By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2026 Paul Ben-Itzak
Under a new proposed law equating anti-Zionism and certain forms of criticism of Israel — notably, drawing comparisons between Israel and the Nazis —with anti-Semitism, a legal offense in France, proposed by legislators from French president Emmanuel Macron’s Centrist party and temporarily tabled Thursday after 707,000 electors filed a petition against it on the legislature’s website (the second highest number of signatures ever gathered for a petition filed on the site), were they alive today Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, two of the most influential intellectuals of the 20th century, would risk being sanctioned for their words.
“In 1948,” Masha Gesson wrote in a December 9, 2023 article in the New Yorker addressing in part attempts by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) to promote a revised definition of anti-Semitism incorporating anti-Zionism and certain critiques of Israel, notably those drawing comparisons to the Nazis, a definition which was the basis of the proposed new French law, “Hannah Arendt wrote an open letter that began, ‘Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.’ Just three years after the Holocaust, Arendt was comparing a Jewish Israeli party to the Nazi Party, an act that today would be a clear violation of the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism. Arendt based her comparison on an attack carried out in part by the Irgun, a paramilitary predecessor of the Freedom Party, on the Arab village of Deir Yassin, which had not been involved in the war and was not a military objective. The attackers ‘killed most of its inhabitants—240 men, women, and children—and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem.’
“The occasion for Arendt’s letter was a planned visit to the United States by the party’s leader, Menachem Begin. Albert Einstein, another German Jew who fled the Nazis, added his signature. Thirty years later, Begin became prime minister of Israel. Another half century later, in Berlin, the philosopher Susan Neiman, who leads a research institute named for Einstein, spoke at the opening of a conference called ‘Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the New Right.’ She suggested that she might face repercussions for challenging the ways in which Germany now wields its memory culture. Neiman is an Israeli citizen and a scholar of memory and morals. One of her books is called ‘Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil.’ In the past couple of years, Neiman said, memory culture had ‘gone haywire.’”
One of the ways that culture has gone haywire is the leveraging, by Israel and enabled, in France, by many program and newshosts on French public radio, of the real pain and loss of Jews inflicted by the Nazis in the Holocaust and the lingering (and, I’d argue, misplaced) institutional and media sense of culpability of European states like Germany and France for, respectively, their direct parts in the Shoah or the Deportation, to protect Israel at a time when, under the direction of the current president of Begin’s Likud party, who has an international arrest warrant on his head for crimes against humanity, it is still targeting and killing Palestinian and Lebanese civilians and dispersing and destroying entire villages while illegally displacing their populations, be they in Gaza, the West Bank which Israel has illegally occupied for 59 years, or Lebanon. This pre-stamped get-out-of-war-crimes and crimes-against-humanity jail free card accorded to Israel by its apologists on French public radio (I don’t mean the correspondents, whose intrepid work if anything contradicts the indemnity granted to Israel by these news and program hosts) extends even to denying the ongoing genocide in Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 75,000 since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 massacre of between 1200 and 1400 people (after killing 2100 in Gaza in 2014), including 38,000 women and girls and at least 20,000 children overall (a Palestinian diplomat appearing on France Inter public radio yesterday with an Israeli diplomat — as if the only way a Palestinian can be allowed on French public radio any more is if he’s accompanied by an Israeli — put the figure at 40,000) and 750 people since Israel agreed to a ceasefire last October, among them a three-year-old child attending a funeral the weekend before last killed in an Israeli drone attack, effectively disabling any criticism of Israel by enabling Israeli propagandists’ claims that such criticism is just anti-Semitism in disguise. And including by the proposed law’s adapting the IHRA’s revised definition of anti-Semitism which incorporates anti-Zionism as have, according to Gesson (writing in 2023), 25 European countries and many American states. Specifically, this definition — which could have serious consequences where it’s incorporated into the law — includes as anti-Semitic comparisons of Israel to the Nazi regime such as those drawn by Arendt, a German Jewish refugee and a darling of French intellectuals including on French public radio, and given the benediction of Einstein, also a German Jewish refugee; and, potentially, what’s referred to as “the diminution” or “banalization” of the Holocaust, which might include, say, comparing the current genocide perpetrated by a Jewish state with a genocide perpetrated against Jews.
