In France, in 2026, Jewish families are removing the mezuzot from their doorframes. No one ordered them to. That is the point.

I have seen this before. Not in France — in the testimonies I have spent years recording from elderly Iraqi Jews, the last witnesses to communities that once lived alongside mine on the banks of the Tigris. A man in his nineties who had not spoken his mother tongue in sixty years. He was born in Mosul, in a house by the river where his family had lived for generations, centuries, possibly. He spoke Judeo-Arabic, a language that will die with the last of his generation. He told me about the day the mobs came. The neighbor who refused to hide them. The border crossing, the confiscated documents, the life rebuilt from nothing in a country where no one understood what had been taken from him. He was not crying. He was past crying. He was reporting.

I have recorded dozens of these testimonies. They are the voices of people erased from my city within a single generation. I came to the study of antisemitism through these voices — through the gap between the world they described and the silence that replaced it. I came to it from the other side of a shared history, a history that should have made coexistence permanent and instead turned it into a cautionary tale that France, in 2026, refuses to read.

I currently direct the Antisemitism Research Initiative at George Washington University, where my team and I track the production and normalization of antisemitic ideology across continents on a daily basis. I teach at Sciences Po Paris — one of the institutions I will discuss here, and one I know from the inside. I am not writing this as a commentator. I am writing this as a researcher who monitors this hatred professionally and watches the same mechanisms he documented in the Middle East take root in the heart of Europe.

October 7 and what followed

On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists murdered approximately 1,200 people in southern Israel — the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Within hours, before Israel had launched any military response, demonstrations erupted in French cities in which the assault was openly endorsed — an assault that La France Insoumise would officially describe as an “armed offensive by Palestinian forces.”

What followed was not a protest movement. In the first quarter of 2024, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announced over 360 antisemitic acts — a 300 percent increase year on year. For the full year, the SPCJ and the CRIF recorded 1,570 — a 360 percent increase over 2022. In 2025, 1,320 incidents, with physical violence rising from 106 to 126 cases. Jews make up less than 1 percent of the French population. They are the targets of more than half of all anti-religious hate acts in the country. This week, Tel Aviv University’s annual report confirmed that twenty Jews were killed worldwide in 2025 in targeted antisemitic attacks — the highest toll in thirty years.

When you chant slogans calling for the elimination of a Jewish state in the streets of a country where Jewish children are being beaten, do not tell me you are exercising a freedom. You are providing the soundtrack to a pogrom.

In February 2026, a thirteen-year-old boy was beaten, threatened with a knife, and robbed on his way to synagogue in the 18th arrondissement. He was holding his kippa in his hand — he was not even wearing it. It was not enough. In March 2026, a fourteen-year-old girl was accosted in Sarcelles by three youths who asked her why she was not observing Ramadan. When she said she was Jewish, they struck her in the face: “I swear on the Quran I’ll kill you.” In June 2024, a twelve-year-old girl was gang-raped in Courbevoie, a crime classified as antisemitic by police. In January 2025, homes, businesses, and a synagogue in Paris and Rouen were defaced with swastikas and graffiti reading “Jewish pedophiles, rapists to be gassed.” The memorial olive tree planted for Ilan Halimi — tortured to death over three weeks in 2006 by the gang des barbares — was cut down.

And then there is the case every French citizen knows. Sarah Halimi, sixty-five years old, beaten and thrown from her balcony in Belleville in April 2017 to shouts of “Allahu Akbar.” The investigation formally established the antisemitic character of the crime. In April 2021, the Cour de cassation confirmed that the killer was not criminally responsible. No trial. No verdict. Francis Kalifat, then president of the CRIF, said what the community felt: “From now on, in our country, one can torture and kill Jews with impunity.” Twenty-six thousand people marched across France to demand justice. The killer has never appeared before a court.

I have met Jewish families in France who describe their daily lives in terms that echo, almost word for word, what the Iraqi Jews I interview describe about the years before their exile. Which streets to avoid. Whether to wear a visible sign of identity. What to tell the children — and when to tell them to lie. The conversations are the same. Only the river has changed. According to a 2024 survey, 68 percent of French Jews feel unsafe. The kippot are disappearing. So are the mezuzot. A community that has been part of France since Roman Gaul is learning to make itself invisible within the Republic it helped build.

Several French universities have become, in practice, places where antisemitism is produced, spread, and normalized. The facts are documented.

At Sciences Po Paris, anti-Israel activists occupied campus buildings in April 2024. Jewish students testified to being told that “good Jews oppose Zionism.” One student was strangled from behind and told she would be treated “like the people in Gaza.” Another was warned not to reveal she was Jewish because a fellow student would kill her. These are not slogans on banners. These are words spoken by students to other students, in the corridors of one of France’s most prestigious institutions. In January 2025, three Jewish students putting up posters for the hostages were beaten and called “Zionist fascists.” The university’s response: disciplinary amnesty for the occupiers. The Île-de-France regional government suspended its funding.

At Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne, Jewish first-year students were removed from a class discussion group on grounds of “supposed Zionism.” A WhatsApp poll in the same cohort asked: “Jews — for or against?” At Sciences Po Lille, a Gazan student admitted on a French diplomatic scholarship had posted content glorifying Hitler as a “visionary” and calling for the filmed execution of Israeli hostages — she was expelled only after the posts went viral.

