Non fiction

French, Jewish, and Leftist: The Dilemma of Belonging in Divided Times

All Identities Combined

28/01/2025

Even long before the bloody terrorist attacks by Hamas on October 7, 2023, followed by the atrocious carnage carried out by Israel in Gaza, I felt, like many leftist Jews, this difficult tension: being caught between a minority, my own, increasingly shifting to the right, and my political camp, increasingly permeable to anti-Semitism, far beyond any anti-Zionism. Today, it is a true heartbreak.

“Killing Jews is a duty.” When I saw the photo of this antisemitic graffiti circulating in the media, written in large letters on a stadium in Carcassonne, my mind immediately went into a state of alert. The emotion it stirred up revived all those moments in my daily life when similar graffiti would appear, targeting my religion, my culture, an inescapable part of my identity and history.

That said, I must admit that this inscription, created far from where I live and in the wake of Hamas’s massacre on October 7 in Israel, had an even more chilling effect. A sense of revulsion was not only triggered by the horrific images of this terrorist attack, broadcast repeatedly on social media, but also by the reactions worldwide. I watched, stunned, scenes of celebration filmed in the streets of Tunisia. With tears in my eyes, I felt relieved that my late father, a Tunisian Jew, did not have to witness this sinister spectacle—he who would have undoubtedly relived his family’s exodus in 1967, shortly after the Six-Day War and the violent anti-Jewish riots in Tunis.

A country where my mother was also born in 1943, an Islamic land then colonized by France and occupied by Nazi Germany. Her early life was already tumultuous, marked by the forced exile from an authoritarian and undemocratic Tunisia twenty years later, along with nearly the entire Arab Jewish minority—a deep wound… From then on, the attachment to the land of Israel, the spiritual cradle of Judaism and now “the world’s only Jewish-majority state,” became visceral.

Because we were born Jewish, often connected to Israel through family ties but also emotionally, culturally, and religiously… Most members of my family are now on the political right, with a few still on the left. None are truly supportive of the settlements (with some exceptions), but all are convinced that, like the Islamist Hamas, “the Arabs do not want a Palestinian state alongside Israel, but only the destruction of Israel,” as my maternal grandmother, originally from Kairouan and buried near Jerusalem, used to insist over and over.

However, I quickly sought to break free from this familial and communal framework, often too inward-focused, marked by a denial of the excesses of Jewish nationalism and a lack of empathy for this new “Other”: the Palestinian. This environment, where Islamophobia is never far away, drove me to assert my right to critically examine things, especially in response to the rightward radicalization of a growing portion of my relatives in recent years.

Distancing oneself from one’s family of origin is one thing, but having to do so with one’s own political camp is quite another.

I, a French Jew, left-wing (a species on the verge of extinction), living near Paris, far from war, annihilation, and Israel’s far-right, anti-Palestinian politics, and its brutal colonization of the occupied territories… And yet, an intimate, resigned witness to the identity retreats that have been suffocating my people for decades, with every upheaval of this old conflict that endlessly impacts our lives.

Distancing oneself from one’s family of origin is one thing, but having to do so with one’s political camp is quite another… As my Jewish family shifted from the left to the right over the span of two decades, it was within the left itself, and in my progressive social circle — my “chosen family” — that I sadly began to notice antisemitic hostility.

“We haven’t rid ourselves of the unnecessary guilt over the Vichy regime.” This statement from an Act-Up Paris activist, supporting Gazans under Israeli bombardment shortly after October 7, as revealed in the media, speaks volumes about the antisemitism within a segment of the left, far beyond certain members of La France Insoumise. Just like the slogans chanted at the last March 8 demonstration in Paris for women’s rights — “Zionists, fascists, you are not feminists!” and “Zionists, fascists, you are the terrorists!” — targeting a collective of Jewish women who had come to denounce the rapes committed by Hamas.

Despite the creation of the State of Israel, born from the ashes of the Holocaust — but synonymous with oppression and humiliation for Arabs — Jews in France and elsewhere, regardless of their stance on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, must not be held accountable for Tel Aviv’s crimes, nor forcibly excluded from feminist protests! As much as Zionism is open to criticism, especially in its most abhorrent and supremacist forms, now central to the Israeli state apparatus…

While such hostility toward Jews is, of course, not exclusive to the left — traditional antisemitism remains structural on the right — the permeability of progressive and anti-racist circles to this hatred is all the more painful. It feels like a second betrayal, a second abandonment for us, Jews of the left!

Two competing traumatic memories clash: that of colonization and that of the Holocaust.

