he first round of France’s snap elections on June 30 put the far-right Rassemblement National in a historically strong position. Ahead of the runoff vote this Sunday, many of Marine Le Pen’s opponents hope only to stop her from winning an absolute majority in the National Assembly. To this end, Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble and the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) have each withdrawn many of their candidates to give each other a free run in the second round.

This attempt to reconstitute a “republican front” marks a belated half-retreat for many in the political center, who’ve long argued that the NPF represents as great a threat as Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. The alliance, they have claimed, is little more than cover for a dangerous new antisemitism on the Left, of which Jean-Luc Mélenchon and France Insoumise are supposedly the most vocal political agents. Allegations of widespread left-wing antisemitism surged against the backdrop of the Israel-Gaza war before becoming one of the main themes of France’s turbocharged snap elections. They have contributed to the normalization of Marine Le Pen and the Rassemblement National — a party founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, a convicted Holocaust denier, and other nostalgists of the collaborationist Vichy regime.

Simon Assoun is a spokesperson for Tsedek!, a decolonial and anti-racist Jewish collective formed last spring. He sat down with Jacobin’s Harrison Stetler for an extended conversation on antisemitism, the political reverberations in France of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the rise of the far right.

• HARRISON STETLER Since president Emmanuel Macron dissolved parliament on June 9, it sometimes seems as if the language of French politics has been flipped on its head. Speaking on the hard-right radio network Europe 1 before the first-round vote, Aurore Bergé, an outgoing minister, said that the Macronist coalition, and not Rassemblement National, represented the “best rampart” against the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) — inverting the kind of rhetoric that has historically been used to tar Le Pen herself. What have the last few weeks revealed?

SIMON ASSOUN We’re living with the effects of twenty years spent trivializing the far right and the Rassemblement National. What’s now blowing up is the attempt to impose on voters in one election after another a political divide between an extreme center, or what some call the “bourgeois bloc,” and the far right.

Now that the far right is on the doorstep of national power and could soon be able to form a government, much of the media and a large portion of the political class are demonizing the Left. It’s the reversal of the so-called republican front. Most commentators agree that the main danger facing France is not the far right; rather, they point to the Left and, more specifically, to France Insoumise. This situation is extremely worrying. It risks aggravating many of the tendencies that have already been at work under the Macronist government. It points to the further erosion of democratic and political rights, an acceleration of France’s authoritarian turn, and a further unleashing of racism.

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HARRISON STETLER

One central element of what you call the “reversing of the republican front” is the idea that the Left is now a hotbed of antisemitism. In recent weeks, it’s sometimes been easy to think that this election is a referendum on left-wing antisemitism. How did this happen?

SIMON ASSOUN

The fight against antisemitism has been hijacked. From resistance to racism targeting Jews, it has been turned into a tool for political disqualification. The reasons for this, in my opinion, are simple. First off, France Insoumise has long held a very coherent position on the Israel-Palestine conflict. In France, it also stands for a clear rupture with the politics of the bourgeois bloc, leading a coalition which is very much in position to be able to contend with the Right and the political center.

One way to tar the Left has been to fall back on the theory of a “new antisemitism,” which we have seen these last two decades. This situates antisemitism as a phenomenon specific to Arab or Muslim communities in response to the politics of the Middle East and the Israel-Palestine conflict more specifically. What’s winning out is a civilizational reading of all of this, pitting a progressive and universalist “Judeo-Christian” West against a barbaric, terrorist, fanatical, and antisemitic Middle East. The problem of antisemitism does also have a particular resonance in Western societies: Europe is the homeland of antisemitism, after all, and where it led to the extermination of six million people. It’s this history and memory that has made antisemitism into such a powerful stigma — and for good reason. But at the same time, it’s a very effective way of disqualifying a political opponent, which is now happening on an unprecedented scale.

