Honorary citizenship for Gaza: Paris's most useless act of solidarity

Emmanuel Grégoire, the newly elected mayor of Paris, has announced he will propose granting honorary citizenship of the city to Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as to Palestinian journalists. 

The proposal will be put to the Paris city council in June, where it is expected to pass with the support of the left-wing majority.

Grégoire frames the gesture as an expression of "solidarity" with civilians facing what he calls "an appalling humanitarian situation." It is, in reality, something rather more cynical: a piece of political theatre calibrated for a specific electorate, with zero practical consequence for a single Palestinian civilian.

Honorary citizenship of Paris will not rebuild a house in Gaza. It will not feed a child, open a humanitarian corridor. It is a symbolic act, and a selective one. 

Grégoire has said nothing about the 1,200 Israeli civilians massacred by Hamas and its Gaza allies on October 7, 2023, in the deadliest attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust. No honorary citizenship for them. No council motion. No gesture of solidarity with their families.

The asymmetry is not accidental. It is the point.

Playing to the gallery

Grégoire knows his audience. His left-wing coalition, which includes parties that have been notably reluctant to condemn Hamas unequivocally, will applaud the move. It costs him nothing politically and earns him considerable goodwill on the French left, where pro-Palestinian sentiment has become something close to an article of faith.

What it does cost is something harder to quantify: the trust of Paris's substantial Jewish community, one of the largest in Europe. For many of them, a mayor who finds it politically convenient to honour Palestinians but cannot bring himself to acknowledge October 7 with equal moral clarity is not a mayor who represents them.

Solidarity, to mean anything, must be consistent. A mayor who reserves his symbolic gestures for one side of one of the world's most complex conflicts is not practicing solidarity, he is practicing politics.

Grégoire is entitled to his views. Paris's Jewish community, and anyone who believes that October 7 deserves the same moral weight as Gaza, is equally entitled to its anger.