These are figures collected by the National Directorate of Territorial Intelligence (DNRT) at the Ministry of the Interior, which L’Express was able to consult exclusively. These reports, relating to xenophobic attacks in France between January and June 2024, attest to the extent of anti-Semitism in the expression of hatred. While Jews account for less than 1% of the French population, anti-Semitic attacks now represent 57% of all xenophobic attacks in the country. A staggering disproportion, known to police statisticians, but often killed for fear of fueling victim competition. One year after October 7, it reached an unprecedented level. It is important to face it.
The French thermometer of hatred is located in Beauvau. In the first half of 2024, 887 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded, including 563 attacks on people, an increase of 192% compared to the first half of 2023. Nearly five per day, including physical attacks, insults, threats or degradations involving resulted in a police procedure, such as a complaint, or legal procedure.
Racist acts, linked to the origin of a person or a community, also increased slightly, by 10%; Beauvau counts 573 in six months, or three per day. The same goes for anti-Muslim incidents, up 5%; there are 101 of them, with the exception that when an attack has an Arabophobic character, but there is no explicit question of Islam, it is classified among racist attacks. Anti-Christian acts present a particularity: they concern the vast majority (92%, that is to say 312 acts) of attacks on property, that is to say damage to religious buildings such as churches. 29 attacks against people with an exclusive anti-Christian motive were also noted, in six months.
“Contrary to what official propaganda says, anti-Semitism remains residual in France,” asserted Jean-Luc Mélenchon on his blog on June 2. A peremptory allegation made with a wet nose and completely out of place when we make this heavy observation, like a stone in the stomach: more than one in two xenophobic attacks in France concerns a Jew. For twenty-five years, the curve of anti-Semitic events has continued to show an ever steeper slope. In 1992, only 139 anti-Jewish acts were reported during the year; in 2016, a year after the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher massacres, there were 606.
Evolution of anti-Semitism
© / Mathias Penguilly / L’Express
September 2017, L’Express devotes its front page to the “new malaise of French Jews”; the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah is alarmed in a report that “French Jews suffer a third of racist acts”. A proportion that is now obsolete, as hatred against Jews has soared further. The annual total of anti-Semitic incidents seven years ago has now been reached in four months. That of 1999, a historic low point (69 annual acts), in two weeks.
Where does this growing hatred come from? The fact that anti-Semitic acts have increased by 192%, that is to say a three-fold increase, since October 7, also since the bombings in Gaza, should raise awareness about what excites these impulses. In the words of many aggressors, the relationship with Palestine is transparent. At the beginning of March, in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, a 61-year-old man was beaten up as he left a synagogue. “Are you the one who kills people in Gaza?” the attacker asks him. He gets three years in prison. In Gennevilliers, in April, a Jewish woman was kidnapped and threatened with death by a man with the “desire to avenge Palestine”. In June, a 12-year-old girl was raped by three teenagers of the same age. They called her a “dirty Jew”, accused her of hiding her religion and being against Palestine, a photo of a burned Israeli flag was found in the phone of one of the perpetrators.
“I wanted to attack Jews”
As early as 2002, academic Pierre-André Taguieff spoke of “the new Judeophobia”, an anti-Semitism driven by hatred of Israel, which had become the fight of part of the Arab-Muslim world. In certain cases, this community motivation is mixed with an Islamist discourse. On July 17, Derek Riant, on radicalized S file, was arrested in Sarthe while he was on his way to commit an attack. He tried to slit the throat of a taxi driver “while making remarks favorable to Hamas” and “his Muslim brothers”, the victim will testify. “I wanted to attack Jews […] I would have come across a guy from Crif, I would have killed him,” he confirmed in police custody. On August 24, El-Hussein Kenfri set fire to the Grande-Motte synagogue (Hérault), armed with a Palestinian flag and an ax whose handle he covered with an inscription on Palestine and the blood of Muslims “El-Hussein Kenfri has been radicalized in the practice of his religion for several months and has also been nourishing it for a long time. , a hatred of Jews, more specifically focused on the situation in Palestine”, then specifies the national anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office. Since 2006, eleven Jews have been murdered for anti-Semitic reasons.
This violence also tells of the equal sign that these minds draw between “Israelis”, “Zionists” and “Jews”. At least in certain cases, this confusion seems skillfully maintained, such as on September 8, during the Parisian demonstration organized by several pro-Palestinian associations, in which several parliamentarians from France Insoumise participated. If the slogan only targets the Israeli government, at the podium, the activist Ramy Shaath evokes the “Zionists”, in Arabic, according to the writer Omar Youssef Souleimane, present on site. Twice, he even speaks of “Jews”, a term that Omar Alsoumi, leader of Emergency Palestine, translates as “Israelis”. On October 11, 2023, in Marseille, during a demonstration organized in particular by the local CGT, the usual slogans about Israel and Zionism gave way, for a moment, to a cruder accusation. “The Jews, the Jews, you are the terrorists”, was uttered, according to the testimony of Pascale Léglise, director of public liberties at the Ministry of the Interior, before the Council of State, on 17 october.
As early as 2014, while refuting Pierre-André Taguieff’s thesis on the “new Judeophobia”, which she considered not very rigorous, researcher Nonna Mayer had raised the existence of “contact anti-Semitism”, “in neighborhoods where communities intersect.” This diagnosis seems more valid than ever, although it has never really been taken seriously by the authorities. In 2016, in Next year in Jerusalem? (Editions de l’Aube), Jérôme Fourquet and Sylvain Manternach demonstrate how French Jews fled certain neighborhoods, in Saint-Denis, Aulnay-sous-Bois or Villepinte (Seine-Saint-Denis). On February 20, 2019, Emmanuel Macron announced, during the annual Crif dinner, the carrying out of an audit on the number of Jewish children who leave public schools. As the L’Express investigation reveals in our October 3 report, this study has still not been carried out four years later.
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