“Le Pen Would Be Great for Israel”

During the strained political environment of June 2024, and antisemitism rising dramatically all over Europe, the far-right party National Rally (NR, previously known as Le Front National)—whose anti-immigrant position lies at the core of its fast-growing popularity—won 31% of votes, first place, in the European Parliament elections, a historical first for a far-right party in France. But the NR was not the only far-right party to do well in European elections. In Italy, Hungary, and Austria, the far right came first, while in the Netherlands, Bulgaria, and Estonia, far-right parties did better than ever before. In France, Macron responded by dissolving the National Assembly and announcing snap legislative elections. These had the highest turnout since 1981, with the far right wining 29%—nine million votes—in the first round. In the second round, the NR were barely defeated by the newly formed coalition of center-to-left candidates: the Nouveau Front Populaire.

Immediately after the results were announced, Mathilde Panot—elected member of the far-left party France Unbowed—vowed to see France “recognize the Palestinian state in the next two weeks” (Marianne 2024).² One Al Jazeera journalist wondered on X (formerly Twitter) if Palestine had just saved France (@Dima_Khatib, “La Palestine aurait-elle sauvé la France?”, X, July 7, 202,). Were the elections in France an instance where support for Palestine helped rather than harmed electoral success? During the election campaign, The Times of Israel (2024) reported that Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli said NR party leader Marine Le Pen would be “excellent for Israel.” In November 2023, Le Pen and president of the NR Jordan Bardella participated in the march against antisemitism, what the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, called a “great civic march” attended by over 100,000 people in Paris alone. Meanwhile, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, head of France Unbowed, tweeted that his party would not be attending because the march was a “rendez-vous for unconditional supporters of the massacre [of Gazans]” (Schofield 2023). The march was in response to an alarming rise in antisemitic acts in France.

On November 15, 2023, 1,518 antisemitic acts were reported in France since October 7 compared to 436 acts in 2022 (Seckel 2023). The rate of antisemitic violence continued to rise in France throughout 2024, culminating in the arson attack on the Grande-Motte synagogue in August 2024. But even years before, antisemitism had been in the rise in France, including among the far right. During the COVID-19 pandemic, old antisemitic tropes reemerged among antivaxxers, and there has been a dramatic rise in antisemitism on major social media platforms (Frenkel and Conger 2022). There is a documented convergence between anti-science trends and rising antisemitism, where the Jewish population globally has been blamed for the COVID-19 virus and accused of vaccine profiteering. “Blaming the Jews for illnesses or other calamities” occurred in Europe during the black death in the fourteenth century and well before (Hotez 2023). In 2021, NR candidate and teacher Cassandre Fristot participated in a protest against the mandatory COVID-19 health pass, brandishing a sign that said “But Who?” and “Traitors” alongside the names of mostly Jewish politics, business, and media personalities.³ “But who?” is an elliptical question and hashtag used by conspiracy theorists to perpetuate the antisemitic trope that Jews control the media. Fristot received a six-month suspended sentence for inciting racial hatred.

How had the NR, a party founded in 1972 on xenophobia and antisemitism by former Nazi collaborators and neo-Nazis, come to be seen as the Jewish state’s ally in France? Why has the NR come to be pro-Israel when historically it has been grounded in antisemitism, and what are the dynamics that came into play behind this seemingly surprising shift? Whether Palestine truly saved France from the threat of rule by a far-right fascist party or not, France’s relationship with both its Jews and Muslims has been strained for a long time. It is worth pointing out the far-right rapprochement to Israel, as well the French Jews rapprochement to the far right in France, which directly impacted definitions of antisemitism depending on the groups deemed responsible for committing acts of antisemitism. The rejection—and rightfully so—of any form of political or cultural antisemitism is striking when compared to the widespread complacency with Islamophobia in both media and political discourse. The next section details the context of antisemitism becoming widely portrayed as a phenomenon intrinsically tied to Muslims, making it easier for the already polarized French public to pinpoint a culprit (Neffati 2021). Thus, the burden of antisemitism is displaced solely on a convenient and already marginalized Other.

