It is not easy to fight anti-Semitism in France. Or at least it has nothing to do with what it means to do it in Spain. We enter the evening organized by Bernard-Henri Lévy at the Antoine Theater in Paris through a door crossed by police armed with machine guns. After identifying ourselves, we went through a maze of dressing rooms guarded at every corner by security personnel. We also glimpse camouflaged agents, hidden weapons. We see it in his looks, in his back.
At the entrance to the common public – we have entered through the door of the privileged because we have to read a few words on behalf of this newspaper – a contingent of the police searches bags and backpacks. The summit is titled “Europe against anti-Semitism”.
We are, in total, about eight hundred. From the stage, no empty seats can be seen in the patio or on any of the four floors of this theater with maroon seats and golden boxes built in the mid-19th century.
Actually, it’s a kidnapping. We don’t know it yet, but it’s seven in the afternoon and we’re not going to leave here until after twelve. The French do not have a prostate. The French don’t get up early. The French are absolutely crazy. When we have had four hours of uninterrupted hearing, faced with a writer’s threat to shorten her speech, part of the audience will shout: “Go on! “We have come to listen!”
At least, when we leave, the machine guns will have had the deference to wait for us.
At a key moment and a few days before the European elections, Lévy has brought together a flood of political and cultural personalities who will defend the fight against anti-Semitism from the stage. There are the center, the right and the left. Extremes absent.
More specifically: there are those of Macron, the Gaullist Republican right and the Socialist Party. Although for reasons that we do not know how to specify, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, our countrywoman, receives a tremendous whistle upon being introduced. Lévy tries to stop the boos by sending him a kiss through the air.
The event is organized by Lévy, but is named after the magazine The rule of the gamefounded in 1990 by different intellectuals, including Salman Rushdie, Mario Vargas Llosa, David Grossman, Jorge Semprún, Susan Sontag and Amos Oz.
Lévy opens the Show with a microphone in his hand and nothing else. Well, with his legendary white shirt, always the same, always the same tailor. He thanks, in addition to the mayor of Paris, the presence of the president of the National Assembly, Yaël Brun-Privet (Macronist), and the president of the Senate, Gerard Larcher (conservative right), in addition to former prime ministers such as Manuel Valls.
On the way to the stage, Lévy stopped to greet some elderly men, with wrinkled skin and light eyes, whom we imagine to be Holocaust survivors and who sit in side boxes because they have great difficulty moving around.
Lévy’s speech begins, which we follow with a certain tension, unaccustomed to a political event being held in a theater and surrounded by machine guns. We also followed it, why deny it, somewhat seduced by this Paris where eight hundred people can gather for an event where there is nothing more than the naked word… for five hours.
In Spain, this is not an event, we call it kidnapping. Before coming we read a poem by Baudelaire that says: “Old Paris is gone. The shape of a city changes faster than the mortal heart. But this is the Paris of the movies. Alive, old and literary, as if cell phones did not exist. Why don’t people look at their cell phones? Why does almost no one go to the bathroom?
Lévy places as a general framework that The Jews “gave the book to Europe”. As he has been doing in his latest articles published in this newspaper, he vehemently states that the continent “tried to commit suicide” with the Holocaust. But “a handful of righteous people,” fortunately, “saved the tatters of Europe.”
“It was the murder of its Jews that caused Europe to be lost and it was thanks to the acts of reparation that were made to the survivors that it managed to give itself one last chance at salvation,” he says, raising his voice. An ovation.
Eighty years later, Lévy harangues, the anti-Semitic hatred, which was latent, runs through the streets “histrionic and vociferous.” Through a tour of European culture, the controversial essayist mentions the most exciting references of European Jewish culture. He cites the if this is a Manof Cousin Levy; the “premonition of Israel’s loneliness”, of Kafka; and remember Simon VeilAuschwitz survivor, first woman to preside over the European Parliament.
Lévy slides a trap to detect that “camouflaged antisemitism”. It is practiced by those who call for an end to the bombing of Gaza, but who “forget to demand at the same time the release of the hostages held by Hamas.” That is also the thesis of the actor and knight of the national order of merit Yvan Attal, which tells how difficult it is for his fellow members today to take a position on this issue. Speak in the same line Philippe Valwhich directed Charlie Hebdo but, by combining journalism and cinema, it does not have that problem.
