Jewish families face divisions over Israel-Hamas war
The conflict has made its way into French Jewish homes, revealing antagonistic points of view regarding Israel, even if the picture seems more nuanced than in the US.
The day after October 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas attack on Israel, Elie was out shopping in Paris with his mother when unease crept into their discussion. As they talked about the massacre, the 26-year-old engineer (who wished to remain anonymous) said what he felt: He didn't feel emotionally involved in events taking place 5,000 kilometers from Paris, in the Middle East. He was saddened by the death of 1,200 innocent victims, of course, but no more or less than if the attack had taken place in some other faraway land.
"My mother was outraged, scandalized," he said in a café in the center of the French capital, wearing a turtleneck and sporting stubble. "She couldn't hear what I, as a Jew, was saying. I was surely feeling anger and sadness." He saw things differently and explained that he feared the hateful and angry engagement that this terrorist attack would bring, with its accompanying community tensions around the world: "I immediately thought of the repercussions for the Arab-Muslim community in France," said the young man.
In the days that followed, the tension continued unabated. Elie, who supports France's Green Party, saw Israel's retaliation as a "disproportionate response," while his family (Ashkenazi, some of whom live in Israel) supported Israel's right to defend itself. "It is not possible to use history to justify violence," he said, when his relatives invoked the memory of the Holocaust, spoke of Israel as the refuge state for all the world's persecuted Jews and reproached him for his naivety and utopianism.
'A new catastrophe is just around the corner'
Elie had noticed that family dinners were becoming increasingly rowdy. After the outbursts, there was awkwardness, then demands for apologies. Then he decided to stop broaching the subject. "I realized that, for the rest of my family, October 7 represented a continuation of the anti-Semitism that never goes away, with the idea that a new catastrophe is just around the corner," he said.
Elie's case is far from unique. While many French Jewish families have closed ranks in the face of the violence of the October 7 attack, in others, the event has heightened existing tensions between generations, or even brought new ones to the surface. For most French Jews, the Israel-Hamas war is not an abstract subject: It conjures up painful memories of the past and concerns for the future. It also raises the question of what it means to be Jewish in France.
"Crises like those of October 7 are moments of a strong call that can produce an awakening of identity among French Jews," said Sylvie Anne Goldberg, a historian specializing in Jewish history, who edited the 2023 collective work Histoire juive de la France ("A Jewish History of France"). "A similar phenomenon occurred at the time of the June 1967 war [known as the Six-Day War], when French people, sometimes even detached from any connection with Jewishness, felt part of Israel's future." This time, the attacks and the war are even being debated within families.
A clear divide in the US
In the United States, this divide takes the form of a generation clash. It is fuelled by major differences in perception linked to Israel's evolution. On one side is the older generation, who experienced the first Israeli-Arab wars, the isolation of a country surrounded by enemies and a population traumatized by suicide bombings. On the other is Generation Z, young people aged between 18 and 30, who see Israel more as a military and economic superpower allied with the US, encroaching on the territory of its neighbors through the spreading of settlements.
This difference in opinion has even become an issue in the upcoming US presidential election, as President Joe Biden's support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sparked debate within Jewish communities. According to a survey conducted by Democratic pollster GBAO Strategies, 82% of American Jews over 36 surveyed support Biden's position, while the figure drops to 53% among 18-25 year-olds. In France (home to the world's second-largest Jewish community outside Israel, far behind the US), even though there is no reliable data on the subject, the picture seems more nuanced.
"Since October 7, many young Jews are returning to their roots," said Samuel Lejoyeux, president of the French Jewish Students' Union, who has seen an influx of new memberships since that date. "Unlike in Anglo-Saxon countries, where decolonial movements critical of Israel are well established, in France, young Jews are afraid of the extreme left, which tends to make the issue of anti-Semitism invisible and to equate Jews with whites, and therefore with those who dominate."
A father and son who no longer understand each other
Most of the people we spoke to wanted to remain anonymous, for fear of adding salt to the family wounds. But also for fear of exposing themselves in a climate of violence unprecedented in France, where the number of anti-Semitic acts recorded has risen by 1,000% since October 7, according to a report by the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions published on January 25.
In some families, dialogue can be at a standstill, as between Daniel, 52, and Samuel, 20 (their first names have been changed, as with all the following sources). In a book-lined Parisian café where father and son squared off, tempers often flared and eyes became teary.
Since the attack, Daniel and Samuel have still been talking, but no longer understand each other. Their Jewishness had long brought them together. The family, Ashkenazi immigrants from Poland in the 1930s, settled in the Paris suburbs. Daniel's parents used to write dramas adapting Hasidic tales. Today, father and son sometimes get together to play klezmer music, complete with trumpet and tuba.
Like many French Jews, they have family in Israel. A left-wing activist and member of the Golem collective fighting anti-Semitism, Daniel said he has always been "sensitive to the suffering of the Palestinian people." As he grew older, his son Samuel took a different view. He regularly travels to Israel, thanks in particular to trips organized by Taglit-Birthright Israel, a non-profit organization that offers young Jews a free stay in Israel. Samuel helps out for a few days on a kibbutz or does maintenance work for the Israeli army. He feels freer there than in France and finds relations warmer in a country where wearing a yarmulke is safe.
He keeps abreast of the war not only through his family's subscriptions to Le Mondeand the investigative outlet Mediapart but also through Telegram channels, fed by local acquaintances. He worries that "hatred of Israel, which is not a fantasy," is not being taken seriously, and rejects his father's two-state solution as "irrational." On his return from a trip last summer, he began learning to write Hebrew and blames his father, who did not teach him the language, for a "gap in his heritage."