Scholars have substantially covered antisemitism’s history in France, analyzing the Christian roots of anti-Judaism in the Middle Ages, the rehabilitation of some of its tropes in the Nazi propaganda of Vichy France in the first half of the twentieth century, and the more recent crises post-Vichy and up to the present day. This work helps us understand how definitions, manifestations, and reactions to antisemitism have changed and the repercussions of these changes on French politics (Winock 2004; Laqueur 2010; Sanos 2012; Bande, Biscarat, and Lalieu 2021; Peace 2009; Arkin 2018; Birnbaum 1992). Reza Zia-Ebrahimi dissected the deep entanglement and intertwined history of antisemitism and Islamophobia that has been forgotten in the contemporary era. Yet, until the twentieth century, antisemitism and Islamophobia were a Western story. Jews and Muslims were jointly targeted, especially in fifteenth-century Spain through early forms of biological racism, and later in nineteenth-century Europe where they were racialized as part of the “Semitic race” and seen as existential threats to Western civilization (Zia-Ebrahimi 2021, 195).

Most recently, in the midst of the Israeli war on Gaza that started on October 7, 2023, a collective of intellectuals in France released an edited volume on the political history of antisemitism in France from 1967 to the present (Bande, Biscarat, and Reichstadt 2024). The authors tried to determine, among other questions, if anti-Zionism is an expression of a new antisemitism and reconsidered the equation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism—more on this point later. In this volume, Alexandre Bande argues that indeed anti-Zionism is sometimes the expression of the questioning of the existence of the state of Israel, which can lead to rendering every Jew responsible for Israel’s policies: it is in this context that anti-Zionism could be considered a form of antisemitism. Bande adds that from 1967, the critique of colonialism morphed into a demonization of Israel and Jews.

Post-1967 Antisemitism?

The Six-Day War in 1967 was chosen by Bande, Pierre-Jérôme Biscarat, and Olivier Reichstadt (2024) as the starting point of their book because it marks a fundamental turning point. Opposed by the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian armies, the Israel Defense Forces took control of the Golan Heights, Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, an occupation condemned by the United Nations (Resolution 242). Avner Cohen (2017) describes 1967 as a war that “transformed Israel from a nation that perceived itself as fighting for survival into an occupier and regional powerhouse.” The Six-Day War explicitly marked the Arab states’ refusal to recognize the existence of Israel, and an anti-Israeli rhetoric intensified within the Soviet bloc, accompanied by a surge of antisemitic acts. As a symbol of this repression, 13,000 Jews left Poland permanently in 1968. This rhetoric also spread to democracies: in 1967, General de Gaulle famously referred to Jews as “a self-assured and domineering elite people” (Aron 2002). While acknowledging that antisemitism in its modern form dates to the turn of the century, with the creation of the state of Israel as the point where antisemitism took another actionable proportion, Bande, Biscarat, and Lalieu (2021) insists 1967 is decisive. The authors highlight a series of events such as the attacks against Israel in 1972 (Lod Airport in Tel Aviv and the Munich Olympics), global support for the Palestinians, and the Non-Aligned Movement conference in 1979, which stated that Zionism is a crime against humanity and facilitated the intertwining of anti-colonialism and the demonization of Zionism. Notably, the United Nations took a stance against Israel in several resolutions, including Resolution 3379 (subsequently repealed in 1991), which declared that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination” (Manor 2010). Following widespread outrage over the desecration of the Carpentras cemetery, the Gayssot Law criminalizing revisionism and negationism (denial of the Holocaust as defined by the Nuremberg trials) was adopted in 1990, marking the start of a shift in the antisemitism/anti-Zionism debate.