Take, for example, this “antiracist” friend who, earlier this year on Instagram, literally “spewed” her hatred of Arab Jews at me — even if they happen to be Israeli. These same Jews, who, according to her, should “go back to the countries they left to clean their ancestors’ graves.” Really? When my family’s forced exile from Tunisia, driven precisely by this unbearable spiral of conflations, can only be explained by one thing: anti-Jewish hatred! Especially since Arab Jews, whether living in Israel or elsewhere, know it would be impossible to reasonably return as a minority to countries like Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Syria, or Yemen, all plagued by state-sponsored antisemitism.

Yet, they carefully tend, through various associations, to the Jewish cemeteries in the countries from which they were expelled through pogroms, riots, and deportations… Regardless of what some “progressive” antisemites might think. Like the cemetery in Sousse, Tunisia, where my paternal grandfather is buried.

This latest broken friendship, emblematic of the essentialization and stigmatization I have endured for twenty years, mirrors what many French Jews experience. And this, in a context where anti-Zionism dominates decolonial leftist circles and the Arab world in general, legitimized by the Palestinian cause, but where an unacceptable obsessive demonization of Jews and all of Israel is also evident.

It is as if antisemitism and its age-old prejudices — about Jews’ supposed “wealth,” “domination,” and “malevolence,” now seen as “super-whites” by certain decolonial leftists — were merely collateral damage in this violent and deeply asymmetrical Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A globalized war where two traumatic memories collide: that of colonization and that of the Holocaust.

French and Western right-wing factions, of course, have chosen their side. That of tolerance for, or even support of, Israel’s worst policies against the violated rights of Palestinians. That of exploiting the fight against antisemitism for Islamophobic purposes and to discredit the left. Naturally, this comes at the expense of the fight against discrimination and post-colonial racism, whether anti-Black or anti-Maghrebi.

That is why, for me, October 7 did not mark a rupture but rather a continuity in the identity-based retreats already well underway in our country. The same applies to the condition of Jews in the face of the resurgence of antisemitism since the 2000s. Today, as before, there persists this constant fear of identifying as “Jewish” in public spaces, particularly in the Île-de-France region. It’s something that is hidden, concealed, left unsaid… Avoidance strategies that many Jews, living outside of any religious communalism, have long adopted to preempt hostility.

This is reflected in the experience of my partner at her former job — her family bears the tragedy of Auschwitz — or my 9-year-old daughter, who has been targeted at school since October 7. And no doubt soon, my younger daughter. She is only 5 years old, but she will quickly assimilate this norm that is ours. After all, as a child and teenager, my brother and I already lied, pretending that only our father was Jewish — a way to convince ourselves that we weren’t entirely so.

Fighting for equality and against all forms of racism — that is my leitmotif, my only course of action.

At 42, I am trying to embrace myself more fully, despite the turmoil of this Israeli-Arab conflict that continues to poison our lives. This journey has required a few definitive breaks with so-called “friends” on the left, who were not truly friends, as they were incapable of acknowledging antisemitism.

Fighting for equality and against all forms of racism — that is my leitmotif, my only course of action as a Jewish left-wing Frenchman. Certainly, I could also take a firmer stance on the conflict over there, as some demand of me — even though I have only visited Israel (and Palestine) twice, and for short stays.

Must I justify myself to French antiracists for the Palestinians who have been massacred, just as some once demanded our Muslim compatriots justify themselves after the Charlie Hebdo or Bataclan attacks?

Beyond this injunction to take a stance, my interest had so far been primarily focused on Tunisia, the country my parents left behind in pain. I have visited it many times, in search of my roots. But since the deadly attack on the Djerba synagogue in May 2023 (where my cousin had taken refuge), I decided to distance myself from this country for a while. Time to let the pain subside. Time to hope that the Israeli-Arab conflict will finally end one day. That everyone learns to coexist, to accept one another, with respect, equality, democracy, and secularism, in Israel as well as in neighboring countries, despite the torments of history: the injustice suffered by Palestinians dispossessed of their land, the destruction of part of the civilian population in Gaza, the slow-burning ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, the Holocaust, which culminated in the creation of a Jewish state in the “Promised Land,” the forced exile of my people, the Israelis killed, taken hostage…

With the certainty that, even if this conflict is resolved one day, millennia-old antisemitism will endure. It is so deeply rooted in the collective unconscious, latent or manifest, surfacing with the world’s crises. This is something that the anti-racist and decolonial left – rightly so – struggles to understand, integrate, and acknowledge.

No doubt, as Doudou Diène, a jurist and former United Nations Special Rapporteur, once said, “Whatever the form of racism, it thrives when it is… denied.”

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