Among the most cogently expressed oppositions to France’s proposed “Yadan law,” after the authoring legislator, which was tabled Thursday after mounting dissent notably as manifest by the petition signed by 707,000 electors(with the government proposing to submit a revised version by the end of June), was that posted by Left-leaning legislator Francois Ruffin, a potential candidate in next. year’s presidential election, on the social networks Wednesday, which adresses several of the proposed bill’s problematic elements. The commentary (translated by me) reads in part:
“The Yadan law promotes a confusion: Throughout its ‘exposition of motives,’ the proposed law links, mixes together, and confounds French Jews and the State of Israel: ‘This detestation to which the State of Israel is subjected is utilized as a pretext to go after our Jewish fellow citizens,’ ‘This hate of the State of Israel is today cosubstantial with the hate of Jews,’ going after ‘this State, which forms a collective of Jewish citizens, is a backdoor way of attacking the Jewish community in its entirety,’ etc.”
(What’s also incredible here is that the law’s authors, echoing some of the hosts on French public radio, make it sound as if Israel was just walking along minding its own business when people spontaneously decided to start detesting and hating it because of its Jewish identity. The day the petition was “classed” by a legislative committee — also meaning that despite having received the second most signatures of any petition filed on the site, and this despite the all but total radio silence over a proposed law which menaces free speech, the legislators declined to discuss it — Israel targeted and killed 20 more civilians in Lebanon, including four emergency workers targeted in a “triple-tap” attack, for a total of 2300 Lebanese killed by Israel since March 2 among them at least 180 children, and 1 million civilians illegally displaced by Israel, and killed another five Gazans in a cafe at a refugee camp. Last week-end, and notwithstanding having signed a cease-fire agreement, Israel began illegally mowing over homes in villages in the south of Lebanon with tractors and destroyed the last bridge linking the region to the rest of the country. In effect, these legislators would pass a law effectively shielding from criticism a state which has absolutely no respect for international law, on the pretense that those who would criticize this contempt for international law and human lives are doing so because they’re anti-Semites. One of the reasons this is offensive to Jews like me is because it creates a lower standard for us because of our ethnicity. Ruffin continued:)
“This assimilation of the Jews of France with the State of Israel, we contest it: It seems to us highly dangerous for the Jews of France themselves. Every act and insult against our fellow Jewish citizens, against their places of worship, against their beliefs, must be pursued and punished. They must, like every Frenchman, feel secure in our country, free in their beliefs and convictions. In turn, criticism of the State of Israel is completely legitimate, and is today absolutely necessary.”
(It’s worth noting that Ruffin assigns responsibility to “the State of Israel”; where they do allow critiques of Israel’s actions to squeeze through and make it onto the public radio airwaves — I’m not referring to the reports of Radio France’s correspondents on the ground, which if anything substantiate criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon — program hosts on French public radio typically try to assign responsibility to “the government of Benjamin Netanyahu,” as if the genocide and Apartheid are just aberrations attributable to one man’s derives, which conveniently immunizes Israel as a whole from criticism and avoids discussing the question of whether the problem is one leader or inherent in Zionism itself. And they usually leave out that Netanyahu has an international warrant for crimes against humanity on his head. Ruffin goes on:)
“The massacres committed in the Kibbutzim October 7, 2023, against women, children, Israeli civilians, we condemned them without reservation the same day. But what followed, and which we’ve condemned every day? Organized, planned massacres, Gaza become a scorched terrain, transformed into a field of ruins, with millions displaced, the bombs and the hunger, a ‘genocide’ as the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations and numerous NGOs denounce it. Against international law, against all the U.N. resolutions, the State of Israel pursues, accelerates the forced installation of settlers in the West Bank. A chaos Tel-Aviv has now extended to Lebanon, where it sows fire and blood, promising to turn it into a new Gaza.”
