Lhe dissolution, decided on Sunday June 9 by Emmanuel Macron, more solitary and vertical than ever, plunged the country into astonishment, before triggering an unexpected mobilization of left-wing forces to try to prevent the worst. The New Popular Front, its common program and its unique candidacies, are the unexpected result of this collective upsurge. However, since its formalization, a subject has poisoned the debates and appears to be the main weak point on which its adversaries have taken hold: anti-Semitism and the French position regarding the situation in Israel and Gaza.
This Achilles heel of the New Popular Front, if it is exploited ad nauseam by its detractors, cannot be dismissed out of hand, because it is an essential and even existential subject for a left gathered precisely today in the name of its highest values.
As a historian specializing in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as a lawyer fighting against human rights violations, against anti-Semitism and all forms of racism, as citizens who voted in the European elections for the Socialist Party-Public Square list, we would like to pose here some observations, reminders and principles so that this trapped debate stops parasitizing such a brief and decisive electoral campaign, and so that other issues can flourish.
Deadly fuel
No, anti-Semitism is not “residual” in France, it explodes. The Ministry of the Interior indicates that the number of anti-Semitic acts increased from 436 in 2022 to 1,676 in 2023, a fourfold increase. This is after the terrorist massacres of October 7 [2023] and the start of the Israeli response in Gaza that this unleashing was noted, with an average of 500 anti-Semitic acts per month at the end of 2023, compared to fifty on average in previous months, according to the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France. Clearly, the tragic context in the Middle East was the deadly fuel of unbridled anti-Jewish hatred.
Also read the forum (2023) | Article reserved for our subscribers “From the first socialists to the present day, all components of the left have made anti-Semitic remarks but in very variable proportions”
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The left, today gathered to counter the xenophobic threat of the National Rally [RN]cannot turn away from this priority fight, the coherence of the New Popular Front and its very justification are at stake.
No, there is no equivalence between the contextual, populist and electoralist anti-Semitism exploited by certain members of La France insoumise, and the founding, historical and ontological anti-Semitism of the National Rally, which defends national preference, denounces the dual nationals and has always and consistently attacked “anti-France”. The first, we must fight it step by step, program to support, without lowering our eyes, by calling voters to witness to demonstrate that anti-Semitism is the very negation of our common values. The second, we must beat, at the ballot box and in an emergency, to prevent France from denying its republican identity by returning to the worst pages of its history.
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