European Participation in a Palestinian Olive Harvest Provocation Explains Why France Is Burning

Islamic immunity is behind both

Bob Goldberg | Oct 18, 2026

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Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify that the provocation and Hilltop attack where a photojournalist was beaten took place on two different days)

This week, Bernard Baudoux, the long-serving Communist mayor of Aulnoye-Aymeries, became the face of the West’s allegiance to Palestinians for reasons he was too clueless to anticipate. Baudoux is well known in France and internationally for his explicit support of the Palestinian cause and his critique of Israeli government policy in the occupied West Bank. After he and a delegation of European diplomats were allegedly assaulted by masked Israeli settlers while participating in an olive harvest in the West Bank town of Taybeh, Baudoux said:

“I think that if settlers are behaving like this, there is a tolerance on the part of the Israeli government.”

“The whole world needs to know what’s happening there. For me, I’ll go back to my country, and everything will be fine.”

As he spoke, France was burning, with fires being spread for the same reason he was in Judea and Samaria. Both are the result of what Bernard Lewis characterized as Islam and Islamic values having an immunity from comment and criticism in the Western world that Christianity has lost and Judaism has never had.

In Limoges, rioters were burning down the town hall. Its spire collapsed into the flames. Shops and a synagogue were looted in Paris. Demonstrators broke into Marseille’s City Hall. Across France, rioters and protesters were waving Palestinian flags and chanting “L’occupation est un crime, la résistance est un droit” (“Occupation is a crime, resistance is a right”) and “Nous sommes tous la résistance palestinienne” (“We are all the Palestinian resistance”).

Mayor Baudoux, it turns out, was involved in a pre-planned effort to provoke hilltop youth to violence that took place on Saturday afternoon, October 17. (Six hours prior to the afternoon attack, clashes broke out at or near the Israeli settlement outpost of Ma’ale Ahuvia, just a few kilometers from Taybeh .) Similarly, Palestinian solidarity showed up in the wider French demonstrations. Photographs showed protesters carrying Palestinian and French flags at Place de la République, and graffiti reading “Free Gaza” appeared on a shuttered Paris storefront.

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