Anti-Semitism is on the rise and we are looking elsewhere. 1,676 anti-Semitic acts recorded in 2023, an increase of more than 1,000% in one year. And yet, in the middle of the European campaign, the subject remains behind, as if eclipsed by the media strike force of pro-Palestinian activists. Bernard-Henri Lévy is indignant: “The major Republican lists – Renaissance, Les Républicains, the Socialist Party – Place publique – do not put anti-Semitism at the top of their political agenda.”
This is how to challenge the candidates on the explosion of anti-Semitism in Europe, the philosopher arranged to meet this Monday, June 3 in the evening at the Théâtre Antoine. The event is organized by the literary magazine “La Règle du Jeu”, and brings together around thirty political leaders, intellectuals, writers and artists. Including the presidents of the two houses of Parliament, Yaël Braun-Pivet and Gérard Larcher, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo and the former Prime Minister, Manuel Valls. But also the rabbi Delphine Horvilleur, the essayist Yann Moix, the writer Justine Lévy, the actors Sandrine Kiberlain and Yvan Attal, and even the president of Crif Yonathan Arfi.
The ignorant youth
Everyone responded positively and seriously to the invitation. And for good reason, “Europe is on the edge of the abyss” repeated Anne Hidalgo in concert with the journalist and essayist Caroline Fourest, who is also among the guests: “Anti-Semitism is definitely not residual: it overflows “. University campuses, in particular. “We do not do major studies to confuse a terrorist attack and a war, however deadly it may be, which only responds to it,” continues the editorial director of the magazine Franc-Stireur. Thunderous applause, standing ovation.
Just before her, the writer Christine Angot mocked an elitist youth who confuses “massacre” and “genocide”, “anti-Semitism and “racism”, or even “Shoah” and “conflicts”. So is there anyone at Sciences Po to tell them that indifferentiation under a single word leads to indifference? And that removing the word anti-Semitism from their mouths is negationism?” asks the author of the Medici Prize cynically, The Journey to the East. And to break down a door: “If Jean-Marie Le Pen said today that the Shoah was a detail of History, that would pose no problem.”
LFI, the face of a “new anti-Semitism”
Around 8:45 p.m., the first comments poured out from the ranks of spectators. “I really liked Christine Angot, she was really fair.” It must be said that the hate letter sent to the President of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, who opened the evening, still resonates in this theater from the second half of the 19th century. “April 19, 2024: Hello Jewish whore, too bad your plane didn’t crash. But when they went around again, that word must speak to you. We’re going to finish the job of 45. Eliminate the Jewish vermin. We has progressed in technique. We don’t forget you, nor your family.”
Silence of indignation in the room. In a low voice, imbued with solemnity, the fourth person in the State recounts having filed no less than forty-eight complaints for death threats or contempt. Twenty-four are clearly motivated by anti-Semitism. “To the old anti-Semitism of the extreme right is now added a hatred of the Jew disguised in the scarf of leftism and the Palestinian cause,” continued Yaël Braun-Pivet, in the wake of Gérard Larcher, affirming that today “anti-Semitism is nourished by other sources, those of radicalized Islam and the extreme left.”
A few lines later, the President of the Senate gives this “extreme left” a physical and moral incarnation: Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France insoumise, who, “blinded by their anti-Zionism for electoral considerations, have lost all bearings and have placed on the margins of the values of the Republic. And to echo with the host of the evening who cheers up a party “populated by people who speak like Edouard Drumont, like Maurice Barrès”. In short, “like anti-Semites”.
The well-hidden game of the far right
However, for a long time, “anti-Semitic” and “left” sounded like two oxymorons. But to be convinced of this would be to ignore the history of “traditional French anti-Semitism”, according to the formula of Bernard Henri Lévy who specifies to L’Express: “Those of the Insoumis who scream the loudest are not only Machiavellian cynics who try to flirt with the voices of the suburbs, these are anti-Semites who are part of a long French tradition which is that of socialist anti-Semitism, a current which did not wait for immigrants to take shape.
A hatred of the Jew, which coexisted for decades with the extreme right, which would never really have disappeared. “We do not stop being anti-Semitic by decree. Anti-Semitism has contaminated and still contaminates the RN. We do not get rid of it by a political office decision: it is slow, patient work, which consists of going at the end of his own confusion”, describes Bernard Henry Lévy. Incisive, Caroline Fourest denounces “the party of racists who are only worried about anti-Semitism when it comes from Muslims or Muslim Brothers […] and who continues to cultivate in his back room the anti-Semitism of yesteryear.”
Here then are two anti-Semitisms put back to back. Both “very well organized”, notes the former Minister of National Education Jean-Michel Blanquer, “unlike the Republican, Democratic and humanist forces”. But the clock is ticking, it’s five minutes to midnight. With her nose to her watch, Christine Angot knows it, and summons Philippe Sollers to sound the alarm: “She was there, she is still there, we feel her little by little coming to the surface, moldy France is back. “