Last week, France held the second round of elections for its National Assembly. Thanks to an uncomfortable alliance between the hard left (led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Fance Unbowed) and centrists (led by the current president Emmanuel Macron), the hard-right National Rally won a relatively small number of seats. The latter party, founded by the anti-Semite and Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen, has in the past decade considerably softened its attitude towards Jews.

Michel Gurfinkiel explains why French Jews have much to fear from the cooperation between the Macronists and the far left, which together

were able to engage in ubiquitous if unnatural crossed alliances so as to reinforce each other and split the spoils between themselves. At Avignon, the Macronists did not interfere in the election of Raphael Arnault, a left-winger on police records for organized violence and anti-Semitic aggression.

To much of French Jewry, Mélenchon’s party, which Gurfinkiel has elsewhere described as “Islamo-Marxist,” seems far more threatening than National Rally:

France Unbowed’s strident “anti-Zionist” hysteria is thought to be related to the rampant exclusion of Jews from higher-learning institutions, the “cancellation” of “Zionist” artists or intellectuals and a 1,000-percent rise in anti-Jewish violence (from the beating of senior citizens or teenagers to the sordid rape of a twelve-year-old Jewish girl in the name of Palestine).

Moreover, the National Rally, who garnered 10.1 million votes on July 7, is currently the most pro-Israel party in France. Even more awkwardly, discarding both Mélenchon and the younger Le Pen would mean voting and supporting President Emmanuel Macron. But French Jews wonder whether he is really a friend.

He shocked them last autumn, when he declined, unlike almost everybody in his cabinet, to take part in a march against anti-Semitism. He shocked them again, one month ago, when he banned 74 Israeli firms from EuroSatory, France’s World Armament Fair. A move seen as BDS’s biggest victory so far in a democratic country.

On the same day the cease-fire went into effect along the Israel-Lebanon border, rebel forces launched an unexpected offensive, and within a few days captured much of Aleppo. This lightening advance originated in the northwestern part of the country, which has been relatively quiet over the past four years, since Bashar al-Assad effectively gave up on restoring control over the remaining rebel enclaves in the area. The fighting comes at an inopportune for the powers that Damascus has called on for help in the past: Russia is bogged down in Ukraine and Hizballah has been shattered.

But the situation is extremely complex. David Wurmser points to the dangers that lie ahead:

The desolation wrought on Hizballah by Israel, and the humiliation inflicted on Iran, has not only left the Iranian axis exposed to Israeli power and further withering. It has altered the strategic tectonics of the Middle East. The story is not just Iran anymore. The region is showing the first signs of tremendous geopolitical change. And the plates are beginning to move.

The removal of the religious-totalitarian tyranny of the Iranian regime remains the greatest strategic imperative in the region for the United States and its allies, foremost among whom stands Israel. . . . However, as Iran’s regime descends into the graveyard of history, it is important not to neglect the emergence of other, new threats. navigating the new reality taking shape.

The retreat of the Syrian Assad regime from Aleppo in the face of Turkish-backed, partly Islamist rebels made from remnants of Islamic State is an early skirmish in this new strategic reality. Aleppo is falling to the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS—a descendant of Nusra Front led by Abu Mohammed al-Julani, himself a graduate of al-Qaeda’s system and cobbled together of IS elements. Behind this force is the power of nearby Turkey.