The Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF) organized a commemoration ceremony on Monday, October 7 in tribute to the victims of the Hamas attack on Israel, and in support of hostages. For its president, Yonathan Arfi, the events of October 7 was "also a revelation of the fractures in France."

What I retain is a sudden sense of dizzying insecurity and immense vulnerability. For Jews the world over, the State of Israel has played a symbolic reassuring role since its creation. On that day, beyond the trauma of seeing the images of an abominable massacre in real time, it was also this that collapsed. October 7 resurrected the ghosts of historical persecution. While this sense of vulnerability has since gradually faded, the trauma has left its mark: like a form of historical regression, as if we had been projected back to times we thought were over, when the Jewish people were more fragile, more threatened, more persecuted.

October 7 will always be remembered as a unique event that cannot be reduced to any existing category. In some ways, it is a pogrom, in others, it is an act of mass terrorism, like September 11 or November 13. While the images of these civilians handed over to the barbarity of the Hamas hordes have taken the collective Jewish unconscious back to images of pogroms, 7 October remains, for the time being, unclassifiable. We have commemorated this massacre, even though in Jewish tradition, after a year, we symbolically pass from the time of mourning to that of remembrance. But how can we move on to the time of remembrance, when the war is still going on, when there are still hostages?

From the first images of October 7, many saw only Palestinian assailants attacking Israelis. Yet, as they gun down their victims, what Hamas terrorists shout is not "Death to the Israelis" but "Death to the Jews". What French Jews clearly perceive at that moment is the driving force at work, that of genocidal intent and hatred of Jews. Far more than a geopolitical conflict, October 7 was first and foremost the epicenter of a powerful anti-Semitic earthquake, the aftershocks of which were felt all over the world.

At 8am on October 7, 2023, my first instinct as president of the CRIF was to call the French interior minister's office to warn of the immediate risk of aftershocks in our country. Because anti-Semitism is above all a phenomenon of activation, liberation and mimicry. Beware of false causality: its driving force is not indignation at the difficult images of Gaza. It was the images of massacred Jews that triggered the wave of acts. Indeed, from October 8 onwards, even before Israel had retaliated, the number of incidents in France multiplied. As was the case after the attacks in Toulouse in 2012 [when Mohammed Merah killed seven people, including three Jewish children and a teacher in front of their school] and at the Hyper Cacher in Paris in 2015 [when Amedy Coulibaly took several people hostage and killed five people at a kosher supermarket] in the days and weeks following those.

You have 71.16% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.