In Paris, ‘Tel Aviv on Seine’ goes ahead under heavy security

Paris deployed hundreds of extra police to protect an urban beach event honouring Tel Aviv on Thursday, after it turned from a summertime celebration into a geopolitical hot potato.

The banks of the city’s river are not only transformed into a beach, but there are sporting events, play areas for children, free libraries, food stalls, and other open-air attractions.

Protesters plan a rival “Gaza Plage” event Thursday near the Notre Dame Cathedral.

The city council member has represented the French capital’s 20th district for the last seven years, which has a large Arab population, saying the daylong festival “sends a very bad message”.

“It is out of the question to allow such an immoral event to go ahead in a public space”, the organisation said in a statement, adding that it was “not about religion but about global law, human rights and human dignity”.

This year organizers chose to give the event an global flavor, dedicating each day to a different beach – in the Maldives, in Corsica and elsewhere.

Pro-Palestinian and left-wing groups said they would protest the event. Many surfers, supported by BDS activists, came out against the organizers of the event who, according to them, are embellishing Israel’s image.

On social media, the controversy was inflamed this week by the attack of Israeli settlers on a Palestinian family killing a toddler and his father.

Paris’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, has received a petition signed by more than 5,000 people demanding the cancellation of the event.

And Hidalgo wrote an article in Le Monde newspaper, explaining that she had picked Tel Aviv because it is a city “open to all minorities, sexual ones, it is creative, inclusive, in a word, progressive, hated for that reason in Israel by all intolerants”.

“The doctrine of Paris is inviolable: it is to encourage rather than scold, exchange rather than boycott, dialogue rather than excommunicate and therefore to travel in both Israel and Palestine and maintain links to all who work in reconciliation.”

“We cannot act as if it’s business as usual in Tel Aviv, only 40 minutes away from Jerusalem and the occupied territories, and say that Paris will celebrate a certain way of life, some sort of “Copacabana-style Tel Aviv”, that would not be decent”, said Eric Coquerel of the French democratic socialist political party Parti de Gauche.

Deputy mayor Bruno Julliard spoke out in defence of Tel Aviv on the Seine, tweeting: ‘No confusion between Tel Aviv, a town symbolic of tolerance and peace, and the brutal policies of the Israeli government!’.