Suggestive graffiti worries French Jews after Hamas attacks

Paris police are investigating after dozens of Jewish symbols were painted on buildings in the French capital, local prosecutors said Tuesday, as antisemitic acts continue to spike following Hamas’ attack in southern Israel in early October.

Some 60 stars of David were daubed overnight on walls in the city’s 14th district, the prosecutors said in a written statement to POLITICO, prompting them to launch a probe into “property damage aggravated by the circumstance that it is because of origin, race, ethnicity or religion.”

The Paris office cautioned, however, that it was not yet known whether the graffiti was hostile in intent.

It has “not been established that this star has an anti-Semitic connotation, but this cannot be dismissed out of hand,” the prosecutors stated. “On the other hand, the public prosecutor’s office feels it necessary to investigate the underlying intention of these tags, particularly in view of the geopolitical context and its impact on the French population.”

If found to be acts of antisemitism, the offense is punishable by up to 4 years imprisonment and a €30,000 fine, they said.

In a statement on X, formerly Twitter, 14th district Mayor Carine Petit condemned what she called “an act of branding that recalls the tactics of the 1930s and World War II that led to the extermination of millions of Jews.”

Similar graffiti was reported in the nearby cities of Aubervilliers over the weekend, as well as in Saint-Ouen and several other Parisian districts, according to local authorities.

Home to the largest Jewish population in Europe — about half a million people — France has seen a marked increase in the number of antisemitic acts since the October 7 attack by Hamas, in which more than 1,400 people were killed, according to Israeli authorities. France also has one of the largest Muslim populations in Europe, numbering several million people. According to Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, anti-religious acts of all kinds — Islamophobic, anti-Christian and antisemitic — have been on the rise in France in recent years.

When asked by POLITICO, the French Interior Ministry was not immediately able to provide data on the number of Islamophobic acts reported in France since the start of the Hamas-Israel conflict.

According to Jean-Yves Camus, a French researcher who specializes in extremism and nationalism, France has regularly witnessed “peaks of antisemitic activity when the situation in the Middle East flare[d] up” since 2000.

Back then, footage of the second Intifada — Palestinian uprisings against Israeli occupation — was widely broadcast by French TV channels, leading to a “transposition of the conflict which at the time was thought to be temporary but turned out to be long-lasting,” the researcher said.

The French Jewish organization CRIF “firmly denounce[d] these antisemitic acts,” which it said were “insults to the French Republic,” while the Brussels-based European Jewish Congress (EJC) said the graffiti was “deeply disturbing.”

“Whoever is behind this antisemitic campaign must be arrested and punished to the full extent of the law,” the EJC said on X.

Appearing in front of the National Assembly on Tuesday, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said the tags were “heinous acts” and pledged that her government would “protect all Jewish people in France.”

The prime minister added that more than 850 antisemitic acts have been reported to the French authorities in the three weeks since the Hamas attacks — up from 436 in all of 2022 — leading to over 430 arrests.

Camus says the recent rise in the number of incidents is “perfectly spectacular” and has instilled “fear” in the French Jewish community, which suffered a “very important psychological shock” after the Hamas attacks.

In retaliation for Hamas’ October attack, Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 8,500 Palestinians, including thousands of children and dozens of UN workers, according to the Hamas-controlled health authorities in Gaza. Israel has also imposed a “complete siege” of Gaza — which was already under a full air, land and sea blockade by Israel since 2007 — strictly controlling and limiting supplies of food, fuel and medicine to more than two million civilians, the majority of whom relied on aid before the war.

In recent days, Israeli forces have launched a ground operation into Gaza which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refrained from calling an invasion.

At the same time, France has banned pro-Palestinian protests calling for a ceasefire, though that has not stopped thousands from gathering throughout the country.

The conflict has revived concerns over the safety of Jewish communities outside Israel.

Some 60 people were arrested on Monday in Russia’s Dagestan region — which is predominantly Muslim — after storming an airport to protest the arrival of a plane from Israel.

In France, the Jewish community has been the target of several deadly Islamist attacks in the past decade, from a 2012 shooting in a Jewish school which killed four people — and whose author had claimed allegiance to Al-Qaeda — to an attack on a kosher supermarket in 2015, in which four people were killed.