Emanuel Debono, editor in chief of DDV (Le Droit de Vivre, in circulation since 1932), the official journal of the LICRA (International League against Racism and Antisemitism), adds that shortly after shows of solidarity with Palestinians in 1967, antisemitism in France took a serious turn, and the number of antisemitic acts exploded (Bande, Biscarat, and Reichstadt 2024). This historical exercise of redefining antisemitism through a process of revisiting its start date leads to the question of whether linking antisemitism to external factors—the “Arab–Israeli conflict”—helps France cope with its own history, whereby antisemitism is no longer a national Franco-French or European problem but a problem that heavily involves French immigrants, specifically North Africans. This way, France need not evoke, nor be reminded of, its Vichy past.

For most of the debates about and commemorations of the Holocaust in France, the aim has always been for France to learn how to not repeat the past and how to move forward in a way that ensures the rhetoric that nurtured antisemitic propaganda in early twentieth century does not prevail again. This is not to say that France does not remember its pivotal role in the most horrific event of twentieth century Europe but rather to say that France does so in a way that says to the world that the nation has learned the lessons of the past and that the contemporary manifestations of an old problem have new and external actors. After all, France struggled to remember and write about its recent past for decades after Vichy (Rousso 1994), and it was not until 1972 that a sense of realization of the full scale of the Vichy regime’s active participation and collaboration with the German Nazi rule took place with the publication of Vichy France by Robert Paxton. It is hard to tell if historians in France are redefining antisemitism, reflecting on trends, or reinforcing them. After all, the authority of these historical accounts comes from their power to persuade as much as their power from being written. For Ludmilla Jordanova (2000), the authority of historical narratives largely hinges on their rhetorical and persuasive efficacy because historical knowledge—whether in academic or public spheres—is principally disseminated and received through writing and its oral adaptations, including scholarly publications, informal manuscripts, and media output. Consequently, interpretative processes such as Bande, Biscarat, and Reichstadt’s (2024) intervention reinforcing 1967 deserve as much critical attention as the source material itself—that is, the exact number or nature of antisemitic acts in and since 1967. The practice of history in this case ought to be understood not solely in relation to the archive but also in relation to the written outputs of historical inquiry and the audiences they engage. The practice, among historians such Band et al., of reinforcing the narrative that tightly links antisemitism in France with the Arab–Israeli conflict, and the recentering of 1967 in that regard, determines how the French public chooses to react to what is indeed happening outside France’s borders—in this case, the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza since October 8, 2023. The frame has been established, the media adopted it, the public consumed it, and we are now at a moment where advocation for Palestinian rights needs to be expressed and navigated in the context of a post-1967 timeline—the burden of responsibility to react to atrocities committed on Palestinians shifted, or rather, lost its motive. That there was a surge of antisemitic acts in 1967 and the following years is not for debate (at least not in this article), but the issue is the way sources are turned into historical narratives about the causality of antisemitism and external factors.

Before we look deeper into the significance of the 1967 date in recent accounts of historical antisemitism, it is equally important to understand the diverse social and political fabric of French Jews. At the start of the twentieth century, the French Jewish population was boosted by a wave of immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe.⁴ After the second world war, France also welcomed large-scale migration of Sephardim from North Africa: between 1944 and 1979, around 240,000 Jewish immigrants arrived in France, with over half coming from Algeria and the remainder from Morocco and Tunisia. Indeed, France is home to the largest Jewish and Muslim communities coexisting side by side outside of Israel, with estimates of 4,000,000 to 6,000,000 Muslims and 500,000 to 600,000 Jews a decade ago (Noiriel 2014, 543). But this postcolonial demographic reality meant that the Jews and Muslims of France grew apart socioeconomically, for French colonization policies “encouraged the Frenchification and upward mobility of many—although certainly not all—North African Jews” (Arkin 2018, 81) and offered them “greater opportunities to acculturate to European social and cultural norms than the Muslim populations amidst which they lived, and this contributed to the formation of new social hierarchies” (Mandel 2014, 4).

