‘Before it colonised Palestine, Zionism colonised Judaism’

Anti-Zionism is a minority position among France’s Jewish population, but since the assault on Gaza began, it’s grown. For some, resisting the conflation of Jewishness with Israel has become imperative.

Where do French Jews stand on Gaza? Is that a legitimate question to ask? With many taking issue with the conflation of Jew and Israeli, professor of Hebrew studies Elad Lapidot has tackled the question head-on: ‘If you identify as Jewish at a time when a genocide is being committed in the name of protecting Jews, you cannot claim it is antisemitic if you are associated with it. As Jews, we’re called upon to take a position.’ Figures on the left such as Rony Brauman and Étienne Balibar have done so spontaneously. Even the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut has said the Israeli government makes him feel ‘tainted as a Jew’.

The Israeli government is a root cause of the conflation of Jews with Israel. But this ‘does not exempt us from looking an uncomfortable reality in the eye,’ says Maxime Benatouil, a member of Tsedek!, a decolonial Jewish activist collective. ‘After several generations of being socialised into Zionism, Jewish communities have largely embraced the Israeli narrative.’ Journalist Sylvain Cypel dates this feeling to the Six Day war in 1967, when, for the first time, the possibility that Israel might cease to exist through a confrontation with Arab states alarmed many assimilated, non-Zionist Jews, such as philosopher Raymond Aron.

Jewish criticism of Israel is all but inaudible in France. Whereas the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) felt able to challenge Israeli policy until the early 2000s, it now acts as Tel Aviv’s faithful mouthpiece. The Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023 have strengthened French Jews’ bond with Israel. ‘I realised how attached I was to it,’ says Olivier Tonneau, professor of French literature at Cambridge, ‘not in a personal sense, but out of solidarity with those for whom Israel represents something.’

The Jewish diaspora in the US appears much more divided on support for Israel. America has not experienced the virulent antisemitism French Jews were exposed to from the time of (…)

Full article: 2 187 words.

(1) Tsedek!, Lutter en rupture, lutter en solidarité (Struggle through rupture, struggle in solidarity), Premiers Matins de Novembre, Toulouse, 2026.

(4) Shaul Magid, The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance, Ayin, New York, 2023.

(5) Bernard Lazare, Le Fumier de Job (Job’s dungheap), Circé, Belval, 1998 (first published 1928).

(6) Abraham Serfaty, Écrits sur la Palestine (Writings on Palestine), Syllepse, Paris, 2025. See also Sonia Fayman, Béatrice Orès and Michèle Sibony (eds), Antisionisme, une histoire juive (Anti-Zionism, a Jewish history), Syllepse, Paris, 2023.