When a university allows Jewish students to be strangled, excluded, and beaten for putting up posters about hostages — and responds by granting amnesty to the aggressors — it is not defending liberty. It is teaching a generation that hatred of Jews is the entry fee to progressive respectability.

Antisemitic violence draws on several sources: a far right descended from Vichy, networks that import eliminationist ideology into European neighborhoods, and a political left that has made the demonization of Israel a marker of its identity.

But it is the left’s betrayal that demands the most urgent reckoning, because it is the form of antisemitism that enjoys, in France today, the greatest political tolerance. Jean-Luc Mélenchon claims the inheritance of Jaurès, who risked his career to defend Dreyfus. What Mélenchon has done with that inheritance is specific and documented. In 2013, he said of Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici, who is Jewish, that he “thinks in international finance, not in French.” When antisemitic acts surged 300 percent in early 2024, he called antisemitism in France “residual.” In February 2026, he mocked the pronunciation of the name “Epstein” at a rally in Lyon — François Hollande called these “the most intolerable antisemitic remarks.” After October 7, LFI’s official statement described the massacre as an “armed offensive by Palestinian forces.” According to an American Jewish Committee poll, 92 percent of French Jews believe LFI has contributed to the rise of antisemitism.

Ninety-two percent. When a community that has been part of France since antiquity identifies a single political movement as the vector of the hatred aimed at it, this is not a perception problem. The moderate left — Socialists, Greens — denounced Mélenchon’s provocations as “intolerable” before returning to electoral alliances with his party as soon as the arithmetic required it. That complicity is part of the problem.

And then there is Rima Hassan, whom LFI has elevated into a symbol. Her record tells a different story. In September 2025, she stated that Hamas’s position denying Israel’s right to exist is historically justified. She questioned the Ministry of the Interior’s own statistics on antisemitic acts. CRIF president Yonathan Arfi responded: “Downplaying, minimizing, and even concealing antisemitism is a core part of LFI’s strategy, and specifically of Rima Hassan.” In March 2026, she posted a quote from a convicted participant in the 1972 Lod Airport massacre, presenting his words as a reflection on the duty of resistance. She is the subject of six ongoing investigations and has been summoned to trial in July 2026 for glorification of terrorism. The complaints were filed by LICRA and the European Jewish Organization.

A European Parliament mandate is not a pass. It does not turn the glorification of a terrorist attack into political speech. And the reflexive cry of “judicial harassment” each time a court opens a file is not a defense — it is a tactic to place antisemitism beyond the reach of accountability.

I have had enough. Enough of watching radicals exploit the language of liberation to provide cover for the oldest hatred in the world. Enough of the slogans that produce violence, the marches that produce fear, the rage that always needs Jews as its scapegoat. Enough.

The loi Yadan, officially the “bill to combat renewed forms of antisemitism,” aims to fill a specific gap in French law. Current legislation, rooted in the press freedom law of July 29, 1881, punishes only direct incitement to terrorism. The bill, adopted by the Law Committee in January 2026 by 18 votes to 16, would close a legal vacuum with regard to indirect or implicit forms of incitement, creating a new offense: publicly calling, in violation of the right of peoples to self-determination and the principles of the United Nations Charter, for the destruction of a state recognized by the French Republic. The text was submitted to the Conseil d’État for advisory review; its recommendations led to a substantially rewritten version. France recognizes both Israel and Palestine. The law does not criminalize criticism of Israeli government policy, advocacy for Palestinian statehood, academic research, or press freedom. It closes a loophole.

The bill has cross-partisan support — center-right, Les Républicains, the Rassemblement National, and several Socialists including former President François Hollande. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has granted it fast-track procedure.

France already accepts this logic. The loi Gayssot punishes Holocaust denial. Anti-terrorism law punishes the glorification of terrorism. No one seriously argues these laws have weakened the Republic. The loi Yadan extends the same principle to eliminationist speech that currently falls through the cracks — cracks exploited by people who know perfectly well that calling for the destruction of a Jewish state at a demonstration generates violence against French Jews on French streets while remaining technically unpunishable.

The petition against the bill gathered over 700,000 signatures. The Law Committee dismissed it on April 15. Seven hundred thousand is a large number. But popularity has never determined moral seriousness. The crowds that chanted “Death to Jews” during the Dreyfus Affair were larger than any petition. The question before the Assembly is not whether the bill is popular. It is whether the Republic still has the will to protect a besieged community — or whether it will yield to the street.

I know what happens when a society lets the rhetoric run. I have the recordings. I have the face of that ninety-year-old man who described the house he never saw again, in a language no one speaks anymore. The Jews of Iraq were not driven out by people who called themselves antisemites. They were driven out by people who called themselves liberators. And they were abandoned by people who called themselves moderates.

France is not Iraq. France has a constitution, a Constitutional Council, and legal traditions that Iraq never had. But none of that protects anyone if it stays on paper. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen means nothing to the boy beaten in the 18th, to the student strangled at Sciences Po, or to the family that quietly removed its mezuzah from the doorframe.

Antisemites must fear the law. That sentence should not require courage to write. The loi Yadan is imperfect — all laws are. But it says what needs saying: hating Jews is not a freedom. Calling for the destruction of a Jewish state is not an opinion. A European Parliament mandate is not a license. And the Republic cannot stand by, year after year, while its citizens are terrorized.

Jewish life in France must be protected — by the law and by the refusal to let hatred disguise itself as liberty.

I have heard too many testimonies from people who understood too late. France does not have that excuse.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)