This recentering of 1967, though convenient for some, is far from incidental. 1967 changed the Jews of France and their experience of their sense of belonging to the French nation. Joan B. Wolf (2003, 17) underscores the importance of 1967 as “the seminal event in the development of public discourse on the Holocaust” in post-Vichy France and notes that the Jewish community in France, threatened by the Six-Day War and disillusioned with de Gaulle’s non-committed foreign policy, raised concerns in the late 1960s and early 1970s about the potential resurgence of widespread antisemitic violence. In response to perceived threats to Israel’s future, French Jews expressed their concerns as a collective, invoking the Holocaust in the media to convey the gravity of the situation (Wolf 2003). Jews grew to have a voice and be heard by French officials. In fact, Mandel (2014, 4) does specify that “French Jewish spokesmen had a far more developed apparatus with which to articulate a group politics and greater access to national and local officials for promoting the causes important to them.” This advantage was the result of deeper and longer distinct experiences of immigrations between French Jews and French Muslims. Immigrant Jews in the 1960s

joined a long-rooted French Jewish community, which although deeply undermined by Vichy legislation during World War II, had been engaged by the mid-1950s in a decade-long rebuilding process that had given rise to a highly developed communal infrastructure. While encounters between incoming Jews and those already settled in France were never smooth, Jewish migrants to France benefited from institutional structures geared to facilitating their integration and a communal leadership determined to defend Jewish interests, particularly when Jewish lives were understood to be endangered. Arriving Muslims not only had no equivalent infrastructure in place, but also the organizations that sought to speak for them were profoundly distrusted by French authorities as sources of political instability. (Mandel 2004, 4)

Post-1967, only several thousand French Jews a year made aliyah—the basic tenet of Zionism, which is the immigration of Jews from the diaspora to Israel, though “even those who were too firmly rooted in France to ever consider aliyah were forced, by the existence of the State of Israel, to rethink the terms of their own citizenship and admit that there were indeed specific ties, both objective and symbolic, with Israel” (Schnapper and Johnstone 1995, 41). This shift was caused by the trauma of the Holocaust following a century where French Jews had been emancipated for nearly 150 years and “were the most effectively assimilated . . . and shared with fervor in the cult of nationhood founded on the values and the myths of the Revolution” (Schnapper and Johnstone 1995, 40).

No wonder that by the 1980s, French Jews acquired a new sense of identity, illustrated in their feeling of belonging and solidarity with Israel. These strong tie with Israel further complicate the anti-Zionist question, as negative expressions towards Israel became personal negative expressions against Jews themselves, including those living in Europe. David N. Myers (2006) argues that “Zionism has become an important pillar of faith for many modern Jews . . . Israel and its representative institutions have become central foci of identity for many Jews.” According to a report published by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in 2019 on the perspectives of young Jewish Europeans (aged 16–34) living in twelve European Union member states, Israel features strongly in their lives: 89% of those surveyed have visited the country, and 76% have family or relatives living there, while 73% regard “supporting Israel” as important to their sense of Jewish identity.

What Exactly Is New Antisemitism?

In the aforementioned report, 31% of young Jewish Europeans surveyed experienced antisemitic harassment, and 59% of those victims of antisemitic violence described the perpetrators as “someone with a Muslim extremist view.” Lower, but nonetheless significant, proportions also pointed to “someone with a left-wing political view” and, to a lesser extent, “someone with a right-wing political view” (Institute for Jewish Policy Research 2019, 21). In November 2014, two opinion polls were conducted by Ifop (The French Institute of Public Opinion): the first, carried out online, involved a sample of 1,005 people representative of the French population aged 16 and over; the second, carried out face-to-face, involved a sample of 575 people who declared being born into a Muslim family, whether French or not, were living in France, and were aged 16 and over. The aim of the second survey (575 Muslims) was to test the hypothesis of a new form of antisemitism proliferating among Muslims and determine whether Muslims living in France are more or less likely than the national average to hold prejudices against Jews or even to develop an antisemitic perspective. For instance, while 19% of all respondents agreed with the statement that “Jews have too much power in politics,” the rate rose to 51% among Muslims. In 2024 however, one in three French people, irrespective of their ethnic background, believed Israel was “committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza” (YouGov 2024), and a recent poll shows that 74% of the French support Macron, not on his domestic policy but on his position critical of, and plan to impose sanctions on, Israel (Clavier 2025). It remains to be seen if the interviewees in the last two surveys are considered antisemites. The surveys have certainly not been discussed by any of the mainstream media outlets. If you come to consider antisemitism a problem quasi-exclusively linked to an already antagonized minority within the nation, then any legitimate expressions by that minority against what they consider an injustice committed by Israel against Palestinians will be considered antisemitic, or at best ill-faithed. This is usually done in the name of protecting French Jews. But seeing the strong ties of French Jews and Israeli Jews, this protection extends to the latter and gives the French state an exemption from any form of action.

