U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer today delivered remarks on the Senate floor regarding French President Macron’s comments on anti-Zionism. Below are his prepared remarks:

Finally, M. President, I’d like to applaud the French President Emmanuel Macron for his comments over the weekend about anti-Semitism. “We will yield nothing to anti-Zionism,” he said, “because it is the reinvented form of anti-Semitism.”

He is absolutely right.

Anti-Semitism is a word that has been used throughout history when Jewish people are judged and measured by one standard and the rest by another. When everyone else was allowed to farm and Jews could not; when anyone else could live in Moscow and Jews could not; when others could become academics or tradesmen and Jews could not. The word to describe all of these acts is anti-Semitism.

So it is with anti-Zionism; the idea that all other peoples can seek and defend their right to self-determination but Jews cannot; that other nations have a right to exist, but the Jewish state of Israel does not.

Anti-Zionism, unfortunately, continues to bubble up in many different forms. There is perhaps no greater example than the pernicious effort to delegitimize Israel through boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. The BDS movement is a deeply biased campaign that I would say, in similar words to Mr. Macron, is a “reinvented form of anti-Semitism” because it seeks to impose boycotts on Israel and not on any other nation.

I hope that states across the country continue to push back against the BDS movement, by boycotting the boycotters, as my home state of New York has done.

And I hope that my fellow Senators will join me in condemning this modern brand of anti-Semitism, as Mr. Macron did this weekend.

Thank you and I yield the floor.

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