims”.
Pro-Palestinian protests
Several hundred people attended a pro-Palestinian demonstration yesterday in Saint-Denis to the north of Paris where the match was played.
That came after a larger protest on Wednesday against the holding of an “Israel is Forever” gala in the French capital. Clashes broke out with police firing tear gas and some protesters damaged the window of a restaurant.
The leader of the Jewish community in France, Yonathan Arfi, expressed hope the France-Israel match would demonstrate there could be no repeat of the violence in the Netherlands.
“We need to show a sort of ‘anti-Amsterdam’ this evening,” said Arfi, the president of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF).
As well as Macron, Prime Minister Michel Barnier and former presidents Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy were in the crowd.
Macron’s presence was aimed at drawing a line after “controversies and misunderstandings” in recent relations between France and Israel, said a member of his team who asked not to be named.
Last week in Jerusalem, Israeli police entered a French-owned church compound, briefly detaining two gendarmes and prompting French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot to abandon a scheduled visit.
The draw was enough for France to secure a place in the Nations League quarter-finals. Israel earned their first point of the competition. — AFP