Antisemitism as an offense increasingly associated with Muslims thus came to be known as the “new antisemitism”—first popularized by the publication of La Nouvelle Judeophobie by Pierre Andre Taguieff in 2002, which achieved a certain notoriety in intellectual circles but has become the text of reference on this subject for many in French Jewish groups (Arkin 2018, 81). Two years prior in 2000, concurrently with the start of the second intifada, France witnessed an explosion of antisemitism unprecedented since the Second World War. In that year alone, a total of 744 antisemitic incidents were recorded (520 in the month of October alone) compared to only eighty-two the previous year. This wave of antisemitic acts continued throughout the years that followed and peaked in 2002 and 2004, with 936 and 974 incidents, respectively. In 2002, the Israeli Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rabbi Michael Melchior, described France as the most antisemitic Western country (Vidal 2002), while the American Jewish Congress called on Hollywood stars and producers to consider boycotting the 2002 Cannes Film Festival in protest (Fouché 2002). In July 2004, then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon urged French Jews to move to Israel to escape the growing threat of antisemitism (The Guardian 2004). French media and voices in Israel both helped reinforce the idea that antisemitism is an “old and global story of Muslim hatred for Jews” (Arkin 2018, 81) and further reinforced the “institutionalisation of the anti-Zionism-equals-antisemitism claim” (Zia-Ebrahimi 2023, 259).

New antisemitism, described by Taguieff (2002) as the “ideological metamorphosis of antisemitism from an explicit to an implicit anti-Jewish racism,” has two additional features. First, it is meant to designate equally a group of people who, and an idea whereby, the state of Israel has replaced “the Jew” as the object of antipathy in the eyes of antisemites. In this new dynamic, Jews are targeted not as individuals but as a people and/or nation. In other words, Israel has become, in the words of Brian Klug (2003), the “collective Jew.” In fact, while Klug (2013, 470) aptly demonstrates what makes a text antisemitic, he also explains the many ways “hostility to Zionism (or to the State of Israel as the expression or fulfilment of Zionism)” can be construed as not antisemitic. That many critics of Israel’s policies in Gaza or the West Bank view Israel as “a state whose policies and conduct disturb the peace of the region . . . in and of itself, is not anti-Semitic” (Klug 2013, 476). And in the case where “the State of Israel is disliked purely because it is seen as something imposed on the Arab world by outside forces,” such “hostility directed at the state is not anti-Semitic” (Klug 2013, 477). On the other hand, the dominant media narrative maintains that anti-Zionism is the “detestation and criminalization of Israel, not as a government/state like many others, but as a symbol of something whose very right to exist is even questioned” (Attal 2004). This narrative insists that the internal nature of antisemitism has changed because “the Jew” has been redefined. Antisemitism is thus tightly linked to Zionism, or rather, as per Taguieff’s reading, the hatred of Israel coalesces around a representation of Zionism as the incarnation of absolute evil and the belief that every Jew is a “Zionist.” This dangerous and erroneous representation of antisemitism helps criminalize pro-Palestinianism.

