One afternoon, when Nurit (her name, as with all of the children, has been changed) came out of school, she rushed up to her mother and said, "Mom, something bad happened today." Then she fell silent. Once home, she decided to recount the event that upset her. In response to a teacher's request for an exercise on symmetry, the little girl chose to draw an Israeli flag. One of her classmates then shouted "Israel dead by Palestine!" while miming a decapitation gesture in her direction. That was in March. Three months earlier, the boy had shouted "we are all Palestinians" in the playground.
In November 2023, when Nurit hadn't wanted to stand in line next to another little boy, the boy had retorted, "Don't care, I don't like Jews anyway." Around the same time, Nurit's older brother Avichai received a swastika on a WhatsApp group of friends he was in.
Nurit is 7, in second grade at a private school in an affluent neighborhood in western Paris. Avichai is 12, in seventh grade. "I grew up in the 93 [Seine-Saint-Denis, a working-class northern Paris suburb], so when I gave my children Israeli-sounding first names, I was convinced that we were done with all that," said their mother. "I'm afraid for my children, since October 7, 2023 [the date of the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel] I don't dare to call them by their first names in the street."
Observers, researchers, parents, teachers and other professionals working in schools have all noted that the average age of perpetrators and victims of racist and anti-Semitic insults and acts is getting younger. "October 7th was a trigger," said Déborah Journo, founder of the Actions Avocats legal association, who has been contacted by the parents of the two children. The association, created the day after October 7, 2023 to help in freeing the hostages taken by Hamas, now fights "against all hatreds." When it was founded, it comprised 50 lawyers; three days later, it had 150. Today, there are 835.
"We help parents write letters to school principals, we write to universities to remind them of their duty of neutrality, we work to have certain websites banned," explained Journo, who also offers to speak on the subject in schools on request.
Indeed, October 7 represented a turning point. Tina Théallet, head of legal affairs at the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA), has pointed to a 45% increase in reports of racist acts in elementary, middle and high schools since that date. The inter-ministerial delegate for the fight against racism, anti-Semitism and anti-LGBTQ+ hatred, Olivier Klein, also referred to alerts issued by departmental operational committees amid an increase in these types of comments in schools from the elementary level upwards.
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