Anti-Semitism in France 'quadrupled' on back of Israel-Hamas war
Anti-Semitic acts in France nearly quadrupled in 2023 compared with the previous year, the country’s main Jewish interest group warned on Thursday. The Crif pointed to a surge in incidents since the 7 October attack by Hamas on Israel.
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The Council of Jewish Institutions in France (Crif) reported a whopping 1,676 anti-Semitic acts in 2023, compared to 436 the previous year.
It was citing figures from the French Interior Ministry as well the Protection Service of the Jewish Community watchdog.
Nearly 60 percent of those incidents were attacks involving physical violence, threatening words or menacing gestures, the Crif said in its report.
Others were against property, while 7.5 percent of incidents were online.
The number of anti-Semitic incidents exploded in the three months following Hamas’s attack on Israel, and Israel’s retaliatory bombing campaign on Gaza.
The number "equalled that of the previous three years combined", the report said.
Perpetrators in schools
Nearly 13 percent of the anti-Semitic acts took place in schools, most of them in middle schools.
"We are witnessing perpetrators of anti-Semitic acts becoming younger. Schools are no longer a sanctuary of the republic," the report said
“For the first time in a long time, new generations are more open to anti-Semitic prejudices than previous generations,” the group’s president, Yonathan Arfi, told the AFP news agency.
He pointed to three so-called “fuels” for the phenomenon: the hatred of Israel, Islamism and belief in conspiracy theories.
Sharpest rise
The increase in anti-Semitism is the worst since the Crif started keeping such statistics in 2012.
Previous spikes came after Mohammed Merah killed three children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, and after the 2015 attack on a Paris kosher market that left four people dead.
The Crif warns that its tally reflects only incidents that were reported officially to the police, and that the real number may be much higher.
Pointing to the Jews who have started hiding their identity – by removing mezuzah door ornaments or changing names on mailboxes – Arfi worries that “the risk, in the end, is that of the invisibilisation of Jews in the public sphere".
Anti-Semitism, he said, was an issue that "goes beyond Jews", and says something about the "societies in which it develops”.
(with AFP)
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