Another consequence of the “recentering” of the Six-Day War and the second feature that designates antisemitism as new is its association with the left, which distinguishes it from supposedly older forms. The “classic” version of antisemitism refers to that which generally derived from the extreme right, motivated by ethnocentric/biological racism, nationalist chauvinism, or religious bigotry. The left, originally sympathetic to Israel, shifted its stance after the occupation of the territories captured during the Six-Day War. Israel equals a colonialist power with imperialist ambitions, and anti-Zionism became ingrained within the discourse of the left, particularly the so-called New Left. The mainstream left in France, embodied by the Socialist Party, has always been split on the issue of Zionism and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; its leadership, however, has generally supported the Israeli Labor Party and the two-state solution. Therefore, the “new antisemitism” of the left has been uniquely associated by some commentators with the extreme left, mainly France Unbowed and causes such as antiracism, anti-imperialism, human rights, solidarity with Palestinians, and opposition to Islamophobia. According to this theory, new antisemitism acquires a paradoxical quality, because it is supposedly perpetrated in the name of just causes. However, rather than those on the left being directly associated with acts of antisemitism, they are accused of promoting “antisemitism by proxy” through their anti-Zionist discourse and pro-Palestine stance. Debono (2023) describes pro-Palestinianism since the second intifada as a “convergence between the extreme right, extreme left, and the Islamists.”

The question of equating anti-Zionism and antisemitism is old and new. In France, as early as 1962, the Holocaust denier Paul Rassinier compared Israel to Nazi Germany, condemning its racism towards the indigenous Palestinian population while asserting that the Holocaust is a myth intended to serve the interests of the Jews and the state of Israel. In Le Monde in 1965, the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch (1965) summarized the close ties between anti-Zionism and antisemitism as follows:

Antizionism is an incredible boon, for it gives us the permission—and even the right, and even the duty—to be antisemitic in the name of democracy! Antizionism is justified antisemitism, finally made accessible to everyone. It is the permission to be democratically antisemitic. And if the Jews themselves were Nazis? That would be wonderful.

The “nazification of Israel,” an example of Holocaust inversion whereby Israeli policy towards Palestinians is compared with Nazi policy regarding Jews, is a stance some anti-Zionists take and are criticized for, more so recently considering the growing consensus that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza (Farrell 2024). In February 2024, Dara Horn, who served on Harvard President Claudine Gay’s antisemitism advisor, commented on American university campuses protests, summarizing antisemitism as follows:

The through line of anti-Semitism for thousands of years has been the denial of truth and the promotion of lies. These lies range in scope from conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial to the blood libel to the currently popular claims that Zionism is racism, that Jews are settler colonialists, and that Jewish civilization isn’t indigenous to the land of Israel. These lies are all part of the foundational big lie: that anti-Semitism itself is a righteous act of resistance against evil, because Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist. Today, the big lie is winning. (Horn 2024)

A few more offenses have been added to the growing list of things critics of Israel are not allowed to do or say, including using the slogan “from the river to the sea,” boycotting Israel, and more broadly and continuously showing solidarity to Palestinians, including among orthodox diaspora Jews.

Anti-Zionists, though not all, are tuned to the decolonial movements, including the Palestinian struggle for liberation. But not every anti-Zionist wants a liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea through the eradication of Israel. A free Palestine can also mean 1) the right of Palestinians to move freely inside the borders; 2) the removal of the wall that by all legal definitions constitutes an apartheid; and 3) an inclusive solution that is not built on ethnic exclusion and segregation. Many anti-Zionists would agree that “it is not bigoted to try to turn a state based on ethnic nationalism into one based on civic nationalism” (Beinart 2019). But the issue with the critics of anti-Zionism, whether by Zionists or not, is that their arguments misrepresent, overgeneralize, and for the most part are anti-anti-Zionism absolutist.⁵ No amount of criticism of Israel is unoffensive. American campuses protests (were) echoed (by) similar ones in Europe and France, and even though they faced similar censorship, French campuses remained in the most part peaceful (Marchais 2024).