Noting the international arrest warrant issued against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity, Ruffin goes on to criticize what he views as the lack of sanctions against Israel. “Not even the symbolic sanction of depriving Israel from participating in sporting competitions and cultural encounters, that its national hymn will no longer resonate (in French theaters and stadiums), that its flag will no longer be brandished, as as been done in the case of Russia.” Indeed, while the mainstream media largely supports bans on Russian artists, Israeli artists continue to be programmed in France while disruptions of performances of Israeli national performing arts ensembles like the Israeli Symphony are treated as anti-Semitic. (On the other hand, appearing yesterday morning with his Palestinian counterpart on France Inter public radio, Israel’s former ambassador to France Eli Barnabi was asked about and endorsed the European Union’s suspending Israel’s favored trade status.)
… Which leads us to the continuing instances of some program hosts on France Culture public radio effectively shielding Israel, even as it continues bombing and killing its neighbors (which incidents are duly reported by Radio France’s intrepid and objective correspondents) and Gazans who under international law it is obligated to protect as the Occupying power. Including, just last week, the hypocrisy of Culture Monde, the middle-brow public radio chain’s daily world affairs program, in a focus on how some countries use culture to create a public image countering the image suggested by their acts, discussing Russia but not Israel, whose “Brand Israel” program of cultural exportation funding touring arts organizations is explicitly intended to present a kinder, gentler image of Israel than that communicated by its acts: the 75,000 killed in Gaza, the 2300 killed in Lebanon in little over a month, what several human rights organizations including Israeli human rights organizations have documented is an Apartheid state, the torture of prisoners as verified by both the U.N. (in a report still not mentioned on France Culture or its sister station France Inter) and the Israeli human rights association Bet S’elem….
But the the most forceful example of the implicitly pro-Israel bias (by which I mean here the relative rarity of a Palestinian or even Jewish perspective critical of Israel) of some France Culture program hosts last week was the host of the nightly “debate” program — which often does present real debates with opposing points of views on any subject but Israel and Palestine — once again Thursday, in the immediate wake of the Yadan law’s flop in the face of the doubt sowed by the force of the 707,000 electors who signed the petition opposing it amongst large chunks of legislators, presenting as a “debate” a conversation in which both the guests invited and even the misleading framing of the debate itself resembled more an effort to save the Yadan law than a genuine debate (by genuine I mean in which both sides are represented) over whether anti-Zionism as manifest in critiques of Israel is anti-Semitism and should be legally sanctioned as such. Even before the debate got started and despite a promised discussion of a law where opponents and proponents recognize that the central question is whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism and should be legally sanctioned, the title itself given by the host of the “debate,” “Can one legislate against anti-Semitism?” (as opposed to, say, “Is it worth sacrificing free speech to protect a state in the process of committing a genocide in territory it illegally occupies and which has killed 2300 people and illegally displaced a million more in a neighboring state in six weeks, just because it happens to be Jewish?”) implicitly endorsed the proposed law’s problematic and in my view false premise: that its intention was to combat rising anti-Semitism, where its effect if passed would be to stifle criticism of Israel in a time when Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and has already killed 2300 in Lebanon (and, earlier this month and as reported by a Radio France correspondent, a 17-year-old shepherd in Syria), including by qualifying comparisons like those proposed by Arendt and endorsed by Einstein, two survivors of Nazi anti-Semitism, as anti-Semitism. As for the three interlocuteurs invited to participate in the “debate,” one was a Jewish (you’ll see why this is pertinent) activist who by her own definition supports the notion that anti-Zionism is a pretext for anti-Semitism (and if the anti-Zionism or critique of Israel comes from a Jew, the Jew must be a self-hating Jew or, as she put it “Even firemen can be pyromaniacs”); the other two scholars who suggested a more nuanced answer to the question which incorporated in one case the notion that the legitimacy of criticizing the establishment of a Jewish state stopped the moment Israel was recognized by the United Nations in 1948. As for inviting an interlocuteur who might actually dispute the notion that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism — with 707,000 signatories opposed to the proposed law not to mention eloquent and popular legislators like Ruffin, there was no embarrassment of choice — let alone a Palestinian, as usual on most of France Culture’s talk shows including those presented as being “debates” this perspective was conspicuous by its absence. I don’t count the host’s playing a brief clip of a guest on a previous show from a Leftist Jewish organization, which incited the pyromaniac comment from the pro-Zionist guest, the Jew in question conveniently not being present to defend himself. This was not a debate, in this instance it devolved into an occasion for gutter-sniping, with the victim unable to defend himself because neither he nor the point of view he represented — a point of view echoed by at least 707,000 French electors — were welcome at the table. Once again, a program host on France Culture had effectively muzzled debate — a phenomenon which *only happens on this subject* — both by implicitly endorsing the Yadan Law’s false claims that the intention of the law was to combat anti-Semitism when it reality they were to stifle anti-Zionism and impeach or at least inhibit and intimidate legitimate criticism of Israel and excluding any guest who might dispute this notion. (Including Jewish critics; representatives of the Jewish Union for Peace, which has actively militated against the genocide and has a presence in Gaza, are never invited. This refusal to invite Jewish guests critical of Israel — and I don’t mean French public radio’s house Zionists like Denis Charbit who wrack their hands and rend their garments over Netanyahu — is particularly insidious because it promotes the false narrative that Jews in France entirely support Israel.) Despite its grave implications for free speech in France, the Yadan law itself was all but ignored by French public radio until public outcry against it made it impossible to ignore.
