To the Jews of France

If, as 2027 approaches, we are speaking out as French Jews, it is because we are living through a turning point. Fascism is rising in a society caught in political, moral, and historical turmoil. Our concerns are at once shared by all French people and particular to us. Faced with this threat, we intend to act today both as citizens and as Jews.

Trapped

For nearly three years, the Israeli government’s policies have weighed on our lives like an intimate catastrophe. Slaughtering and razing Gaza, expelling populations from the West Bank, striking Lebanon, and more: how can Jews support this, and why do these crimes rebound onto us? Our governments support Israel unconditionally and guarantee it total impunity, making France complicit in what most experts agree to call an ongoing genocide in Gaza. The major media give a platform only to Israel’s Jewish supporters, closing off the space for those who have doubts or who object. We ourselves fear that a new antisemitism, tethered to Israel’s policies, will feed on the legitimate outrage these crimes provoke and be turned back against us. So here we are, boxed in: called to answer for a state from which no one will grant us the slightest distance, and cut off, little by little, from the rest of society.

Since October 7, 2023, political leaders from the center-left to the far right have vowed to make the fight against antisemitism a national priority. But they are not fighting it: they are using it. They lump us together with Israeli policy and reduce us to an essence, deliberately ignoring the great political diversity of our communities. They anoint the CRIF as our representative body, when in fact it carries the voice of the Israeli government - a voice in which we cannot recognize ourselves. Worse, they turn a blind eye to the antisemitism thriving on the far right - where the classic antisemitic prejudices are most alive.

In our diversity - believers or not, attached or not to a tradition, a memory, a family history, a country of origin - we are pushed back, against our will, into an imposed identity, and associated with crimes we do not support. Election after election, the “Jewish” question is summoned and antisemitism brandished as a weapon: for 2027, the trap is already set. It is time to speak in our own name, and to stop letting political discourse and its propaganda define us.

Racism and Us

Antisemitism kills, and every antisemitic act deserves the national outrage it provokes - as does every racist act. Yet the flood of Islamophobic acts and rhetoric running through French society provokes neither the same outrage nor the slightest political response. This ranking of victims, instilled by political leaders and the media, is a poison. We are constantly played off against one another: “defending Jews” becomes the pretext for persecuting Muslims, and the stigmatizing of Muslims in turn feeds the conflations that leave us exposed. In a system where other forms of racism are erased, the exceptional status granted to us puts us in danger. That is why we want a rigorous antiracist politics, one that includes the fight against antisemitism without ranking these struggles against each other.

What is more, those who speak in our name - politicians, columnists, intellectuals - also manufacture a charge of false antisemitism in order to silence political opposition, the voices for peace, and above all the “gauche de rupture” (left that breaks with the status quo, not center left), their only real adversary. These false accusations know no limits: they have targeted Holocaust survivors, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the Pope, the UN, the Red Cross, MSF, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, UNICEF, UNRWA, the International Criminal Court, and more.

The Fascization of France

As 2027 comes into view, the political realignments are taking shape.

On one side, the far right - Le Pen, Bardella - claims to protect us; in reality, it cultivates the deep roots of French antisemitism, which a demonstrative support for Israel merely whitewashes. We know this lineage: from Maurras to Vichy, from Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Holocaust denial to Zemmour’s rehabilitation of Pétain. Far from being consigned to the past, this antisemitism still shows itself today, in antisemitic conspiracy theories and in neo-Nazi demonstrations tolerated by the state.

On the other side, the liberal bloc - from Sarkozy to Hollande and Macron - has failed for twenty years. Under promises of progress, they have attacked our social system, hollowed out our public services, ignored the ecological emergency, and trampled our democracy. In doing so, they normalize the far right by adopting its racist rhetoric and serve, as history has already shown, as a stepping stone for fascists.

Neither one can suit us, as Jews of the left: with both alike, the same unconditional support for Israel, the same liberal and antisocial austerity. The danger is not only that the far right may come to power in 2027: it is that it is already installed culturally - in the language of columnists, in the capitulations of the centrist bloc, socialists included, in the criminalizing of every antiracist, antiwar, or environmentalist opposition. This normalization is itself one face of the fascization of France.

Our Particular Responsibility

Many of us, in speaking out, want to make visible a reality that others are trying to erase: there are Jews in France who refuse to let antisemitism be used to silence any criticism of Israel or any solidarity with Palestinians. Jews deeply committed to justice, to equal rights, to international law. Our words count precisely because they break the conflations. One can be Jewish, alarmed by the rise of antisemitism, and still refuse the crimes committed in Gaza, as well as the Israeli state’s headlong colonial flight. That is why there are attempts to disqualify us: our voice cracks this whole ideological construction.

Our commitment does not come from nowhere: it continues a long history, that of Jews who have taken part, everywhere, in the struggles for emancipation, from the labor movement to antiracist struggles. It is this universalist and humanist tradition that we claim as ours: you do not protect Jews for the long term by cutting them off from others, but by fighting every form of racism together. And a truly protective society is also one that defends its public services, refuses destitution, and takes the ecological catastrophe seriously. This is what we hold to: not an exception that isolates us, but a justice that connects us. In the face of this danger, we need a “gauche de rupture” (left that breaks with the status quo) capable not only of resisting fascization but of carrying this project of emancipation. That is why we are doing our part, here and now.