“Cutting down the olive tree that pays tribute to Ilan Halimi is an attempt to kill him a second time,” French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on Friday after it was revealed that the memorial to the murdered French Jewish man in Épinay-Sur-Seine had been desecrated.
Halimi was 23 years old when he was kidnapped in 2006 by a group called the Gang of Barbarians. The group falsely believed that all Jews are wealthy and demanded large sums from his family. Halimi was tortured in captivity for three weeks, and left naked and handcuffed to a tree on the side of a road with 80% of his body burned. He died in an ambulance en route to the hospital.
Macron assured the public that Halimi will not be forgotten: “The Nation will not forget this child of France who died because he was Jewish.”
He added that “all means are being deployed to punish this act of hatred,” and that France remains “unwavering” in the face of antisemitism.
Paris police chief Laurent Nuñez confirmed that an investigation has been launched into the “disgraceful act” adding that “everything will be done to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.”
French Chief Rabbi Haïm Korsia, said he found it “moving that the State, the city hall, and citizens are mobilizing to say that it’s not just a tree that was cut down – it’s hope that someone tried to sabotage.” French Prime Minister François Bayrou said that while “the tree for Ilan Halimi, a living bulwark against forgetting, was felled by antisemitic hatred,” no crime “can uproot memory.”
Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said “The barbarity of his captors and murderers continues in the antisemitic hatred of those who destroyed the tree that had been planted in his memory.”
“What kind of hatred must one be filled with to take a chainsaw today to an olive tree planted in his memory?” asked Yonathan Arfi, the president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF). “The barbarity of those who desecrate his memory is no better than that of those who took his life,” he added. “The antisemites of today are no better than those of yesterday.”
Jewish groups, Israeli ministers, express anger at Macron
Several, however, turned their anger to Macron, including Israel’s Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Minister Amichai Chikli, who wrote: “Mr. Macron, you have cut down the tree with your own hands and through your actions.”
Chikli added that “no French president has been more hostile to the Jewish people since the Vichy regime” than Macron and told the French leader that his legacy will be “21% support and backing for Hamas.”
The rabbi of Levallois-Perret, Chalom Lellouche, also addressed Macron directly, asking him, “How many will it take? How many Jewish French citizens assaulted? How many rabbis beaten? How many synagogues burned? How many memorial sites desecrated? How many children violated?
“At what point will you judge the situation in our country grave and alarming enough, nearing the point of no return, to finally deign to look the nation straight in the eye, on national television, and dedicate an entire address to the anti-Jewish hatred now striking our Jewish compatriots almost daily?”
The tree was planted in 2011 in the Alcobendas garden of Épinay-Sur-Seine in Seine-Saint-Denis.
It is not the first tree in honor of Halimi to be cut down. Two trees planted in tribute to him (one in 2006 and one on the tenth anniversary of his death) were found sawn down in 2019. They had been planted in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, in Essonne, the site where Halimi was left dying on the side of a railway track.
In 2017, a plaque commemorating Halimi was ripped off the wall and graffitied with antisemitic slurs.