The leader of France’s Jewish community accused the judiciary last week of failing to recognize Jew-hatred as a motive in several major cases, including in a recent murder conviction.
Yonathan Arfi, the president of the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities, leveled the accusation on Feb. 19 in the presence of Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu during the annual dinner of Arfi’s organization.
He also condemned inaction on antisemitic media and aspects of France’s anti-Israel policies. Lecornu said the government was committed to fighting antisemitism and its new “mask [of] anti-Zionism.”
Arfi’s public rebuke of the government at the dinner, an annual event that is traditionally a cordial encounter with top officials,
underlined growing frustration by many French Jews with the government of President Emmanuel Macron amid a surge in antisemitic crimes. Macron has vowed to fight antisemitism but is accused of fanning its flames by targeting Israel unfairly.
Arfi asked the prime minister: “How are we to understand the judiciary’s decision to not recognize the antisemitic nature of … the defenestration of René Hadjadj in Lyon or the poisoning of a Jewish family?”
Arfi’s question referenced the 18-year prison sentence that a French judge earlier this month handed down to a man who, in 2022, had thrown his 89-year-old Jewish neighbor, Hadjadj, to his death from the 17th floor of their apartment building. The court did not uphold the aggravated hate crime element sought by the prosecution.
The poison of antisemitism
The mention of poisoning referenced the December conviction of a nanny from Algeria who deliberately contaminated her Jewish employers’ food in the Paris region. She reportedly referenced the family’s Jewish identity to police during questioning, but the court cleared her of the aggravating hate crime charges, prompting outrage by some local Jews.“Should perpetrators express antisemitism or racism for it to be recognized? France needs the judiciary to put words on hate more often, even when it spreads silently,” Arfi said.
On the night of the CRIF dinner, unidentified individuals doused a kosher restaurant in Paris with acid, vandalizing it for the second time in six months. Police are treating the case as an antisemitic hate crime, Le Parisien reported.
Daily incidents
Separately, on Monday, a woman told police that two activists for the far-left France Unbowed party had hurled antisemitic insults at her after noticing the mezuzah on her doorframe in Paris while canvassing for next month’s local elections. Party Leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon has made numerous statements deemed as antisemitic.
In another incident, police arrested a 15-year-old boy and a 23-year-old man in a northern suburb of Paris, Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, after the boy allegedly threatened to use tear gas on two Jewish boys on the street last week, i24 News reported Monday. The man is suspected of inciting the other suspect to assault police, according to the report.
Jews were the target of more than half of all the hate crimes documented in France against a religious minority last year, an Interior Ministry report published this month said. The ministry’s report counted 1,320 antisemitic incidents.
France has about 440,000 Jews, according to the Institute of Jewish Policy Research. At least 50,000 Jews have left for Israel alone since 2014, when this traffic surged amid deadly jihadist attacks that began in 2012.
Lecornu told community leaders at the dinner last week that their coreligionists’ fears are the result of an attempt by France’s enemies to increase sectarianism and divide society. He also expressed support for a current bill that would ban calls for Israel’s destruction because this is a “veil” for antisemitic hate speech, he said.
Lecornu also referenced the nanny case, saying: “In France today, a mother wonders, when choosing a nanny, whether or not that person is potentially steeped in the widespread antisemitism.”
‘This is what our enemies seek’
Addressing Jews’ concerns about antisemitism on the part of non-Jewish nannies and other non-Jews in their lives, Lecornu said: “The poison of sectarianism lies there: dividing France into suspicious communities.” Later in his speech, Lecornou added: “This is what our enemies seek—sow hatred, instill fear and above all to divide.”
He addressed the institutional antisemitism that was on display during the turn of the 20th century in the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a French-Jewish army captain who was wrongfully convicted of treason because of his origins. The Vichy Government, which collaborated with Nazi Germany, “was not the Republic, not France faithful to itself,” Lecornu said.
More recently, “contemporary anti-Zionism has become a mask for old-fashioned antisemitism,” Lecornu said, repeating a statement that President Emmanuel Macron first said in 2017. He then said the government would support outlawing calls for Israel’s destruction, but he did not specify how.
Macron has repeatedly said France was an ally of Israel and supported Israel’s right to exist, as well as a determined force working against antisemitism.
However, Macron’s critics say he has failed to live up to these comments. The critics, including former CRIF executive member Gilles-William Goldnadel, cite France’s 2025 arms embargo on Israel; Macron’s accusing Israel of “barbarity” weeks after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas.
Speech vs. policy
Macron condemned Israeli strikes on Hezbollah and Hamas while the groups were trying to kill Israelis; promoted international sanctions against Israel; abided by the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and did not intervene in perceived judicial failures in the fight against antisemitism.
A major judicial scandal was the case of Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old Jewish woman who was murdered and thrown from her apartment in Paris by a neighbor in 2017.
In that case, a French court concluded in 2021 that the neighbor, a 27-year-old man named Kobili Traore, was motivated to kill Halimi because she was Jewish. But Traore, who is Muslim, was not tried because multiple courts ruled that he was psychotic at the time of the killing, in part because he was high on marijuana.
Thousands of French Jews protested what they perceived as a failure to convict and punish the killer. A 2021 rally in Paris, a significant portion of French Jewry showed up for a rare expression of anger by a community where many members feel gratitude to authorities for guarding them against antisemitic violence.
Criticism not addressed
Lecornu did not address these criticisms in his speech and did not reply to the critical questions raised by Arfi.
Lecornu did say that “Calling for the destruction of the State of Israel is calling for the vital endangerment of a people. And in France, incitement to murder is prohibited.”
Public rhetoric that incites antisemitism “is punishable by law,” he added. “Therefore, calls for the annihilation of a state can no longer be tolerated,” he said. Chanting “from the river to the sea” was a ”call for the erasure of Israel. It is to accept the idea that Israelis no longer have a place,“ Lecornu also said.
“Therefore,” said Lecornu, the government will promote in April a bill submitted by an independent lawmaker, Caroline Yadan, that would ban presenting terrorist acts as legitimate resistance, as the bill states.
An earlier version of the bill would have also banned calling for Israel’s destruction but that language was removed from the version approved last month for a first reading in parliament.
Will calling for Israel’s destruction be illegal?
A separate bill from 2024 is focused solely on banning calls for Israel’s destruction. It has not been voted on in committee or in the National Assembly. Lecornu did not mention that bill or say whether the government intended to advance it.
The prime minister’s office and media team did not reply in time for publication to a query by JNS on how and when the government intended bring to a vote language that would ban calling for Israel’s destruction.
Arfi, the president of CRIF, also criticized France’s recognition of a Palestinian state in September, despite the vocal objections of CRIF, other Jewish groups and Israel.
“What has France gained from this premature recognition, I wonder?” Arfi said. He noted that the Palestinian Authority, which reportedly arrested a terrorist who’d helped murder six Jews in a Paris kosher restaurant bombing in 1982, has not yet extradited the man to face charges in France.
Arfi also addressed the government’s perceived inaction against media that incite antisemitism, including Al Jazeera.
“The [French] Republic suffers when we allow Al Jazeera and its social media offshoot, AG Plus, to spread Islamist rhetoric in France that attacks French laicity as much as it threatens Jews,” Arfi added.
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