[BIL’IN, WEST BANK]
Every Friday, locals of this run-down Palestinian village in the West Bank gather with international human rights activists and the rare Israeli to protest the wall built to separate Bil’in from the adjacent Jewish settlement of Modi’in Illit. A Swiss ambulance stands by to treat protesters hit with tear gas or rubber bullets as they feebly chant, “One, two, three four, occupation no more. Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a fascist state.” But this Friday in July, the protesters come with another message. Dressed in cotton white t-shirts streaked with red, they march in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza.
In Paris, the spray-painted cotton resistance is a popular import. Since the most recent Gaza war was announced, Parisians in solidarity with Gazan Palestinians have marched to protest Israeli aggression on civilian homes, hospitals, and schools, donning the same hastily made shirts.
But the protests in France have taken on an ugly hue. While the majority of pro-Palestinian marches are exactly that—calls for the end of the war in Gaza and the end of the Israeli occupation—a number of French protesters proudly chant, “La France aux Français! Juifs, Sionistes Hors de France!” (“France is for the French! Jews, Zionists Get Out of France!”). One man holds a sign reading, “Liberté, Egalité, Dieudonné,” lauding the anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, whose claims that Zionism is an effort to take over the world have prompted fandom and disgust alike. In Paris, hate runs high.
Why has anti-Semitism surged in Parisian pro-Palestinian rallies, endangering the legitimate effort for Palestinian statehood?
The anatomy of French anti-Semitism is ultra-nationalism. Chants of “La France aux Français!” would sound fitting to an eighteenth or nineteenth century French Jew. That the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen allowed French Jews to be emancipated (which they were, by 1791) is misleading. In supporting their right to citizenship at the December 1789 debate on emancipation, Count Stanislaus Marie famously quipped, “The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.” He followed this statement by demanding that Jews must become French, and that if a Jew should refuse to assimilate, he must be expelled.
This nationalist-justified conception of Jews revealed that during the rise of the nation-state, the French elite saw Jews as a separate nation. But assimilation would not fix this “problem” in later centuries, contrary to Stanislaus’s claim. Although assimilated Jews became integrated into the upper echelons of French society, the late-nineteenth century Dreyfus Affair—in which a French Jewish captain was falsely accused of spying and was publicly degraded to shouts of “À bas le Juif!” (“Down with the Jew!”)—shattered any surety that a Jew could be a Frenchman.
Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, believed that a separate Jewish state would be the end of anti-Semitism, as a Jewish state would eliminate the European discomfort with a nation living among nations. But today, the minority of protesters who have turned some pro-Palestinian rallies into hostile anti-Semitic headliners demonstrates that the existence of Israel alone would not extinguish anti-Semitism. In nineteenth-century France, anti-Judaism was motivated by resentment towards a separate nation dwelling in the streets of Metz and Paris. Contemporary French anti-Semitism extends the logic, holding Jewish citizens of France responsible for the actions of the concrete nation, Israel.
Yet even the continuous nationalist aspects of French anti-Semitism do not fully explain the source of tension. Partaking also in the upheaval is a contemporary French tendency to abuse democratic concepts to persecute disfavored groups. This is evidenced by France’s 2004 passage of the infamous Law Number 2004-228. Law 228 purportedly enforces laïcité (separation of church and state) by banning any conspicuous religious symbols or garb in primary and secondary schools in order to promote a secular society. Not only is this very law paradoxical to laïcité (for it uses the state’s power to determine public religious practice), but it has also promoted Islamophobia, framing public religiosity (e.g. wearing a hijab) as resistance to the French state.
As 228 engendered Islamophobia, certain French protesters have over-extended free speech to engender anti-Semitism. The relationship between hate speech and French society is complicated by the fact that free speech is perhaps the most beholden of French rights. In an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, French sociologist Michel Wieviorka noted,
Il y a des gens qui ne sont pas spécialement au courant de la situation israélo-palestinienne. Ils baignent pourtant dans cette culture des médias, de l’Internet et des réseaux sociaux avec parfois l’idée que les Juifs sont contre la culture de la liberté d’expression, affirmant qu’être antisémite est un acte criminel.
There are people who are not expert in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but are immersed in this culture of media, of the Internet, and of social networks. They sometimes have the idea that Jews, asserting that anti-Semitism is a criminal act, are against the [French] culture of liberty of expression.
Not only are anti-Semitic opinions often veiled in pro-Palestinian sentiment, but anti-Semitism also has become perceived by some as a legitimate position on the spectrum of free speech. As such, the stoppage of hate speech can only be perceived, by French extremists, as a slippery slope to complete censorship. Indeed, protests spiked after French President François Hollande ordered police to ban potentially violent demonstrations. These trends indicate an ominous failure to recognize nuance within French society.
To be sure, there are a number of moving parts to this story. To treat all protesters as subscribers to primordial anti-Semitism is to ignore those pro-Palestinian activists who condemn anti-Semitism while condemning the war in Gaza and to submit to the very same failure to recognize nuance. And pro-Israelis in France have had their own violent factions. In a number of cases, pro-Palestinian demonstrations were peaceful until disrupted by members of the Ligue de Défense Juive, the Jewish Defense League. According to Sammy Gozhlan, president of the National Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, the militant Jewish group has gained the “sympathy of the base [French Jewish] community” by “protecting” it, but the LDJ’s tactics and ideology place them under the umbrella of terrorism. The pro-Israel group has historically attacked and celebrated the killing of Palestinians, French Muslims, and French Jews who disagree with its ideology. Aligned with Meir Kahane, the late founder of the American Jewish Defense League, the organization’s actions have prompted the Ministry of the Interior to consider banning it.
The clashes in Paris are a mess of conflations: French Jews conflated as Israelis, Israelis as Netanyahu’s government, pro-Palestinians as anti-Israelis, anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. These conflations are fatal, given how nuanced the situation is: even as a minority uses criticism of Israeli policy as a way to bolster their anti-Semitism, staunch supporters of Israel misinterpret dissent against specific Israeli policies as anti-Semitism and apply broad strokes to human rights activists. Ultimately, if pro-Palestinian sentiments are too consistently associated with anti-Semitic rhetoric, Palestinian nationalism will lose the moral prerequisite it needs for public support, and, muddled and stigmatized by these assumptions, will become a noble project yet again postponed.
Faced with dichotomous representations of domestic and international conflicts that are anything but black-and-white, a number of Frenchmen and -women are tallying and choosing sides. Meanwhile, violence in Paris continues, a shoddy translation of the conflict in Palestine. French police release tear gas. Ambulances stand by.
Photo credit: Flickr / Frog and Onion