Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, anti-Semitic markings have been found on several university campuses in France. In Toulouse-III Paul-Sabatier University's Faculty of Health on November 15, a first-year student discovered the words "Sale juive, crève" ("Die, dirty jew!") on the folder she had left on her desk during a break, alongside swastika. "This eruption of hatred in a faculty where people are trained to care for their fellow human beings came as a complete shock," said Dean Philippe Pomar, who has demanded that a message reminding students of the seriousness of such acts be read at the beginning of every class henceforth.
From Poitiers to Paris, Rennes and Strasbourg, anti-Semitic tags have been found in universities. Strasbourg University president Michel Deneken filed a report with the prosecutor and lodged a complaint with the police. He condemned the return of the "virus of anti-Semitism," which everyone thought would be definitively eradicated "with all the pogroms of history and the apocalyptic abyss of the Shoah."
At Sciences Po, the management reported a student who posted messages on social media "clearly inciting violence against Jews" to the prosecutor's office and summoned him to a disciplinary hearing. Four students were disciplined for messages posted on WhatsApp groups.
According to the Ministry of Education, the number of anti-Semitic acts reported to the justice system by universities does not exceed "a few dozen," but it specified that it didn't keep a tally of them. "These acts don't necessarily take place on campus, but rather on social media, and in this case, the PHAROS reporting platform takes over," explained the minister's entourage.
The atmosphere can sometimes be highly charged in the lecture halls and alleys of the campus. Israel's warring response against Hamas is fuelling the militancy of some students, who are setting up "Palestine support committees" under the aegis of far-left collectives such as Le Poing Levé, an offshoot of the Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste (NPA, far-left). "The question of the Palestinian people is the question of an entire generation of young people, young ecologists and young feminists," said Ariane Anemoyannis, a law student at the University of Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne and spokesperson for Le Poing levé, on the X account "Révolution permanente" on November 18.
To rally the student population, the NPA's leaflets are targeting "French imperialism, complicit in the ongoing massacres in Gaza." As well as "the more global struggle against apartheid and colonization, to put an end to the colonial situation in Palestine."
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