Penn Raine - Plus ça change: the rise and rise of antisemitism in the West.

During World War Two France deported 275, 000 Jewish people to the extermination camps. Three thousand returned.

The sanitised view is that the French boldly opposed these actions largely with the courage of the Resistance. The truth is that even before the occupying German force demanded that the deportation quotas be filled the Vichy government of the allegedly Free France had already drawn up its own plans for deportations.
How was it that expulsion and extermination of Jews was so readily accepted by the French authorities?

Four percent of France’s population was killed during WW1 (compared with 2% of Britain’s) and following the Armistice of 1918 the French economy was desperate to replace the working men lost in the war.

As a result Jewish workers from across Europe – Poland, Germany, Russia, Romania, Austria, Greece, Turkey and Hungary were encouraged to make their homes and work in France. In 1939 they and their families numbered about 50,000.

Vichy’s readiness in 1942 to herd them into detentions centres and from there to be transported east in cattle cars might be initially and charitably explained as xenophobia rather than antisemitism, but the excuse becomes less acceptable when the savagery was directed similarly at 24,000 French Jews.

These citizens had largely been taken by surprise by the laws enacted against them as most saw themselves as French first rather than Jewish. That many served commendably in the previous war, in the civil service or in the nation’s intellectual life was no protection.

Among the many Jews prominent in French life who were arrested, deported and put to death were Hélène Berr the outstanding Sorbonne student whose Journal became one of the most important French Holocaust testimonies, René Blum, the founder of the Ballet de l’Opéra de Monte-Carlo and brother of Prime Minister Léon Blum, and Élisabeth de Rothschild of the Rothschild banking family.

These three represent the dozens of prominent French people whom the state considered expendable.

To put it in perspective, it is estimated that French citizens wrote between three and five million letters of denunciation to both German and Vichy officials during the war. While a number of these were to betray their Jewish fellows, the majority were not.

France, by its own reckoning counts itself amongst the elite of world culture. At 90 million foreign visitors a year it is the globe’s favourite holiday destination whose travellers come to marvel at its beauty: the chateaux and ancient cities, the food and fashion, its patrimony of the arts and philosophy. And to admire the civilisation that after 1789 was the poster child for human rights and equality.

It is difficult to find an area of civilisation where France has not excelled and yet in a matter of months it determined to send its own Jews to the ovens of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück.

Britain’s Community Security Trust, the official organisation for monitoring antisemitism and protecting the Jewish community, reports that since 2023 incidents are in their thousands and are ‘unprecedently high’, several hundred percent more than previously. Following Hamas’ invasion of Israel on October 7 that year, the world has been polarised on the topic of Israel’s right to exist and of the acceptability of demonising all Jews everywhere, Israeli or not.

In 2005 when Israel handed Gaza over to the Palestinian Authority and thence to Hamas more than 8,000 Israelis were forcibly evacuated by the IDF. Although the infrastructure, including factories and farms of those exiting the territory was left in place, much of it was destroyed in a display of independence and contempt by the replacement population.

In the following twenty years the mutual animosity has not diminished. Gazans claim they are blockaded even though the fact that they have a southern border with Egypt, a fellow Arab state is often ignored. Hamas’ founding document calls for the specific destruction of the Israeli state by an armed struggle and although October 7 cannot have represented a definitive move in this direction it is seen by Israelis as a warning of more to come.

Israel’s response has been widely condemned as ‘disproportionate’, although a map of that area shows how the Jewish state surrounded on three sides by hostile or potentially hostile jurisdictions and 30 kilometres wide at its narrowest point, might consider a robust reaction necessary. Although its toehold in the Middle East as the only western democracy is of geopolitical use to several other western democracies, those with Left governments have been noticeably coy in standing with the only Jewish state.

For this favouritism Hamas and its allies must be credited with world class public relations nous.

Although through the UN and other agencies billions of dollars of foreign aid have entered the territory although there is relatively little to see for it in the lives of ordinary Gazans. Mainstream media never show the smart shopping areas and luxury beachfront hotels, only sad women and children bewildered amidst rubble. Check out ‘Gaza malls and beach resorts’ on Google for a more factual image of what genocide looks like.

‘Oh, but the poor children,’ is always the cry of liberals worldwide who take their facts only from biased left-wing media. The Hamas authority running Gaza has taken foreign aid and honeycombed the territory with underground tunnels. We’re not talking about the crawl-on-your-stomach tunnels of the Vietnam war but underground passageways through which military vehicles can drive. Underground cities with electricity, plumbing and arms stores. Not only were they constructed strategically under mosques and refugee camps but after their construction schools and hospitals were deliberately built over them as effective human shields for command and weapon centres below.

Even in the corners of the globe thought to be easeful and prejudice-free, where Holocaust survivors were taken in and nurtured the antisemitic climate has turned ugly.

In the year following the October 7 terrorist attack the Executive Council of Australian Jewry noted over 2,000 anti-Jewish incidents which was a 300% increase from the previous year. The incidents include on-line abuse, threats, graffiti, harassment near synagogues and schools and targeted boycotts of Jewish-linked businesses.

The first such incident took place very publicly at the Opera House on October 8, 2023, even before the IDF had made any retaliation for the previous day’s massacre, and where Jews were reviled for…being Jews. The most searing iteration of that animus showed up at the Hannukah Bondi shooting when 15 Jewish people were gunned down.

In Canada the years following October 7 antisemitism has been the highest ever recorded since tracking began in 1982, on average more than 18 incidents daily. As in the US this rise is most notable on university campuses where Jewish students report hostility, exclusion, and intimidation.

In NZ long recognised of a country of moderates, a country of sheep say some, it is nonetheless unwise for a Jewish group to publicise an event. There has not yet been serious violence, but it will be picketed if not by angry Muslims then by morally superior keffiyeh-wearing liberals who would have difficulty explaining which river and which sea they were chanting about.

In Hitler’s Weimar the reason for antisemitism could likely be found in the stereotype of the rich and greedy Jew, a trope exacerbated by the economic disaster of war reparations and the financial crash of 1929. If you were Christian the good old standby of ‘the Jews killed Christ’ was sufficient excuse for performative prejudice.

In 2026 the hatred has a more visible and simpler target – the Jewish state, a successful modern economy magicked from the sand and rocks of the ancient Jewish homeland.

In the first half of the twentieth century Jew hatred reached its zenith when the state apparatus of Germany and France lost its moral compass. How much more insidiously dangerous is it when apparently civilised states stand on the sidelines clutching their pearls while activists punch the air shouting for ‘Global Intifada!’

The graffiti, the slogans, the marches and chants, the targeting and vandalism of Jewish businesses – where have we seen this before? Only this time the state is not the visible instigator but the permissive onlooker. Asking that these acts are ‘not politicised’ and are not used to ‘demonise minority groups’. It mouths about ‘peaceful protest’ and ‘the right to free expression’ while the mob howls ‘Where’s the Jews?’

Or something like that.

Penn Raine is an educator and writer who lives in NZ and France.