The recent riots in France, justified as a supposed protest against classroom conditions, have featured arson attacks, smashed windows, beatings, and violence across the country.
In one image that may become a canonical reminder of this moment, crowds stand around a burning policeman, gloating as the flames rise. In the background, the Palestinian flag flies high – a flag that could represent a people, but instead fuses with a project whose only horizon is the erasure of others.
The violence exposes an increasingly strange political bifurcation: between a “left” that refuses to acknowledge the problem and has become beholden to antizionist and Islamist actors, and a “right” that now seems to include anyone unwilling to accept the destruction of civilisational values and nations – even those who remain perfectly progressive on any number of social and economic questions.
The emerging political divide is therefore not simply between left and right, or nationalism and universalism, but between those committed to preserving a universal order that protects the integrity of particular peoples and civilisations, and those who have become beholden to movements that seek their annihilation.
At a moment in which believing that Western nations have a right to exist is treated as unsavoury, it’s worth considering how any commitment to the nation came to be coded as inherently reactionary, rather than as a force of freedom and progress.
It was Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt who located the great catastrophes of the 20th century not so much in the nation-state, but in its failure.
Whereas Enlightenment liberalism guaranteed the end of feudal and hereditary rule through institutions meant to protect the equality and liberty of the citizen, states that failed to preserve civic values exploded into renewed imperial expansionism.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she located Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism as precursors to Soviet communism and Nazi fascism, cross-border movements that transformed the older notions of hereditary superiority into new projects of racial supremacy and conquest.
Today, pan-Islamism and jihadism present a parallel challenge, rejecting national borders as obstacles to their own caliphatist ambitions.
Many of the world’s worst mass atrocities and genocides in recent decades have been carried out by Islamist extremist movements and regimes rather than the “Western colonialists” who are blamed in universities, NGOs, and liberal governments.
That record includes the genocide in Darfur in the 2000s and renewed genocidal violence since 2023, Isis’s genocide against the Yazidis in 2014, the atrocities committed by Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, and the Taliban, and the mass killing and persecution of Christians and Muslims by jihadist movements across Africa and the Middle East.
Defenders of human rights ought to focus their attention on the ideologies actually responsible for so much violence.
The same distortion extends to the indigenous non-Muslim and non-Arab peoples of the Middle East and Africa, who have faced centuries of conquest and subjugation under Islamic expansionist projects.
Those who exploit the rhetoric of indigenous rights have remarkably little to say about their oppression.
Anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani, father of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, for example, refused to acknowledge the Darfur genocide of black African tribal groups, rejecting the characterisation of Arabs as foreign settlers – a racialising narrative he has nevertheless embraced in his attacks on Israelis.
Today’s obsession with casting any form of immigration restriction as fascist, and any Islamic expansionist movement perversely as liberatory, leads to the dissolution of core liberal values of equality, justice, and human rights.
We should neither dismantle every international institution – bemoaning the entirety of international law when its institutions are corrupted, as are the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the Nobel Prize, and so many others today – nor proclaim that nation-states are the problem.
We should reform the institutions so that they practise the values they preach.
Fighting Islamophobia requires fighting antizionism: because when antizionism is denied and erased from the discourse, it appears as if the Jew-hatred flowing from left-wing and non-European movements can be reduced to “Islam”.
It’s essential to show, on the contrary, that antizionism is a specific bigotry that can appear at the intersection of different ideologies. It is in no way essential to either Islam or the left.
France’s government offers a particularly stark illustration of this confused set of moral priorities. It is sanctioning Israelis living in their indigenous territory as inherent criminals while pouring hundreds of millions of euros into the Palestinian Authority – which glorifies the racist murder of Israelis – and sponsoring expansive construction into Area C of the West Bank, under Israeli civil and military control.
In September, it joined other European countries in announcing plans to restrict trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank, due to “settler violence”. The irony, as France’s own streets erupt with uncontrollable violence, cannot be missed.
The Palestinian flag, whatever it could mean, has become a symbol of racism, expansionism, and Orwellian subversion.
The people harmed by this transformation are not only Israelis or Palestinians, but the entire edifice of human rights and the international order.
The riots on the streets of France – the “settler violence” that is tearing its own society apart – is simply a microcosm of this broader breakdown of political sensibilities.
Antizionism is an interconnected global structure. Those who believe they can fight “antisemitism” in London or New York, without challenging antizionist narratives weaponised against Israelis, or the ideological radicalisation on the streets of Saint-Denis and across Europe, are deeply deluded.
The solution is not reducible to a policy fix. We need a renaissance of universal values against the corrosive nihilism of the red-green alliance – whose central ideology is but the latest image of empire.
Adam Louis-Klein is the Founder of the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ)
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