HARRISON STETLER

How can the Left push back against these accusations? Mélenchon has dismissed them, arguing that antisemitism today is a “residual” problem. But even serious figures on the Left, like the attorney Arié Alimi, have maintained that there is an antisemitism problem. Although it prioritizes the fight against the “foundational, historic, and ontological” antisemitism of the far right, a cosigned essay in Le Monde by Alimi and the historian Vincent Lemire accused elements of France Insoumise of peddling an “electoralist” antisemitism. This is the argument that Mélenchon’s appeal consists in his willingness to exploit an alleged antisemitism among French Muslims and voters in the working-class banlieues.

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SIMON ASSOUN

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The Left must stand united and reject the instrumentalization of the fight against antisemitism. What’s being targeted isn’t the Parti Socialiste or the Écologistes or even the Parti Communiste Français; it’s really France Insoumise. The first thing I’d expect from the parties of the Nouveau Front Populaire is that they be able to stand together to make quite clear that France Insoumise is not an antisemitic party. In my opinion, agreeing on that is a necessary condition for us to be able to have an internal debate on the points of disagreement on the question of antisemitism and for us to be able to move forward together.

Everything needs to be looked at in context. Something becomes a dog whistle depending on the situation in which it is enunciated, who is speaking, to what audience, or in what political moment. Is it or is it not a way of speaking about the Jews without specifically saying so? Take, for example, Mélenchon’s claims in 2021 that “the enemy is not the Muslim, it’s the financier.” This set off a major scandal, with people essentially arguing, “if he says financier, it’s because that’s code for Jews.” But that really means a trial of intentions.

One of the main problems with the instrumentalization of antisemitism is that it ultimately undermines any possibility of having a real public debate on the issue. When you’re accused of antisemitism on a spurious basis, you can’t get into a real discussion. The discussion is distorted, especially in a media landscape that is far from neutral. Much of the French political spectrum, from the far right to parts of the center left, have come to a consensus on antisemitism in France Insoumise, or the idea that slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” or using the term “apartheid” to describe the reality in Palestine are themselves antisemitic.

HARRISON STETLER

How do these allegations undermine the fight against antisemitism?

SIMON ASSOUN

What’s extremely dangerous is that we’re making Jews into something of the dividing line in society. This is what the government is doing by framing its campaign against the Left around antisemitism. Today it’s to disqualify France Insoumise. In the past, it’s been used to delegitimize the gilets jaunes or anti-racist organizing. It places Jews as the demarcation line, locking us, to a certain degree, into an uneasy bind with the state. We’re told that the Left is antisemitic or that certain racial minorities are antisemitic. All that’s left for the Jews is the state. This contributes to making Jews into a vulnerable group, aggravating the very real sense of isolation and unease in Jewish communities.

After all, there is still antisemitism in France. But this instrumentalization puts another target on us and makes Jews into something of a shield to deflect social resentment. It opens the door to all sorts of antisemitic prejudices and clichés: that the Jews are close to power, for example, or are an overprotected and privileged minority. We shouldn’t be fooled. This instrumentalization weakens the fight against antisemitism.

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HARRISON STETLER

Are these accusations in reaction to some of the Left’s successes? Thanks to France’s movement for a cease-fire in Gaza and to organizing from groups like Tsedek!, the Nouveau Front Populaire is calling for a significant shift in French policy on the Israel-Palestine conflict. What do you make of the NFP’s platform on this issue?

SIMON ASSOUN

What’s clear is that eight months of struggle have mobilized a growing share of the population and have helped to politicize France’s position on the conflict. We saw this in the largest demonstrations this past winter and in the way that young people, particularly university students, gave the movement a second lease on life this spring. We also owe it to the tenacity of France Insoumise, which managed to hold the line in a French context that was particularly rigid on this issue.

So yes, it’s a collective achievement to have succeeded in imposing the policy shifts laid out in the NFP program, including a demand for an immediate cease-fire, clear stances in defense of international law, a call for the recognition of Palestinian statehood, and an embargo of arms deliveries to Israel. There’s even mention of the genocidal risk in the war.

That being said, we haven’t succeeded in imposing a counternarrative to the dominant media framing of the conflict. This still portrays the State of Israel as acting within its right to self-defense, making sense of the war within the paradigm of the fight against terrorism, thereby entirely shrouding the historical, political, and colonial context of the Israel-Palestine conflict. We haven’t managed to reverse this. That, too, is part of breakthrough of the Rassemblement National, after all. Beyond the approach on Palestine in the NFP platform, what we could soon be facing is a major defeat for the Left.

