Antisemitic Incidents in France Up 200% This Year, Interior Minister Warns After Attempted Synagogue Arson

There has been a “very significant increase” in antisemitic acts in France this year, according to outgoing French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, who on Sunday warned incidents targeting the country’s Jewish community spiked by about 200 percent since Jan. 1.

Darmanin revealed the troubling surge in antisemitism one day after French police arrested a 33-year-old Algerian man suspected of trying to set a synagogue ablaze in the southern French city of la Grande-Motte.

The attacker had set fire to several entry doors to the synagogue and cars nearby. One of the cars contained a gas canister that exploded, injuring a policeman who was securing the site. The rabbi and his family were inside the synagogue at the time of the attack but were unharmed.

“Deliberately setting fire to a synagogue where the rabbi and his family live while waiting with an axe … is an antisemitic act, and it must be denounced as such,” Darmanin said of the incident on French television, according to Euronews.

On Sunday, Darmanin continued to denounce what he described as a “vile antisemitic act” and the increase in anti-Jewish crimes across France more broadly.

“Two-thirds of anti-religious acts … are against Jews,” the interior minister added, according to French broadcaster BFM TV.

Darmanin’s comments came after he stated earlier this month that antisemitic acts in France have tripled over the last year. In the first half of 2024, 887 such incidents were recorded, almost triple the 304 recorded in the same period last year, he said.

France has experienced a record surge of antisemitism in the wake of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. Antisemitic outrages rose by over 1,000 percent in the final three months of 2023 compared with the previous year, with over 1,200 incidents reported — greater than the total number of incidents in France for the previous three years combined.

Amid the wave of attacks, France held snap parliamentary elections last month which brought an anti-Israel leftist coalition to power, leading French Jews to express deep apprehension about their future status in the country.

“It seems France has no future for Jews,” Rabbi Moshe Sebbag of Paris’ Grand Synagogue told the Times of Israel following the ascension of the New Popular Front, a coalition of far-left parties. “We fear for the future of our children.”

The largest member of the NFP is the far-left La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”) party, whose leader, Jean-Luc Melenchon, has been lambasted by French Jews as a threat to their community as well as those who support Israel. Melenchon has a long history of pushing anti-Israel policies and, according to Jewish leaders, of making antisemitic comments — such as suggesting that Jews killed Jesus, echoing a false claim that was used to justify antisemitic violence and discrimination throughout the Middle Ages in Europe.

Darmanin appeared to call out the hard left for fostering a hostile environment for Jews during his remarks on Sunday.

“There is hateful political speech against the Jews of France and it must be denounced,” he said, according to France Info. “We can clearly see that part of the left, unfortunately, is making this speech of encouragement of hatred toward our Jewish compatriots.”

Shortly after the NFP’s victory, Melenchon — who in a 2017 speech referred to the French Jewish community as “an arrogant minority that lectures to the rest” — called for France to recognize a Palestinian state. Supporters of the hard-left coalition, which includes socialist and communist parties, poured into the streets of Paris waving Palestinian flags. French flags were largely absent from the celebrations.

Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), lambasted Melenchon for denouncing an “intolerable crime” without mentioning antisemitism while condemning Saturday’s attack on the synagogue.

“I do not believe in the sincerity of Jean-Luc Melenchon when he condemns this antisemitic act,” Arfi told the French broadcaster RMC on Monday, referring to the far-left leader as a “firefighter-arsonist” who incites hatred against Jews.

In the wake of the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, Melenchon and his party issued a statement declaring the attacks “an armed offensive of Palestinian forces” as a result of continued Israeli “occupation.” Melenchon also failed to condemn a deputy who called Hamas a “resistance movement.”

Arfi referred to the synagogue attack over the weekend as a “symbol of the antisemitism which has struck French society” since October.

“It must be seen as such, as a tragic illustration of the new face that antisemitism has taken on in recent months,” he added. “It misappropriates the Palestinian cause to designate Jews as legitimate targets. French Jews are today attacked in the name of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the name of Gaza, by guilty shortcuts but also by a certain number of actors who fan this fire, in particular the political leaders of La France Insoumise who have contributed to the fact that today, these issues are inflammable. This unfortunately results in the fact that Jews are attacked.”

Arfi and Darmanin’s comments came about a month after an elderly Jewish woman was attacked in a Paris suburb by two assailants who punched her in the face, pushed her to the ground, and kicked her while hurling antisemitic slurs, including “dirty Jew, this is what you deserve.”

In another egregious attack that garnered international headlines, a 12-year-old Jewish girl was raped by three Muslim boys in a different Paris suburb on June 15. The child told investigators that the assailants called her a “dirty Jew” and hurled other antisemitic comments at her during the attack. In response to the incident, French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the “scourge of antisemitism” plaguing his country.

Around the same time in June, an Israeli family visiting Paris was denied service at a hotel after an attendant noticed their Israeli passports.

In May, French police shot dead a knife-wielding Algerian man who set fire to a synagogue and threatened law enforcement in the city of Rouen.

One month earlier, a Jewish woman was beaten and raped in a suburb of Paris as “vengeance for Palestine.”

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