The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) persistently bombed the besieged Gaza Strip for more than a month, with the increasing scale of massacres against children and women. Global protests, particularly in Western capitals, challenge politicians’ unwavering support for Israeli atrocities in Palestine. Thus, the United States and the European Union claim to have the highest standards regarding basic principles of international law.
On the contrary, instead of taking the path of reason, the so-called “collective” West acted emotionally, creating a sacrosanct alliance against Palestinians to fight “darkness.” A narrative that enhanced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s argument, making his unjust war on Palestinians a religious one, empowering the racists’ and the messianic point that it is, in fact, what is taking place in Palestine: It is a war between the “cross” and the “crescent.”
This apocalyptic scenario is dear to the messianic government in Israel, the radical evangelical groups in the U.S. and the extremist far-right in Europe. However, the real question is about a just resistance to harsh occupation and acculturation processes that Palestinians have been going through for seven decades in their occupied land.
This takes us to the question of why the West is unconditionally supporting Israel. In this context, for instance, France. What happened to France’s balanced Arab policy? Where does France stand today in this war?
Diplomatically, Paris has had a balanced Arab foreign policy in the last five decades and positioned itself as a credible voice for peace and security in the Middle East. Still, this policy was gradually declining because of the rise of the Arab and Muslim anti-sentiment in France – where the extremist far-right parties, media and political elite, since French President Emmanuel Macron’s tenure and especially since the appointment of Gerald Moussa Darmin as the powerful interior minister in 2020 is shaping anti-Arab and Muslim narratives and policies. So, what is left of France’s Arab foreign policy? Only the l’Institut du Monde Arabe! (Here is a reference to the cultural organization founded in Paris in 1980 by France, with 18 Arab countries reaching out to the Arab world’s cultural and spiritual values).
Two top high positions in the French Republic, French Senate President Gerard Larcher, the number two in the republic ranking after the president, and Yael Braun-Pivet, the National Assembly president who ranks fourth in the republic, did call for a march against anti-Semitism on Sunday, following solid critics against Macron’s unlimited support for Israel. He is like all his Western leader counterparts in light of the Oct. 7 Al-Aqsa Flood Operation reactions and said Israel has the right to defend itself.
In line with the “emotional diplomacy” approach led by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the president of France’s National Assembly, accompanied by a delegation of French MPs, made a significant visit to Israel to express full support. However, it is noteworthy that Eric Zemmour, the leader of the extremist far-right party Reconquest!, visited Israel, despite his past glorification of Marshal Philippe Petain, who played a minimized role in the Jewish deportations during the Nazi occupation of France (1940-1944).
Nonetheless, the participation of the far-right National Rally (RN) Party and Reconquest! embarrassed the center-left, weak Socialist Party, who were not happy to march with the extreme far-right party leaders. The left party leaders like Insoumise France (LFI) and the French Communist Party (PCF) argued Jean Marie Le Pen, the National Front (FN), the Holocaust denier, and his party today RN and his admirer Zemmour (who is France’s Jean Le Pen of the '80s) have no place in such a “republican” gathering.
Tensions escalated in France, home to significant Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe, following the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on Oct. 7. The subsequent month has witnessed Israeli revenge and collective punishment, revealing evident ethnic cleansing in Gaza and harsh occupation in the West Bank. Since the operation, French authorities, as reported by Darmanin, have registered 857 anti-Semitic acts.
Prosecutors have investigated a possible Russian connection to more than 200 Stars of David spray painted on buildings in France, where anti-Semitic acts have been sharply rising, according to a statement from the prosecutor’s office in Paris.
In 1894, Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, a career army officer of Jewish descent, was charged with selling military secrets to the Germans. He was tried and convicted by a court-martial and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island off the South American coast.
The Dreyfus family reopened the case and were frustrated by the general belief that justice had been done. A few politicians, notably Georges Clemenceau, took up Dreyfus’s cause. Still, the army's high command refused to discuss the affair, so intellectuals like Emile Zola, a novelist and journalist, in January 1898 published an op-ed piece in the newspaper L’Aurore titled: “J’accuse...!”. In it, she accused the French government of anti-Semitism for jailing Dreyfus.
After the French surrender to German forces in June 1940, the Vichy regime and Marshal Philippe Petain collaborated with the Nazi regime. It facilitated the deportation of Jews not only in the northern zone occupied by German forces but also in France’s free zone in the south, which the German army occupied only after the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942.
In May 1990, Vandals desecrated more than 30 graves in a Jewish cemetery at Carpentras in southern France, smashing marble markers with iron bars and digging up bodies. This abominable act generated outrage among France’s political and religious leaders, who joined in calling it one of the most heinous anti-Semitic acts in the country in recent years and a frightening symbol of rising intolerance.
The left in power at that time did link these racist acts to the extreme far-right National Front Party of Le Pen, saying, “anti-Semitism is only the most obvious sign of a return of fascistic ideas on which the National Front builds up its electoral business.”
In July 1995, on the 53rd anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv roundup, former President Jacques Chirac acknowledged the role the state and its police had played in the persecution of Jews and other victims of the German occupation.
“France,” Chirac said, “land of the enlightenment and human rights, land of hospitality and asylum, France, on that day, committed an irreparable act. It failed to keep its word and delivered those under its protection to their executioners.”
Despite tensions, Muslims and Jews in France, including during the colonial rule in the Maghreb countries, coexisted peacefully for decades. Dr. Robert B. Satloff, the Jewish American scholar and executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, highlights this in his book “Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands.” The book narrates instances where the Imam of the largest Mosque in Paris saved thousands of Jews and Tunisian ruler Muhammad VII al-Moncef, known as Moncef Bey, provided protection, even offering them Muslim ID cards.
Yet, in France in 2023, in light of the banalization of the extreme far-right discourse, Zemmour and Le Pen are the new virtuous righteous among the righteous; Sunday’s march in Paris against anti-Semitism has turned into a pro-Israel rally and Islamophobia.
In sum, the land of enlightenment and human rights, the land of hospitality and asylum, France is currently losing its welcoming spirit toward Arabs and Muslims, failing to uphold its cherished ideals. Resurfacing racism and xenophobia are fueled by extreme far-right politicians, media pundits and elites, echoing the sentiments of the far-right racist and messianic government in Israel. The conflict in Palestine is, unfortunately, becoming entangled with divisive narratives against the crescent.