HARRISON STETLER

Tsedek! was founded last summer as a new political space for Jewish people in France. What were some of the reasons for creating this collective?

SIMON ASSOUN

We realized that there was a real political need for a new home, as we like to call it, especially for those of us who no longer wanted to live their Jewish identity in conflict with their political values. We wanted to emancipate our Jewish identity from ties with the State of Israel and with Zionism. We wanted to put back on the agenda an idea of Jewishness in full connection with anti-colonialism and universal equality and solidarity.

It was also about rediscovering a certain idea of dignity and identity. We wanted to revive the cultural and spiritual traditions that have been muffled by the way Jewish communities have been organized and developed in France. Take my own family’s links with Arab and Berber cultures. There are many of us who share a similar cultural history, but it’s still a taboo for some families to live with it. As far as my family’s background is concerned, we’re essentially Arabs! We have a similar culture, eat the same food, and listen to the same music. Despite that, you hear an Arabophobic undercurrent, and lots of talk about how, “Oh no, we’re not Arabs. We’re Jews.” Tsedek! has been a place where we can work through these questions about our identities and discuss them collectively. It’s done a lot of good.

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HARRISON STETLER

Tsedek! remains relatively marginal in France’s Jewish community, however, and a political outlier when compared to many of the more established and legacy organizations that are rapidly shifting to the right. Why?

SIMON ASSOUN

The Jewish community in France is really at the crossroads of two intersecting histories. On the one hand, there’s the history of the Holocaust and the deportation of Jews by the collaborationist Vichy regime. On the other hand, there’s France’s own colonial history in North Africa. The majority of French Jews are Sephardic, with roots in North Africa. As such, this community is doubly traumatized. There’s the trauma of extermination and the Vichy regime. But there’s also the trauma of having been uprooted from an Arab and Maghreb culture in North Africa, with French nationality imposed on Jews in Algeria [the 1870 Crémieux Decree] without giving them a real place in a society that was virulently antisemitic at the time. The fact that a lot of French Jews are Sephardic also led to a certain projection of past divisions with Muslims in North Africa on to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there was an opening of a discussion of what it meant to be Jewish in France. In the post–World War II context, however, these questions were still largely inaudible, what with the largely held myth that essentially the whole country took part in the resistance to Nazism. When these questions could finally be raised, identification with the State of Israel would take up an enormous amount of space in the reconstitution of French Jewish identity.

HARRISON STETLER

One of the cruel ironies of this debate is that we could be on the cusp of the first far-right government since Vichy. For over a century, the main proponent of antisemitism in France has been the nationalist right. And this history is not as distant as many would like to think.

SIMON ASSOUN

Just look at the attempt to rehabilitate Philippe Pétain [leader of the Vichy regime] or Charles Maurras [a leader of the fascist group Action Française]! Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin defended his campaign against Islamic “separatism” by reappropriating Napoleonic-era antisemitism, writing that he wanted “the state to impose on Muslims what Napoleon imposed on the Jews.”

How could someone in his position say something like this without causing major uproar? It’s because for twenty years, society has been reworking the question of antisemitism, both redefining it and reframing the fight against it. That’s what the theory of the “new antisemitism” is all about.

This gets back to our discussion about how the Left can get out of this bind. We need to reintegrate the fight against antisemitism within the broader battle against racism in France. In other words, we need to do the opposite of what the government is doing today in trying to separate the two. Looking frankly at the present and history of antisemitism can also help us understand the racism that exists in French society today. Obviously, each form of racism has its own specificities. But in terms of political strategy, I think it’s important to join the fight against antisemitism with the anti-racist movement more broadly. If the government and the Right are investing such energy in their fight against antisemitism, it’s in part to legitimize their own racist and Islamophobic battles. The two really need to be confronted together.

HARRISON STETLER - AN INTERVIEW WITH SIMON ASSOUN

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