France has the largest Jewish minority of any European country. Its record of Judeophobia during the Second World War, under the auspices of the criminal Vichy regime, was sinister and ugly. Denial and complicity goes to the very top of French society - Francois Mitterand, for example, defended Maurice Papon, who as police prefect of Bordeaux presided over the deportation of thousands of French Jews during the Occupation.
And some more writing on the 'new anti-Semitism' and its relationship to Israel today, also from Verso:
Tariq Ali: Notes on Anti-Semitism, Zionism and Palestine
After the war, France was closely allied to Israel. It took part in the abortive and unprovoked attack on Egypt in 1956 to wrest control of the canal zone from Nasser's government. It was Israel's principal armourer, until after the 1967 war. Israel began its nuclear programme with French assistance in reactor technology in the 1950s.
France still disports itself as an ally of Israel. It is in this light that one must read President Macron's determination for anti-Zionism to be conflated with anti-Semitism in French law. It's also in this light that one must remember the crass and boorish presence of Netanyahu, pushing his way to the front of the massive government-organised rally to protest at the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015, and then a few days later suggesting that Jews, no longer safe in France, should take part in the in-gathering to Israel.
Shlomo Sand, an abrasive but fearless Israeli historian, courted controversy some years ago with his book The Invention of the Jewish People. In scholarly terms, the controversy should have been a storm in a teacup: Sand was not doing much more than applying the ideas and methods of the great wave of Anglophone scholarship on nationalism of the 1980s (Anderson, Gellner, Hobsbawm, Hroch) to the history of the Jewish people, showing that Zionism, in common with many other ethnic nationalisms, created an 'invented tradition' by way of a retrojected story of Jewish coherence and unity. He's recently published a powerful book on the fall of the great French intellectuals from the philosophical heights of Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault 25 years ago to the idiocy of BHL and the Islamophobia of Alain Finkielkraut today. Here he is on Macron's new policy - from the Verso site:
And some more writing on the 'new anti-Semitism' and its relationship to Israel today, also from Verso:
Tariq Ali: Notes on Anti-Semitism, Zionism and Palestine
Anti-Semitism Real and Imagined by Alain Badiou and Eric Hazan
And on anti-Semitism in the British Labour Party:
Conor
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