When riots swept through France following the death of a seventeen-year-old at the hands of the police, it was hard not to see important resonances with the recent experiences of French Jewry: the rioters tended to be young Muslims of African origin from the slum-like suburbs known as banlieues—in other words, they came from the same population that has been the source of pervasive, and sometimes murderous, anti-Semitism. Many observers cited the vandalization of a World War II memorial in the city of Nanterre; one article described the outbreak of violence as an intifada. But Marc Weitzmann argues that it is wrong to see the rioters as motivated by anti-Semitism:

There is a reason why [so many writers are] using the Nanterre memorial as evidence of the riots’ anti-Semitism: there is no other even vaguely plausible example. In fact, even the case of Nanterre is deceiving. First of all, the Nanterre wall is neither “a Holocaust memorial” nor a “memorial of deportation” [of French Jews by the Nazis] but a monument dedicated to “the martyrs of deportation and of the Resistance.” . . . If the Nanterre memorial symbolizes anything, . . . it is the ambiguity of French memory regarding World War II.

Were kosher restaurants and Jewish stores ransacked during the riots? Of course they were—but no more than non-kosher restaurants and stores that happened to be within reach of the rioters and looters. In fact, from a Jewish standpoint, if anything is remarkable, it is the almost complete lack of specificity in the choice of the businesses targeted.

What this outburst of anti-French violence shares with previous instances of anti-Jewish violence, according to Weitzmann, is a common cause: France’s failure to integrate immigrants from Muslim countries and their descendants into its society—and their refusal to integrate.

Aside from racism, one of the most underestimated reasons for why the French failed to develop any active policy to integrate migrants from their former colonies was that this would have been seen as a casus belli by the new nationalist Algerian and Moroccan regimes, whose oil and gas were vital to the French economy. . . . The former colonies made a point of directly controlling their nationals on French territory, a deal to which the French state assented. As a result, the ex-colonies also controlled the mosques and migrant culture in France.

In that regard, it is therefore tempting to see the random, spontaneous, anti-Semitic attacks that plagued France between 2000 and 2014 and beyond—that is to say before and after the terror wave—as a non- or pre-verbal designation of the enemy: the energetic condition, so to speak, for the subsequent terror to fall on everyone.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.