While the government of Emmanuel Macron has been fighting its own war on terror both domestically and in Africa, it has consistently condemned Jerusalem’s efforts to defend itself against Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Tsilla Hershco comments:

During the May 2021 Gaza war, . . . France condemned the terrorist organization’s attacks on Israeli cities and expressed support for Israel’s right to self-defense. At the same time, it demanded restraint from Israel on the alleged grounds that the violence was the product of a lack of political progress with the Palestinians, the (supposedly) provocative nature of Jewish communities in the West Bank, and the purported violation by Israel of the status quo in Jerusalem.

France feared that the events in Gaza would lead to violent demonstrations by French Muslims and an increase in anti-Semitic attacks on French Jews (as had occurred in previous rounds of war). Indeed, the French interior minister banned a demonstration by “supporters of Palestine in Paris” on May 14. Despite the ban, hundreds of French Hamas supporters gathered to demonstrate, refused police demands that they disperse, and attacked police officers with dangerous objects.

These events illustrate France’s vulnerability when dealing with growing pockets of poverty and crime, frequently in suburbs with a significant Muslim population. Obviously, the attempt to please Muslims in France by adopting a show of a “balanced” position on the Israel-Palestinian conflict does not solve the serious problems associated with the French republic’s relations with its Muslim population. Many Muslim immigrants, particularly of North African origin, have not integrated into French society and economy and are alienated from France. The growing influence of radical Islamists among French Muslims is reflected, inter alia, in the increase in the number of those who regard sharia law as above the laws of the French republic.

In 2001, in the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, Jonathan Rosen was asked to write something about anti-Semitism. So many of the points he raised in the resulting essay, reproduced in full at the link below, ring true today, and make clear just how predictable so much of the global reaction to October 7 has been. Rosen reflects on what he wrote then from the standpoint of 2024:

It is worth remembering that the Nazis saw the Holocaust as self-defense, though Jews were a minuscule fragment of a giant militarized nation. This was irrational, of course, even as they spoke the language of science, redefining Jews as a biological menace, like a virus, making the murder of babies and the elderly necessary, too, because like a microbe only extermination was the cure. It was the existence of Jews that made them a provocation, just as the existence of Israel, in any borders, inspired the Hamas massacre, as its 1988 covenant, never revoked, makes abundantly clear. The towers were a similar provocation.

It was back in 2001 that Rosen found himself “awakened to anti-Semitism,” as he wrote at the time:

I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ-killer. . . . But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler’s agenda and a key motivation of his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that’s what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.

I felt this in a different form reading coverage of Israel in European papers. Though public expressions of anti-Semitism are taboo in a post-Holocaust world, many Europeans, in writing about Israel, have felt free to conjure images of determined child killers and mass murderers. Earlier this year, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon depicting a large building labeled “Museum of the Jewish Holocaust” and behind it a building under construction labeled “Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust.”