“You disgust me. “To find something like that among the left is unbearable.”

WORLD “You disgust me. “To find something like that among the left is unbearable.” Article by Martina Meister • 57 mins France has the third largest Jewish community in the world, but four million Muslims also live there. After the terrorist attacks by Hamas, the conflict is threatening to develop a social and political life of its own. And that is also due to the French left. The left was absent from the solidarity demonstration for Israel in Paris Several thousand people gathered in Paris on Monday evening to demonstrate their solidarity with Israel. Almost all major parties were represented, including numerous members of the right-wing populist Rassemblement National (RN), and the right-wing extremist Éric Zemmour also appeared. Only the representatives of France's Left Party were missing from the rally called by the umbrella organization of French Jewish organizations (Crif). Already on Saturday, the party leadership of Indomitable France (La France Insoumise) could not bring itself to condemn the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel as such. On the contrary, after long hours of silence, the LFI parliamentary group issued a statement refusing solidarity with Israel and expressing its understanding of Hamas's atrocities. The latter is not referred to as a terrorist organization, but rather euphemistically as the leadership of the “Palestinian armed forces”. The first sentence in the press statement, written in the worst bureaucratic French, reads: “The armed offensive by the Palestinian forces led by Hamas takes place against the background of the intensification of Israel's occupation policy in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. We regret the dead Israelis and Palestinians.” The fact that the violence of the Islamist terrorist group Hamas is legitimized by Israel's settlement policy sparked outrage in France. Especially since the Left Party is not a left-wing splinter group, but a faction with 72 MPs who have formed a coalition with socialists, greens and communists. Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne spoke of an “absolutely shocking and misplaced statement”. The left-wing alliance is in danger of collapsing “The Jews are always blamed for what happens to them,” said Socialist Senator Laurence Rossignol. Her party colleague Jérôme Guedj criticized the “useful idiots of Hamas” who explain and excuse their atrocities. “You disgust me,” wrote Guedj, “to find something like that among leftists is unbearable.” The shaky left-wing alliance of the Nupes is in danger of finally bursting. Party founder Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who, like the British ex-Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn, repeatedly attracts attention with anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic statements, only regretted the “unleashed violence against Israel and Gaza”. Violence leads to violence, argued Mélenchon and called for a ceasefire. The left-wing populist goes even further by accusing the organizers of the rally, representatives of the umbrella organization of French Jewish organizations, of forcing everyone to align with the "far-right Israeli government" and allowing representatives of the Rassemblement National at the demonstration to have. “The dead on both sides don’t deserve this, they deserve our total sympathy,” he wrote on X. The Rassemblement National, the party of founding father Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has never made a secret of his anti-Semitism, has long been perceived by the French as anti-Semitic, but rather as anti-Arab. Since his daughter Marine managed to “normalize” the party and win 89 seats in parliament, she no longer plays the role of political pariah. Indomitable France has now clearly taken over this. Mélenchon's political line is in line with decades-old anti-colonialism on France's left. Political analysts suspect that Mélenchon wants to appeal to the large electorate that is of Arab origin or Muslim. A poll last year by the research institute Fondapol found that 33 percent of LFI voters believe that “Jews have too much influence in the world of business and finance.” Not geographically, but politically, France is closer to the Middle East than Germany. The reason for this is the fact that France has the third largest Jewish community in the world after Israel and the USA, but also around four million Muslims. The Arab-Israeli conflict was already “imported” during the Second Intifada. This time too, the escalation of violence in Israel and the hopelessness of the conflict are having a social and political aftershock.