The reason for VIP turnout at France’s UEFA Nations League matchup on Thursday was the opponent, Israel’s national team, and what was happening on the Stade de France field was “very much overshadowed by what was happening away from it,” according to Panja & Porter of the N.Y. TIMES. The violence a week earlier in Amsterdam surrounding a soccer match between a Dutch team and a different Israeli squad guaranteed that Thursday’s game would be “far more a political event than a sporting one.” The France-Israel matchup saw the type of political attention “reserved for only the biggest of sporting occasions,” with French President Emmanuel Macron along with the Prime Minister and other political grandees in the stands. The city’s police chief said there would be “4,000 officers deployed for the game, with 2,500 stationed around the stadium itself and the others spread across the city.” Then another 1,600 private security guards and stewards were on duty at the game. With the heavy security, and the presence of the president and other dignitaries, French authorities wanted to make clear that the event “was safe and that no disturbance would be tolerated.” A member of Macron’s staff said his attendance was also meant to send a “message of fraternity and solidarity after the intolerable antisemitic acts that followed the match in Amsterdam” (N.Y. TIMES, 11/14).
PROTESTING BEFORE AND AFTER: REUTERS’ Julien Pretot noted leading up to the game, several hundred anti-Israeli demonstrators had “gathered at a square in Paris’ Saint-Denis district, perimeter, waving Palestinian flags, as well as a few Lebanese and Algerian ones,” to protest the match. At the end of the game, two Palestinian flags were displayed at the south end of the stadium. French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said this week there was “never any doubt the match would go ahead,” following the unrest in Amsterdam which saw both Maccabi fans and local groups engage in violence, according to Dutch police. He added that there were “no specific threats identified ahead of the game, but that zero risk did not exist” (REUTERS, 11/15).
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