Anti-Zionism Is a Jewish Tradition

Yet, might there be an unseen benefit in keeping Israel and antisemitism entangled? It is true that the framing of antisemitism in relation to critiques of Israel ignores diaspora Jewish identities and the reality that not every Jew in the world aspires to be part of Israel and the Zionist project. Equating anti-Zionism and antisemitism assumes critics of Israel are not able to discern that not every Jew is or wants to be part of Israel and that not every critic of Israel is unsympathetic to the idea of a “Jewish refuge from persecution” (Klug 2013, 481). In other words, a person could be “hostile to the ideology of Jewish nationalism but sympathetic to a different version of Zionism” (Klug 2013, 481). Far more common than being anti-Zionist and antisemitoc is being a Zionist and antisemitic (Zia-Ebrahimi 2023). It is in fact harder to find an alt-right, far-right, white supremacist group with an antisemitic history that is not pro-Zionist, both in Europe and the United States (Zia-Ebrahimi 2023). Yet, keeping anti-Zionism strictly connected to Israel is what guarantees we do not cross the line to the realm of hostility to Jews. A similar question was asked by David N. Myers (2006) in his search for a “principled antizionism.” In his exploration of Jewish anti-Zionism, Myers offered two criteria that could help in filtering out the antisemites from Israel’s critics: exclusion and group stigmatization. The first criterion of exclusion presupposes that criticism of Israel becomes an exclusive—or obsessive—exercise that focuses on Israel’s breaches and transgressions while ignoring other state-sponsored violence of a similar or greater scale elsewhere. Many proclaimed anti-Zionists, including in the Arab world, do voice equally strong criticism towards countries that commit human rights violations, even their own governments. Though, for the sake of argument, there is no requirement for some sort of intersectionality or transnationalism in the fight against authoritarianism, and there is nothing morally reprehensible about picking one cause to defend. In fact, a fixation on Israel’s apartheid policies in the West Bank and its unjust treatment of Palestinians could be justified among people in the region and neighboring Arab countries as symptomatic of racialized policies that have for a very long time tainted West–Global South relations. Adopting an antiracist lens for one’s criticism of Israel should be an expected outcome.

Group stigmatization, the second criterion advanced by Myers (2006), posits that when criticism of Israel moves from focusing on the actions of its political leaders to attacking the character of Jews, whether in Israel or in the diaspora, a boundary has been crossed. Timothy Peace (2009) clarifies: “[I]t should be conceivable that someone could oppose the existence of Israel and not bear any prejudice against Jews, just as one could hate Jews but still (paradoxically) be a fervent supporter of the Zionist cause.” Certain elements of the French extreme right could be considered antisemitic Zionists because they would rather see Jews in Israel than in France. The majority of those on the left in France are, given that they support a two-state solution at best and a one-state solution for Israeli–Palestinian coexistence at the minimum, not even anti-Zionists, let alone antisemitic. The possible criticism that could be levelled against members of the left is that their stance in opposition to Israel might inadvertently encourage antisemitism by proxy, something that of course can be neither proven nor measured. The extreme right still poses more of a threat to Jews than the extreme left (Peace 2009).

Myers highlights Jewish anti-Zionism that has internally focused on the question of aliyah at the turn of the (twentieth) century. But Zia-Ibrahimi has revisited a history of Jewish anti-Zionism that tackles the question of new antisemitism head on. Prior to the emergence of the Palestinian question, one of the dominant currents in Jewish historiography exalted the historical coexistence between Jews and Muslims, a response to the failed promises of Jewish emancipation in modern Europe that idealized the prosperity Jews had known under Muslim rulers (Zia-Ibrahimi 2021). Notable to this historiography, which conglomerated in the school of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (the Science of Judaism), was a narrative of harmonious coexistence that effaced periods of subjugation (Zia-Ibrahimi 2021). This approach was abandoned by the dominant trends in Jewish thought in the twentieth century, both in Israel and in the diaspora, and the rich and complex diasporic histories of Oriental Jews were retroactively reinterpreted as nothing more than a prolonged “antisemitic prelude” to Zionism (Zia-Ibrahimi 2021). The Palestinian question compelled many Jewish intellectuals to rethink Jewish–Muslim coexistence, which played an ideological role in facilitating the colonization of Palestine and the marginalization of its indigenous inhabitants. At the moment the dispossession of native Palestinians was unfolding, it became unfavorable to depict their presumed ancestors as architects of inclusive societies that had treated Jews relatively well. Doing so risked casting the Zionist project in a negative light (Zia-Ibrahimi 2021).