BRAUSEBAD
Notwithstanding the excellent and objective reports from Radio France’s correspondents in Israel, the Occupied Territories, and Lebanon, by the on-air evidence, when it comes to Israel and Palestine, the evident preeminent desire of certain program hosts on France Culture, as on France Inter to a lesser degree (there notably by relentlessy vehicling, without citing any proof, the distortion of a leading Left-wing party’s critiques of the genocide as anti-Semitism) is, in my opinion, not to protect French Jews from anti-Semitism, it is to protect Israel from being called to account for its actions against its neighbors and against the Occupied population it is obligated by international law to protect, apparently out of some perverse notion that because France deported Jews to their deaths in a genocide 80 years ago it (France Culture and, in some instances, France Inter) must now protect a state lead by a man wanted for crimes against humanity because that state happens to be Jewish, a protection which has the tragic effect of buttressing what Israel’s victims in Gaza have referred to as the world’s silence in the face of Israel’s acts including genocide and letting it go on committing them. Including by their dissembling the law’s real intention, through both their radio silence over the law and one-sided ‘debates,’ which is not to protect Jews but to muzzle Israel’s critics. A law which pretends to be motivated by the need to protect Jews that, if passed (even if the government has tabled the Yadan law, it’s promised to submit a new law before the end of June), would prevent people like me, even Jewish people, from fully criticizing it, especially if we were to do so like Hannah Arendt did 80 years ago, supported by Albert Einstein, and draw analogies between Israel’s acts and those of Nazi Germany. And yet — as one cartoon I saw on a “social” network at the time suggested — when a state that exploits both its putatively Jewish nature and the memory of the Holocaust to garner immunity from criticism for its war crimes and crimes against humanity profits from its own starvation of innocent civilians by shooting them down like rats at a food distribution point they’ve come to thinking they’ll get food only to get shot to death (at least 600 Gazans, including women and children, were killed including by Israeli soldiers last year at food distribution points organized by the fake Gaza Humanitarian Foundation where they’d been promised food), if the scale doesn’t come close to mirroring the Germans’ disguising gas chambers as showers, certain comparisons cry out to be pointed to, particularly in the minds of Jews still haunted by this memory, and particularly when it is Jews who are mowing down civilians who came in response to the promise of food. Such historical resonances not only call out to be identified, they are essential in sounding the alarm that what we swore would never happen again is now happening before our eyes and we are doing little to stop it. Was it intentional? I don’t know. But the question merits to be discussed, a discussion which would be interdicted by this law.
