Hawzah News Agency - The lower house of France’s Parliament passed a nonbinding resolution equating criticism of the Zionists occupying Palestinian territories with anti-Semitism, defying warnings that such a move could serve to stifle the advocates of Palestinian rights.

The National Assembly passed the resolution on Tuesday, with 154 votes for and 72 against, various media outlets reported, 

The resolution states, “Criticizing the very existence of Israel as a collective composed of Jewish citizens is tantamount to hatred towards the Jewish community as a whole.”

“Such abuses increasingly make anti-Zionism ‘one of the contemporary forms of anti-Semitism’ in the words of the President of the Republic,” it adds, citing French President Emanuel Macron.

The Zionist entity proclaimed existence in 1948 after occupying huge swathes of regional countries during a Western-backed war.

Right before the war, it had already gone on a campaign of ethnic cleansing that lasted until 1949, leading to the expulsion of between 750,000 and 850,000 Palestinians from their homeland while the Israeli regime was replacing them with a similar number of Jewish migrants.

Still using far-and-wide Western backing, the regime staged another wholesale war in 1967 that saw it seizing more chunks of land, including the Al Quds ( West Bank, East Jerusalem)-, the Gaza Strip and parts of Syria’s Golan Heights