Israel’s Ambassador to France, Ovadia Soffer, has publicly protested the failure of Le Mans Law School president Jean Pierre Gelard to call the police when some 200 pro-Palestinian students prevented the Israeli envoy from delivering a scheduled lecture at the school, about 100 miles southwest of Paris, last night.
The students, mainly Palestinians and North Africans, blocked the entrance to the lecture hall, waved anti-Israel posters and shouted anti-Israel slogans through bull horns. French law authorizes the head of a university to summon police to campuses to quell disturbances. But Gelard refused to exercise his authority in this instance.
A spokesman for the university said today that Gelard had written Soffer warning him of possible trouble. He also told the envoy that he would not meet with him, a normal courtesy to a visiting lecturer, because he personally opposed Israel’s policies in south Lebanon.
Soffer protested what he said was Gelard’s “refusal to fulfill his responsibilities.” He said he would continue his lecture tour of several French universities.
A large proportion of the Le Mans Law Schools’ students are Palestinians, Moroccans and Tunisians. The honorary president of the Jewish community in Le Mans, Jacques Isar, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the community had not been informed in advance of the Ambassador’s scheduled lecture.
He said that if the 150 Jewish families in the city had known Soffer was to be there, they would have tried to mobilize public opinion on Israel’s behalf and to arrange for more Jewish and pro-Israel students to be on hand.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