When I was in high school, my theater conservatory group presented a production of “The Diary of Anne Frank”; I played Peter van Daan, Anne’s boyfriend. Whenever we got to fooling around too much during rehearsal — we were after all high school students (my best friend, who played Anne’s father, and I would sometimes dissect Peter’s invisible cat Mouschi) — our director Lewis Campbell (who as an American soldier in Germany in the 1950s had been to a performance of the play whose ending was met with silence by the shattered audience) would shout “BRAUSEBAD!,” the German word for shower room, to remind us of the gravity of what the play was about and get us back on task. (We even took to mocking him behind his back by imitating his cry.) One of the things this play and that diary were about was that this should NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN, not just to Jews but to anyone. That no more Anne Franks would be martyred by racism and intolerance. In a time when Israel has now martyred between 20,000 and 40,000 Palestinian Anne Franks and some program hosts on France Culture, a public radio chain whose mission is to inform the public, continue to abet efforts by Israel’s protectors and enablers to reverse the culpability and penalize those who would call this genocide out by labelling us anti-Semites (and the Jews amongst us self-hating Jews when in fact our motivation is the opposite, we treasure our Jewish soul and we condemn those who would profane it), even to enabling the potential criminalization of what Hannah Arendt and Einstein said before and what I am about to say now in the interests of protecting a genocidal state, it is time to climb up on the highest rafters and cry out
BRAUSEBAD.
Speaking of Anne Frank: What I also remember from that high school production is the author’s admission that she was “a little bundle of contradictions.” While the above, thus, would be a neat place to end this article, I can’t do so without exposing another deleterious effect the Yadan Law would have produced, and that its resurrection in a simliar form by the government might yield: to preclude exposing real instances where legitimate resentment towards a Jewish state for its acts not because of its ethnicity is exploited to resurrect genuine anti-Semitic tropes by having them aired and even debated in public where they could thus be openly combatted.
In October 2023, thus not long after Hamas’s massacre *and before any quantitative evidence of the genocide to come existed, even if remarks by the Israeli defense minister announced it*, a French radio humorist, Guillaume Meurice, went on France Inter, the most listened to radio chain in France, and quipped: “Netanyahu is a kind of Hitler without a foreskin.”
The problem — and where, in my opinion, the inherent and in the past deadly form of anti-Semitism of this “joke” is exposed — is that the lack of a foreskin is not just a typical anti-Semitic trope signalling difference, it is how many Jewish males were identified, presumably including in France, to be deported and ultimately sent to the gas chambers. So here, the “humorist” is effectively using (consciously or unconsciously; I can’t get inside his head) the guise of criticizing a head of state who has or is about to commit condemnable acts to resurrect a more than condemnable classic variety of anti-Semitism *because it set Jewish men and boys apart as different*, and *in a country where the lack of a foreskin* was likely used to identify Jews and deport them, with many of them ultimately ending up in the gas chambers.
(Ironically — given the global reluctance on French public radio, exempting as always the correspondents sur place, to criticize Israel and the general connivance among some news and program hosts in promoting the false idea that critiicizing Israel makes you an anti-Semite — when Meurice was warned by his supervisors and then suspended when he repeated the offense, here involving a joke that actually did evoke real anti-Semitic tropes and with a deadly history including in this country, the majority of his public radio colleagues rallied around him.)
And even before Gaza, or at least Gaza this time around (this is not the first war on Gaza in which israel has massacred vast numbers of civilians including women and children; the other problem with the vast majority of coverage on French public radio when it comes to Israel and Palestine is that they set the historical marker on October 7, 2023; the question is not whether that massacre was condemnable — it is and was and nothing Israel did before can justify it — but the double standard), a close friend of mine in Paris *and who lost relatives deported to the gas chambers,* *and whose father hid out during the war* thus who would never had been born if his father had been caught, was particularly upset about bumper stickers which started sprouting up around town whose slogan I forget but it either called for freeing Palestine or criticized Israel; perhaps the slogan was “Zionism = Racism.” What triggered my friend’s alarm, and rightly so, was not necessarily that sentiment but that *the stickers were printed on yellow background” — the same color as the Jewish star which Jews in France and other Occupied countries including his grandfather were required to wear to set them apart as meriting discrimination and, later, deportation. In other words, under the pretense of condemning Zionism as racism the signs’ authors were resurrecting another, provedly deadly form of racism, targeting Jews, with a tragic history in this country.
My friend also told me about returning to his car parked on a high-way to find someone had painted a Swastika on it. When a service station attendant asked if he wanted him to paint it over, my friend said no.
