By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal
More than 1,500 antisemitic incidents have been recorded in France between Oct. 7, the day Hamas attacked Israel, and mid-November, according to the latest statistics from the French Interior Ministry. This is three times the reported number in all of 2022.
“These are mainly tags and insults, but there are also assaults and injuries,” reported French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin. The number of requests from French Jews for emigration to Israel has continued to rise as more seek to escape what they perceive as a climate of fear.
Many confirmed that they no longer consider themselves safe in France and feel compelled to hide their kippah or other outward signs of Judaism for fear of being targeted. They perceive a lack of empathy for the Israelis killed during the Hamas massacre and for the relatives of the hostages who are suspended in an agonising limbo.
Israeli officials have recorded a 430 per cent increase in the number of applications from France. In December, several events were organized aimed at providing information and advice for those who wish to relocate to Israel. Gatherings in Paris, Marseille and Lyon each drew hundreds of attendees, some of whom had to travel to get there.
The Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF) is also listening to such concerns from the French Jewish community, as it has in the past when events locally or in Israel precipitated an increase in antisemitic activity.
The figures for immigration to Israel and the opening of files “have always been a barometer of the level of concern of Jews in French society regarding antisemitism,” remarked CRIF president Yonathan Arfi.
Even if he believes that measures are being put in place to fight this climate of fear, Arfi believes it is now a much deeper problem in French society.
“Political authorities are very aware of the current reality but this is not enough, it’s now more social. We will only really fight antisemitism if it’s socially condemned in all walks of life in French society, which is not always the case today,” he added.
France has lived through antisemitic waves, from the Dreyfus affair (1894-1906) to the Vichy government’s antisemitic laws and its collaboration in the Holocaust between 1940 and 1944.
So this concern about rising antisemitism in France is fuelled in part by what happened to Jews before and during the Second World War, and that makes it particularly fearsome for those who may be only one or two generations removed from people who were the victims of Nazi brutality, including deportation to the death camps in Poland.
Today in France, the Jewish community faces not just centuries-old far-right antisemitism and decades-old Islamist antisemitism, but now a rapidly growing left-wing antisemitism that includes both anti-Zionism and traditional antisemitism.
While left-wing antisemitism has existed in France for many years, its mainstreaming is a source of deep concern in the French Jewish community. Since the mid-20th century, the French left had been influenced by the Soviet Communist Party with its anti-Zionism that challenged the legitimacy of Israel’s existence.
This has also found fertile ground mainly in successive generations of immigrant communities. In this version, the State of Israel and the Zionists, with whom all Jews are identified, are seen as the last vestiges of Western colonialism. Israel is considered a Western outgrowth in the Middle East and the Palestinians are the last people awaiting national liberation.
Traditional antisemitic conspiracy theories are also prominent on the left. Images of Jews controlling the government have been found on social media accounts of left-wing activists, including some prominent personalities.
In 2017, Gérard Filoche, a member of the Socialist Party executive committee, tweeted an image of newly elected President Emmanuel Macron with three prominent French Jews in the shadows behind him.
President Macron appeared with his arms outstretched over the globe, wearing a Nazi armband on which the swastika has been replaced by a dollar, and American and Israeli flags were in the background.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, today the most important politician of the French left, is frequently criticized for using antisemitic tropes in his rhetoric and for his indifference to the resurgence of antisemitism. Mélenchon has attacked CRIF, accusing it of dominating behaviour when it advocates political positions that Mélenchon opposes.
Every time Mélenchon is questioned, he responds that antisemitism on the left does not exist and that accusations of antisemitism are manipulated to prohibit criticism of Israel.
On Oct. 22, Melenchon accused Yael Braun-Pivet, the speaker of the French National Assembly and a member of President Emmanuel Macron’s ruling party, of “camping in Tel Aviv to encourage the massacre,” referring to Israeli strikes on Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip. “Not in the name of the French people!” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. She is Jewish and had travelled to Israel in the aftermath of the Hamas attack.
And it is significant that a successful march against antisemitism on Nov. 12 in Paris that gathered more than 182,000 people from across the country did not include him or those of his party, France Unbowed (France Insoumise), who refused to condemn Hamas or its Oct. 7 attack.
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