The president of the National Assembly takes the stage. We are going to have the same feeling with the president of the Senate and with the mayor of Paris. It happens, therefore, with the left, the center and the right. They are politicians of another level. They speak without papers, with a certain charisma, they seem read. We remember Francina Armengol or Pedro Rollán and, automatically, we declare ourselves surrendered to the “grandeur”. Tomorrow we will go to the tomb of Joseph Bonaparte, which is next to that of his brother in Les Invalides, to remember the war of independence and to de-French ourselves.
The president of the Assembly is Jewish. She is dressed all in black and recounts the attacks she has suffered because of her Jewish origin. She lists some of the insults and then sweeps them away shouting “I am the fourth authority of the State and I have the entire Republic behind me.” Ovation. “I will never be intimidated by anti-Semitism.”
The president of the French Parliament lists a chilling fact: in 2023, there were 1,676 acts against anti-Semitism. “An explosion of 1,000% in one year.” The origin: the Hamas attack on October 7 that started the war. The president’s grandmother was a great swimming champion whose professional future was thwarted by the Holocaust. Her grandfather fought in France against the Nazis until the shameful armistice of Petain and then continued doing so in the ranks of the Resistance.
Madame Brun-Privet He leaves a glove on the table that the president of the Senate and the mayor of Paris are going to pick up. To the traditional French anti-Semitism of the extreme right, “a camouflaged anti-Semitism of the extreme left” has been added. They are the ones who They ask for peace in Palestine, “but not the release of the hostages”. They are the ones who call for “international pressure against Israel”, but not against Hamas.
The president of the Senate gives us a tremendous rally. He is a man who enjoys inflaming the masses. We see him unleashed, delighted to abandon his duties of moderating the Upper House. He seems like an affable guy. He has taken some very cordial photos, far from any institutionality, with the other authorities in the theater. Those on the left, too. Can you imagine it in Spain? Or better: can you imagine the Teatro Real in Spain full of friendly politicians positioning themselves against the two extremes? But we remember the machine guns and celebrate that fighting against anti-Semitism today, in Spain, is much easier than here.
Larcher remembers that this union of parties also occurred in a large demonstration against anti-Semitism in the streets of Paris. He focuses his words – a little limping, because he is not from the center, he is from the right – on criticizing Melénchon’s extreme left: “They are losing their republican values for pure electoral interest.”
He responds with these words to those who are putting international pressure on Netanyahu’s government: “Are they also putting pressure on the Hamas terrorist group? Let’s not forget the hostages.” Like the right in Spain, Larcher does not deny the recognition of the Palestinian State, but he does deny the moment: “It must be done through negotiation; not after a terrorist attack.”
Anne Hidalgo, as mayor, tells us that anti-Semitism is real, that it exists and that it translates into insults and attacks detected by the city police. She adds that the guilt of the Occupation is in the veins of the History of Paris and that it is not advisable to forget it so as not to repeat it. “Today, the joy of being together is very common and is part of that DNA that was built after the end of the war,” she says.
Hidalgo thus criticizes the extreme right because he also wants to give his share of the rally. His predecessors have done it and it is clear that, in five days, there are European elections. “Today some far-right politicians want to rehabilitate Petain by falsifying History”. Then he adds, so as not to lose votes for the other side: “We do not accept any lessons from the extreme left.”
She tells us her origins, which we already know: she is the granddaughter of Spanish republicans. “For us, the French Republic was the unattainable myth,” she says. Hidalgo continually claims to be a woman of the “democratic left,” which is against Netanyahu and equally against “anti-Semitism.”
That is, broadly speaking, the line that members of cinema, theater and literature are defending. With few exceptions, they ask that Israel not be identified with Netanyahu, nor should Jews be identified with Israel. They point out that this carom that puts everyone in the same bag is the patina of anti-Semitism that covers the debate today.
After, effectively, five hours of hearing, with a BHL who, almost the entire time standing, invites the speakers to take the stand, it is Manuel Valls’ turn to close. The former prime minister says: “Do I conclude or do I not conclude? Are you sure this is going to end?” And people are delighted! They have to be extras. If not, pas possible ça!
Valls appeals to hope, to fighting fair battles, and points out, like Lévy, that the war against Russia is, fundamentally, the same as that against the Hamas terrorists. He has to go outside to get a taxi. We are not here to analyze too many geopolitical reflections. The taxis are on the other side of the fence where there are no machine guns or this private security patrol.
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