French politicians propose law to make modern antisemitism punishable

Two French politicians have filed a bill aiming to make “renewed forms of antisemitism” illegal, Le Point reported on Wednesday.

The bill was brought by French MP for the Eighth constituency for French residents overseas, Caroline Yadan, and former Equality Minister and National Assembly member Aurore Bergé. Former president François Hollande also reportedly agreed to co-sign the bill.

The bill, which was co-signed by 90 other deputies, proposes a new law that would codify modern manifestations of antisemitism, including comparisons of Jews to Nazis, calls for the destruction of Israel, and the veneration of Hamas.

Yadan told Le Point that the bill stemmed from her desire to fight renewed forms of antisemitism, which manifest in three axes: terrorist apologism, denying Israel’s existence or right to exist, and the comparison of Jews or Israel to the Holocaust.

Yadan said she wants to make all rhetoric like “From the river to the sea,” especially where maps of Israel have been replaced with Palestine, punishable by the law.

“This, so that Rima Hassan can no longer consider Hamas a resistance group and go unpunished or that one could no longer post a Nazi flag accompanied by a Star of David on one’s social networks,” she explained.

Rima Hassan, the French-Palestinian politician with the La France Insoumise party, has propagated the false accusation that “Israeli dogs” rape Palestinian prisoners and called for “Zionists” to return organs she claimed were stolen from Palestinians.

“It is this porosity of hatred that must be denounced,” said Yadan. “Because it is what defines antisemitism in its current form and it has been evolving for millennia.”

Holding Israel to a different standard 

In her conversation with Le Point, Yadan drew upon the hypocrisy that holds Israel to a different standard than other countries. This is codified in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which says that “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” is a form of antisemitism.

It is also mentioned in the “three Ds of Antisemitism,” a criteria formulated by famous Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet refusnik, author, and human rights activist, as a model to distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from antisemitism. It argues that delegitimization, demonization, and double standards are the three tests for differentiating between the two.

UN Watch founder Hillel Neuer and others have noted that the number of UN General Assembly human rights resolutions targeting Israel compared to other countries is an example of such a double standard. From 2015 through 2022, the UN General Assembly adopted 140 resolutions on Israel and 68 on other countries.

“No other state in the world is subjected to calls for its destruction or denial of its existence,” Yadan declared. “Afghanistan or Iran are never called into question despite their repressive and totalitarian policies.”

YADAN SAID her experience as a lawyer helped inform her development of the bill, saying she worked hard to draw up something that would not be punishable by the Constitutional Council.

“Without going into technical legal details, I wanted to address the issue of the comparison made between the Holocaust and Jews in Common Law,” she said, adding that she realized such an amendment would pose difficulties given that many are attached to the laws concerning freedom of the press.

“The most feasible legal solution was to address this subject within the framework of the Gayssot Law and to add that contesting the Holocaust is punishable, even if it is presented in a covert or vague way by way of insinuation or comparison, analogy, or connection.”

“As a result, comparing the State of Israel to the Nazi regime would be punished as an outrageous trivialization of the Holocaust,” she said.

The Gayssot Law, enacted in 1990, made it a criminal offense in France to question the existence or extent of the crimes of the Nazi party. This made it illegal in France to deny the Holocaust.

Yadan added that her proposal was not exactly new as it was already codified into French law. The sole new detail, she said, was the denial or call for the destruction of Israel.

She told Le Point that she did not think the France Insoumise Party would vote for it.

However, she was not “seeking the support of the LFI deputies because they are precisely an integral part of the problem [of antisemitism in France] due to their legitimization of hatred of Jews in our country under the cover of anti-Zionism.”

She referenced the words of French philosopher and musicologist Vladimir Jankélévitch: “Anti-Zionism is simply justified antisemitism finally made available to all. It is the permission to be democratically antisemitic.”

Yadan’s law was also supported by Sylvain Maillard, who supported the resolution to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism.

However, according to Yadan, the “horrifying” state of antisemitism in France made it necessary to take this a step further. “We had to move to a new stage to fight against this hatred.”