France in flames: As Paris lectures Israel, riots leave its Jews fearing for their safety - opinion

OCTOBER 23, 2026 13:53France likes to speak in the name of the human conscience. It lectures other countries, hands out moral grades, and proudly invokes its national promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity.But when its streets are burning, stores are being looted, and Jews fear for their safety, the disgraceful gap between France’s international posture and its domestic reality is exposed. A world power that seeks to teach others how to manage conflicts is struggling to protect its citizens’ storefronts.This is more than a governance crisis. It is an indictment of French President Emmanuel Macron and a leadership that has replaced responsibility with empty rhetoric.The student protests and anger over the cost of living may have originated in genuine hardship. Precisely for that reason, allowing them to become a pathway to arson and looting is a betrayal of the public that came to protest.No shortage of classrooms justifies burning businesses, and no electricity bill justifies attacking police officers. Anyone who wraps criminality in the flag of social justice is not a revolutionary. He is granting legitimacy to lawlessness.A man throws a plastic traffic cone through a burning barricade amid clashes during a day of demonstrations, France, October 17, 2026 (credit: REUTERS/Abdul Saboor)A government that cannot protect both the right to protest and the victims of violence has failed in its most basic duty.Amid the chaos, the question arises once again: Why are Jews expected to pay the price?Rioters vandalized a synagogue in Paris’ 19th arrondissement. The Torah ark was forced open, and religious items were thrown to the floor. There is no moral path leading from student hardship to attacks on Jews. When such a path emerges, protest has become a refuge for hatred and antisemitism.There is no reason to condemn all the protesters. But the Palestinian flags and chants of “Free Palestine” provide ample evidence of what parts of the demonstration became. Once again, French Jews are expected to answer for the actions of the IDF and the Israeli government.The citizenship of French Jews has been subjected to racist tests before, during the infamous Vichy regime. Nor should anyone forget the Dreyfus affair.The figures on antisemitism demolish the excuses offered by the French leadership. France recorded 1,320 antisemitic acts in 2025. The synagogue in La Grande Motte was attacked, and a police officer was injured in an explosion.These are not isolated incidents. They constitute a reality demanding national introspection. When the state must place security around Jewish institutions, it should begin examining its own failures. Jews do not need another emotional speech after the next attack.Evasion is not tolerance when confronting Islamism. According to a survey conducted in 2025, 44% of Muslim respondents said they placed the rules of their religion above French law, while some expressed a preference for Sharia law.A country cannot accept a situation in which its laws become recommendations and a minority seeks to dictate the legal rules. There must be no street where the law retreats in the face of threats or where police officers fear to enter certain areas. A Paris whose streets are in flames is the victim of state failure.In France, as in Britain, politicians fear losing the Muslim electorate. When politicians exchange principles for electoral calculations, and when a leader softens his opposition to extremism for fear of losing support, he also abandons moderate Muslims.A leadership that purchases temporary calm through moral ambiguity is selling its country’s future.Macron’s presidency will be remembered with disgrace. The riots, the burning of stores, and the resurgence of antisemitism are the consequences of his failed leadership and that of the government he heads.The importance of the presidencyMacron has forgotten that the presidency is more than a title, a palace and a flag. The images coming from France are a political humiliation for the president and the French leadership.Anyone seeking to embody European leadership must explain why citizens in his own country are forced to pray that the next protest will pass over their businesses.Israel remembers French moralizing all too well. On the eve of the Six Day War, France imposed an arms embargo and withheld Mirage aircraft ordered by Israel. Fifty Mirage 5 jets ordered in 1966 were never delivered under the agreement and instead entered French service.From an Israeli perspective, this was a betrayal of trust by a major supplier at a moment of danger. Behind the lofty language of balance and responsibility stood a decision demonstrating how friendship can become conditional on diplomatic convenience.France does not enter this debate with clean hands.In Algeria, France operated a system that enabled torture and disappearances, as Macron himself acknowledged in the case of Maurice Audin. In Paris in October 1961, police killed dozens of Algerian demonstrators, including victims who were thrown into the Seine and drowned.The colonial stain and hypocrisy did not end in Algeria. In Madagascar, France brutally suppressed the 1947 uprising, killing thousands. President Francois Hollande later acknowledged the brutal repression and its victims.Behind the slogan of a civilizing mission stood a reality in which demands for independence were answered with military force. The liberty France presented as a universal value ended when people under French rule sought to exercise it themselves.It is difficult to imagine a sharper contradiction between declaration and action: liberty for the ruling nation and subjugation for the people it ruled.The depth of that betrayal was also exposed in Senegal. In December 1944, French forces opened fire on African soldiers at the Thiaroye military camp after those men had served France and demanded the pay owed to them.Men who had risked their lives for France discovered that their service did not guarantee equal treatment. Macron recognized the incident as a massacre in 2024, 80 years after it occurred.That recognition was important, but the delay remains painful. It took decades to call the killing by its proper name. This was not only colonial brutality. It was also state-sanctioned ingratitude.The philosopher and author Maarten Boudry published a powerful monologue on X/Twitter about the riots in Europe:“Before long, we will all know what it feels like to be Jewish. In France, they already know. This will be the punishment we deserve for abandoning the Jews, ignoring their warnings, turning against them, and even marching alongside their oppressors.“For three years, you useful idiots marched with Palestinian flags, wore keffiyehs, screamed ‘From the river to the sea,’ and recognized a fictitious Palestinian state as a reward for the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7. You boycotted the world’s only Jewish state, defamed the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, and spread the blood libel of ‘genocide in Gaza.’“Did you think that if you fed the crocodile enough Jewish flesh, it would eventually be satisfied? All you did was strengthen the monster and further stimulate its appetite.“The Palestinian flag has become a flag of victory, proudly raised among the ruins of historic buildings that were looted and vandalized. It is a symbol of hatred toward our culture and everything it represents. It never ends with the Jews.”France is paying, and will continue to pay, the price of its arrogance. Human rights were presented as a noble promise but were repeatedly subordinated to the interests of those in power.There is now a simple demand of France’s leaders. Before presenting yourselves as judges of the world, acknowledge your own responsibility. Open the archives and give the victims a place more dignified than a footnote in a ceremonial speech.Even if France eventually withdraws its support for the forces of evil represented by Palestinian terrorists who murdered, raped, mutilated, and abducted approximately 1,500 innocent Israeli and foreign civilians, history will not forget.The writer is the CEO of Radios 100FM, an honorary consul and vice dean of the Consular Diplomatic Corps, president of the Israeli Radio Association, and previously served as a monitor for Israel’s Army Radio and as a television correspondent for NBC News.Follow us on Google