French Jews

Key Findings:

The author examines the response of French Jewry to an uptick in antisemitism in 1967 (post the Six Day War). The Jews of the Diaspora facing antisemitism today, post 7 October, can borrow wisdom from this moment in Jewish history. 

Not long after the Holocaust, the Six Day War posed the threat of another extermination of Jews. Israel faced the threat of its surrounding neighbors in the Middle East, who declared “no Jew should remain alive”. Israel won the war, an almost impossible victory, but not without international backlash. 

The rhetoric around Jews and Israel saw a shift over this period of time, with an increase in antisemitism and anti-Zionism, its new counterpart. In 1969, the emergence of Yasser Arafat as leader of the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) added fuel to the fire, pedaling a rhetoric that painted Zionism as “racist,” “fascist,” “fanatic,” and “expansionist.” Eventually this rhetoric culminated in the UN General Assembly’s 1975 resolution that declared “Zionism is a form of racism”.

President Charles de Gaulle made public antisemitic statements in response to the war, and placed an embargo on weapons to Israel, which was continued by his successor, Pompidou. Anti-Zionist organizations started to take root in France, and pro-Palestinian demonstrations handed out copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a widely known antisemitic text. 

The Jews of France responded to the rise in antisemitism “by asserting their Jewishness without sacrificing their claim to France’s promise of universal dignity.” This meant championing the civil rights of all people, without renouncing their Jewish identity, their connection to Israel, or their connection to France. 

LICRA, the International League against Racism and Antisemitism, was a key factor in the fight against antisemitism in France at the time. This organization fought to counter racism against marginalized peoples internationally after WWII, and viewed the fight against antisemitism and the fight against any form of racism as one and the same. Their writers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, worked to expose anti-Zionism as antisemitism in their publications, and condemned the hateful ideology of the PLO while still supporting the existence of a Palestinian state. 

In their work to combat the antisemitism that surrounded them, the author states that the Jews of France “dissected and flatly rejected the linguistic ruses of the day, understanding that the anti-Zionism of the Third World and the European Left was little more than antisemitism cloaked in a different kind of duplicity.”

The Jews of France knew that the biggest threat to the Jewish people was not physical, but ideological. That is, the threat of antisemitism itself, and its morphing, ever-changing nature. They worked with tenacity to counter these ideologies and found the “balance between a true antiracism that opposed injustice and an unwavering support for Israel’s existence”. The author argues that this approach can and should be adopted by Jewish Diaspora today in the wake of the international rise of antisemitism post 7 October.