De-Frenchify their family name
The October 7 massacres have opposite meanings for them. Daniel, the father, considers that the terrorist attack marks "the failure of Israeli policy of the last 30 years and the fact of having staked everything on security without worrying about offering an acceptable future to the inhabitants of Gaza."
For Samuel, on the other hand, his father's vehemence toward Israel is a betrayal. "We expect Jews to be united in the face of this unprecedented problem," he said. "The great mistake of my father and of many left-wing people who think they are virtuous is to think that if the Jews make concessions to the Palestinians, they will calm down, whereas the Arabs have never wanted to cohabit with the Israelis." He compared Hamas to Nazis "even more bloodthirsty than the Einsatzgruppen [mobile extermination units of the Third Reich]."
Daniel, a former activist with the NGO SOS-Racisme who mourned the death of French-Algerian student Malik Oussekine by police during a 1986 demonstration, is dismayed to see his son's "rhetoric close to that of the Israeli far right." Samuel keeps kosher and has taken steps to de-Frenchify their family name. Despite their differences, father and son went together to the demonstrations against anti-Semitism organized this fall in Paris.
If October 7 weakened certain family ties, it's also because the Hamas attack awakened deep-seated pain. Since that day, Shanah, 41, a civil servant in Paris, has stopped speaking to her sister, 12 years her senior. They grew up in one of the many Ashkenazi families decimated by the Holocaust. Their maternal grandparents, who left Poland before the war to settle in the Paris region, were among the few survivors: Their grandfather returned from Auschwitz and their grandmother managed to hide during the Occupation.
'Jewish shame'
Shanah describes hers as a "very secular French family." They celebrate all the major Jewish holidays, but there's always a "piece of sausage lying around." The Holocaust made them lose the very idea of believing in God, but unlike her elder sister, Shanah grew up wondering about her Jewish identity. Having witnessed several anti-Semitic attacks in France, she regularly travels to Israel, "a place where people don't hide." She feels that her sister behaves "like a shameful Jew," refusing to have her children circumcised or to celebrate religious holidays.
For Shanah, October 7 was a profound shock. "It's no small thing to be part of a people who have been exterminated and rejected. That's what happened again on October 7," she said. The day after the attack, she was surprised not to hear from her sister: "I said to myself, 'Can you believe it, she doesn't understand what's going on? She's so cut off from her identity that she doesn't want to hear about it. For her, none of this exists.'" Worse, she heard her reproach their mother for going to the October 9 demonstration in support of Israel in Paris. "The events reinforced her idea that we had to be discreet. This way of living by apologizing for being oneself saddens me."
Shanah, on the other hand, praises the richness and diversity of French Jewish communities. Committed to the left, she claims to support Israel while being highly critical of Netanyahu's policies and said she was shocked by the thousands of Palestinian deaths: "The intervention in Gaza is becoming nonsense." "There are a lot of debates within the community that we don't talk about outside. It's a shame," she said with regret. "The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a complicated subject on which we're always asked to have simple positions."
The feeling of not being 'liked' by Muslims
This is as true of Jewish families as it is of the rest of French society. The Arab-Israeli conflict has generated a phenomenon of "hemiplegic empathy," to use the _expression_ often quoted by Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur. Everyone feels obliged to choose sides, and October 7 compounded the evil, a situation that saddens Ava, 34, who works in the media sector in Paris.
Since the Hamas attacks, her relationship with her parents has come under a heavy shadow. Her family settled in France after fleeing Tunisia in the 1960s, a few years after independence and Habib Bourguiba's rise to power. "My parents felt chased out by the Tunisians and are part of that generation of Sephardic Jews who feel they are not liked by Muslims," Ava said.
The family has many members living in Israel. She often visits this country, which has for her the comfort of a refuge. She pronounces its name in her prayers, but her feelings are ambivalent. She has always noticed how much the Palestinians suffer from the Israeli settlements: "The Israelis' 'everything is ours and we're going to take back our land' attitude makes me uncomfortable. My attachment to Israel has another side: sadness and anger at the tendency, present on both sides, to ignore the suffering of the other."
'French Jews becoming more right wing'
Her parents, who are now retired, see things differently: "For them, the Palestinians have always been the bad guys," she told us. Ava's father voted for far-right Jewish candidate Eric Zemmour in the last presidential election, in 2022, and unreservedly supports Netanyahu. Ava, who feels closer to the left and keeps herself informed by reading the Israeli daily Haaretz and listening to radio station France Inter, regrets seeing her parents glued to conservative 24-hour news channels such as CNews or i24 News.
"I'm enormously saddened by French Jews becoming more right-wing," she said, sitting in a bar in the inner suburbs of Paris. In the last presidential election, the 10% of French Israelis who voted gave 53.59% of their votes to Zemmour. Before October 7, Ava would try to make her point to her parents, casually mentioning this or that peace demonstration. "But the conversation always turned into a shouting match. My position irritated them, so I always ended up talking about more harmless subjects."
On the evening of the October 7 Hamas attack, Ava learned that close family friends in Israel who were reservists had left home to join the army. "There was a real turning point that day," said Ava. "I stopped trying to explain my way of thinking to them. I realized that talk of peace was simply no longer being heard." October 7 also marked the end of a certain type of dialogue.