French Jews are grappling with two stark facts – both of which will be familiar to the community on this side of the Channel.
First, antisemitism is soaring. Last year there were 1,320 hate incidents, with a record number of physical assaults.
Second, the racism is being increasingly driven by antizionism and hatred of Israel.
The Service for the Protection of the Jewish Community (SPCJ), the French equivalent of CST, said that references to Israel, Palestine and “genocide” were present in about one-third of the recorded incidents.
The alarming fact that Jew-hate has simultaneously surged and mutated in France is not lost on a number of parliamentarians.
The French government has vowed to present a new bill to tackle the “new forms” of antisemitism next month.
Caroline Yadan, an MP for Emmanuel Marcon’s centre-right Renaissance party and a key sponsor of a first bill – which was pulled from the National Assembly agenda earlier this month due to a lack of support – summed up the problem facing French Jews with a chilling example.
She told the JC: “A father called me and said that his son had been assaulted in school. His head pushed into a toilet with shouts of ‘you dirty genocider’.”
Among those who rejected Yadan’s bill were left-wing MPs who claimed the text was a threat to free speech and that existing laws were enough to fight all types of antisemitism.
MPs from far-left party La France Insoumise (LFI) argued that hatred of Israel was not a form of racism against Jews and claimed the bill was an attempt to shut down criticism of the Israeli government.
Yonathan Arfi, president of CRIF, the umbrella body for French Jews, backs the bill, saying far-left LFI “represents an existential threat to French Jews.
“How can we explain that Jews, less than 1 per cent of the population, are the target of 53 per cent of anti-religious acts in our country?
“First, there is an obsession: Jews are constantly associated with the war in Gaza.
“At school and in the street, in universities and sports clubs, in social and professional circles, French citizens are ostracised and held responsible for a conflict thousands of kilometres away.”
The sponsors of the law believe that it will make it easier to convict cases of “new antisemitism” in court.
“The attacks are more frequent, and they are often more brutal than in the past. They’re directed towards people identified at Jews, both adults and children,” the SPCJ report said.
The frequency of attacks decreased after the ceasefire in Gaza took effect in October, but SPCJ said “events on the ground in the Middle East are not the most significant factor in the rise of antisemitism but rather pro-Palestinian protests and highly publicised events, like the Gaza flotillas”.
The report said that anti-Israeli slogans deployed by activists were a catalyst for antisemitism and they brought legitimacy to attacks on Jews in France.
A number of Jewish intellectuals, however, signed an open letter saying the law would not help fight antisemitism.
“On the contrary. This law associated people like me with Israel’s actions. I don’t want to be associated with them.
“On top of that, it’s dangerous to vote laws that single out one community. Anti-hate laws protect all minorities,” Rony Brauman, the former head of Médecins sans Frontières, told France 24.
But antisemitic incidents and racist attacks are not the only factors driving those pushing for a change in the law.
French courts have a long history of controversially ruling out antisemitism as a motive in cases in which the perpetrator’s anti-Jewish views appeared to be blindingly obvious to all observers.
For example, in the trial of men who cut down trees planted in honour of Ilan Halimi, the 23-year-old Jewish man abducted and killed in 2006, an antisemitic motive was ruled out. They were convicted and sentenced for the destruction of a tree, not carrying out a hate crime.
Questions were also raised over the trial of Rachid Kheniche, who killed 89-year-old René Hadjadj in Lyon in 2022.
Kheniche was convicted for pushing 89-year-old Hadjadj off the 17th floor but antisemitism was ruled out, even though the killer destroyed a text in Hebrew the victim had in his jacket and had shared inflammatory online posts about Mossad agents.
In that case, the prosecutor said that a hate motive could be considered only when the perpetrator makes racist comments during the incident.
She also said that if the killer had torn the victim’s Torah in his apartment, then she would have considered the antisemitic motive, but a simple text in Hebrew was not enough.
Only this month an appeals court ruled that an Algerian nanny, Leila Y, who worked for a Jewish family and tried to poison the children in her care, was not motivated by antisemitism.
During the trial, the court heard that Leila Y had said that “because they have money and power, I should never have worked for a Jewish woman, she only brought me problems”.
“For years I have defended Jewish people who had faced antisemitism and I always told them, that although the situation has worsened, the law and justice system were on our side. I can’t say that anymore,” the family’s lawyer, Patrick Klugman, told the press.
The head of France’s Jewish umbrella group CRIF called for change in its annual gathering with French authorities:
“How can we comprehend the court’s decision to exclude the antisemitic character of the sawing down of the memorial tree?
“Just the same, how can we come to terms with the fact that another court failed to recognise the killing of René Hadjadj in Lyon as antisemitic as well as the poisoning of a Jewish family in Levallois?
“Must antisemitism or racism be openly claimed by its perpetrators to be acknowledged?”
The judicial response to the 2017 murder of 65-year-old Sarah Halimi in her Paris apartment is yet another open wound – for the family of the victim and wider French Jewry.
Her killer, Kobili Traoré, was declared unfit to stand trial in 2019 because, according to court-appointed psychiatrists, he suffered an acute psychosis during the attack.
But in recent days Halimi’s brother, William Attal – who has been working tirelessly to bring the case back to court – released to French media an audio recording of the attack that he claims should have been part of the original case.
He told the JC: “The recording is not new. The neighbour who recorded the attack gave the tape to police after the murder.
“But the file wasn’t used properly in the investigation. It clearly proves Traoré was acting in revenge of events in the Middle East when he entered her home, tortured her and threw her off of her balcony.”
In January Traoré was arrested over an assault of a drug dealer in his home.
Will the bill tackling the France’s “new forms of antisemitism” find its way onto the statue books? The battle remains live.
Some 700,000 people signed a petition demanding that debate over the bill be cancelled, the second largest parliamentary petition in French history.
Several centrist MPs who initially backed the bill withdrew their support as the LFI campaign gathered steam.
Without a majority, the bill was withdrawn and the government said it would present its own “compromise” version.
Yadan remains defiant, however. “This is a great victory in fact,” she said surrounded by several other MPs from President Macron’s party. “LFI used dirty delay tactics and spread lies about the bill but it failed to derail it because now it’s not just my text that will be presented to parliament but a large government bill. It will be more powerful.”
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