Antizionism is equivalent to antisemitism, France’s former prime minister told The Times of Israel in Jerusalem on Thursday.

“We often combat antisemitism in the name of the past,” said Manuel Valls, 63, who served as France’s prime minister between March 2014 and December 2016. “But today, antisemitism is anti-Zionism. The hatred of Jews and the hatred of Israel is profoundly linked.”

“The best way to combat antisemitism and anti-Zionism,” Walls said, “is to support Israel. Clearly, without hesitating. Because it’s the same values that we share.”

Valls was in Israel with ELNET, an organization working to build ties between Israel and Europe. He visited Israel’s northern border, met with senior IDF officers, toured the Gaza border, and was slated to sit with President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after speaking with The Times of Israel.

A centrist who served most recently as France’s Minister of the Overseas, a post he left in October, has emerged over the past decade as a leading crusader against antisemitism. The Spanish-born politician, who once cited his marriage to the French Jewish musician Anne Gravoin in proclaiming an “eternal bond” with her people, led a relentless legal assault on the antisemitic comedian and provocateur Dieudonne M’bala M’bala, and along with President Francois Hollande, deployed 12,000 troops and policemen to guard Jewish institutions while premier.

Get The Times of Israel’s Daily Edition
by email and never miss our top stories

By signing up, you agree to the terms

His approach made him something of a hero among France’s Jewish community of 500,000.


French Prime Minister Manuel Valls (L), and French President Francois Hollande (R), walk back to the Elysee palace on June 15, 2016, in Paris after a ceremony at the Ministry of Interior to pay a tribute to a French policeman and his partner, who were killed on June 13 by a man claiming allegiance to the Islamic State group. (AFP PHOTO / ALAIN JOCARD)

Valls, who visited Israel days after the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, said that there is a “paradox” in France’s approach toward Israel throughout the ensuing conflict.

On the one hand, he said, France has shown solidarity with Israel in the face of terror, and has kept the hostage in Gaza on the public agenda. Four months after the attacks, French President Emmanuel Macron hosted a ceremony at the Invalides Memorial complex in Paris, paying tribute to the 42 French citizens of the October 7 massacre, decrying the attack as “barbarism… which is fed by antisemitism and propagates it.”

“Nothing can justify or excuse terrorism,” said Macron.


French President Emmanuel Macron (center) walks in front of members of the French Republican Guard holding portraits of French citizens killed in the October 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities, during a ceremony at the Invalides memorial complex in Paris, on February 7, 2024. (Photo by Ludovic MARIN / AFP)

At the same time, over the course of the war, France barred Israeli firms from defense shows, called for a halt to arms deliveries to Israel, and recognized a Palestinian state without any preconditions.

“There is, in my opinion, an incomprehension about what’s happening here in the Middle East,” said Valls of Macron’s policy during the war. “It’s this incomprehension that created this tension, this deterioration of relationships between the two countries.”


French President Emmanuel Macron, center, seen at the General Assembly Hall for a high-profile meeting at the United Nations aimed at galvanizing support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Sept. 22, 2025, at UN headquarters. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)

Despite Macron’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state, Valls emphasized that the “vast majority” of the French public was against the unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state. A poll from the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions found that 78% of respondents opposed such a move.

“The French understood that what happened in the Nova Festival, what it had in common with what happened in Bataclan,” he said of the two music venues that were the scenes of unprecedent slaughter.

More than 370 people were massacred when Palestinian terrorists attacked the Nova music festival on October 7, amid acts of kidnapping, extreme brutality and sexual violence, part of the wider assault on southern Israel. Others were taken hostage.


A woman is evacuated from the Bataclan theater after a wave of deadly terror attacks in Paris, Friday November 13, 2015. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)

Eight years earlier, in November 2015, Islamic State terrorists carried out a series of coordinated attacks in Paris, leaving 130 dead in the worst peacetime atrocity carried out on French soil. Ninety of them were concertgoers gunned down during a show at the Bataclan theater.

Valls was prime minister during those attacks, as well as the January 2015 attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and a Kosher supermarket in Paris, and the 2016 Nice truck ramming that left 86 dead.

“We have been victims of Islamic terrorism regularly,” he lamented.

Despite the sympathy among much of the French public for Israel, according to Valls, the far left in France believes that “by criticizing Israel, or by spreading the hatred of Jews, they will get the Muslim vote.”

“I cannot think for one second that Macron shares this analysis,” he said. “I don’t think so.”


Polish-born French writer, artist and human rights activist Marek Halter (4thR) and officials march behing a banner which reads as “We march against antisemistim” in Paris on November 12, 2023. (Geoffroy Van der Hasselt / AFP)

But he also hammered Macron for missing a massive demonstration against antisemitism organized by the presidents of the lower and upper houses of the French parliament. Hollande, fellow former president Nicolas Sarkozy and almost all living former prime ministers also marched, but Macron was conspicuously absent.

“The extreme left, the unions, the representatives of the Muslim religion, and the president of the Republic,” he said, delineating those who stayed away from the rally.

“It’s incomprehensible to me, a wound,” Valls said.

Overall, however, Macron has, along with his predecessors Nicolas Sarkozy and Hollande, prioritized the fight against antisemitism.

From Gaza to Iran

On Tuesday, Valls traveled inside the Gaza Strip, accompanied by the IDF. He also met with US General Patrick Frank at the Civil-Military Coordination Center in Kiryat Gat, a project France contributes to.

“France and Europe need, along with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, to accompany the reconstruction of Gaza physically,” he said, “rebuilding it, on a human level and politically. It will be long, complex. But if we manage to do it with the Arab countries, it could be a great solution for the Palestinians.”


Former prime minister Manuel Valls shakes hand with a UNIFIL soldier in Lebanon, January 2026 (Ben Rosenblaum/ELNET)

He cautioned against rushing toward a Palestinian state right now, however.

“There are times when there is a lack of imagination in political and diplomatic language. We saw that before the fall of the Berlin Wall or in the moment of the Oslo Accords. We’re in the idea that we need two states living side by side, with one capital, Jerusalem, et cetera.”

“But there has been the seventh of October,” he argued. “There is Hamas. There’s the role of Iran, of course.”


Iranians attend the funerals of security forces personnel killed in a crackdown on protests in Tehran on January 14, 2026. (ATTA KENARE / AFP)

Turning to the protests in Iran, Valls said that “the downfall of the mullah’s regime would be great news for the Iranians, for democracy…We’re waiting for the downfall of the regime.”

Valls said that Israel’s military success since October 7 and the collapse of the Iranian axis have been “a victory for Israel, and also for the entire West and democracies.”

“Israel is the first line against Islamism,” he stressed.

“If Israel falls, we fall. And if Israel wins, we win, too.”