Anti-Zionism Is the Anti-France

Vicki Caron (2005) highlights the uniqueness of French antisemitism in producing yet another trope at the end of the nineteenth century: a link between antisemitism and anti-republicanism, which emerged as a result of the Third Republic’s new political reality, illustrated in the coalition of Jews, Protestants, and Freemasons. This coalition prompted opponents of the republic to focus their attention on these groups. Consequently, the Dreyfus Affair was more than just the wrongful accusation of a Jewish individual. Because Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, had reached the upper ranks of the state—specifically the army’s general staff—the attacks directed at him quickly intensified into a comprehensive assault on the republic itself. This situation caused the “Jewish question” to embody the core principles championed by the republic: secular governance, equal rights for all citizens under the law regardless of religious or ethnic origins, and the opportunity for individuals to advance based on merit. Many resented these ideals, for they helped the social mobility of “the wrong groups,” and the resentment led Jews to be viewed as the ultimate representation of the despised state (Caron 2005). For one of the leading racist and royalist theorists in the beginning of the twentieth century, Charles Maurras, “anti-France” referred to “the four confederates”: the Protestants, the Jews, the immigrants, and the Freemasons. For the antisemite Léon Daudet, “anti-France” meant the “Jewish–German espionage” and the supporters of Dreyfus. Under the Vichy regime, Philippe Pétain used the term “anti-France” to refer to Jews, communists, and Freemasons. A Pétainist leaflet from 1944 notably states that “the conspiracy of anti-France is the global dream of Jewish sadism” (Réseau International 2024). The concept had concrete consequences: roundups, torture, and deportations for groups deemed to be anti-France. “Anti-France” is essentially a far right concept to identify an internal enemy; if in the past it targeted Jews, today it is the left and Muslims. Its use in 2024 is extremely serious. Macronists have just rehabilitated it. Pisca Thevenot, Macron’s government spokesperson, responded to Ersilia Soudais from France Unbowed, who expressed concerns about Islamophobia in France, saying: “I think there is a gold medal that we forgot to give, that of the indecency and of the anti-France, for the France Unbowed party” (Le Point 2024). The night before, Maud Brégeon, another deputy from Macron’s Renaissance party tweeted directly to Ersilia Soudais: “[Y]our communist and anti-France communitarian propaganda does not take a break?” Is it any surprise that the tropes used to vilify Jews in the past are today used to vilify the left and, by proxy, Muslims?

A few issues were raised in this short article. First, untangling antisemitism and Islam must go hand in hand with the untangling of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. In their attempt to protect Jews, the French establishment is victimizing Palestinians and stigmatizing pro-Palestinians. The way antisemitism is debated and contextualized in France has become intrinsically bound to Muslims, while the RN is no longer considered an antisemitic party but rather a party of antisemites (a few bad apples rather than a real systemic problem). Marine Le Pen has been recently described by left-wing politicians as a figure of tolerance and peace towards French Jews. This, coupled with a generalized complacency and mainstreaming of Islamophobia, risks harming legitimate efforts to counter antisemitism. The fortunate timing of Bande, Biscarat, and Reichstadt’s (2024) collection at the start of the atrocious and unprecedented war in Gaza, and the ensuing crisis in Europe, further legitimized the “new antisemitism” thesis, offering an intellectual cachet. The 1967 recentering illustrates the dangers of extra-academic consumption of the past. This stems from the prevalent inclination among non-specialist history enthusiasts and the public in general to place trust in the opinions of experts—especially highly articulate and intellectually esteemed academic historians. This is further problematized when such perspectives and historical narratives are conveyed through professionally produced media, such as prime-time television programs, especially in times of crises such as the current one. By virtue of the unaccounted-for motivated reasoning among audiences and consumers of both historical texts and their media adaptations, the need for responsibility and reflexivity among historians becomes more vital. The profound, even if unintended, consequences of these “scholarly” interventions on memory and public debate must be accounted for.