The day after October 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas attack on Israel, Elie is walking in Paris to go shopping with his mother when an uneasiness creeps into their discussion. As they talk about the massacre, the 26-year-old engineer (who wished to remain anonymous) says it like he thinks: he doesn’t feel “emotionally involved” by these events which take place 5,000 kilometers from Paris, in the Middle East. He is saddened by the death of one thousand two hundred innocent victims, of course, but neither more nor less than if the attack had occurred in another distant region.
“My mother was outraged, scandalized, he remembers in a café in the center of the capital, turtleneck and three-day beard. For her, these words were inaudible from a Jew. I was bound to feel anger and sadness. » He sees things differently and explains above all that he fears the“hateful and angry implication” what will this terrorist attack lead to, with its share of community tensions all over the world: “I immediately thought of the repercussions for the Arab-Muslim community in France,” adds the young man.
The following days, the tension did not subside. Elie, who says he is close to Europe Ecologie-Les Verts, sees the response of the Hebrew State as a “disproportionate response”, while his family (Ashkenazim, some members of whom live in Israel) supports the right of the Jewish state to defend itself. “Using history to justify violence is not possible,” he rails when those close to him invoke the memory of the Shoah, speak of Israel as the state of refuge for all the persecuted Jews of the world, reproach him for his “naivety” and his “utopianism”.
“The new catastrophe is for tomorrow”
Elie notices that family meals are becoming more and more chaotic. The outbursts are followed by awkwardness, then demands for apologies. Before the young man decided to stop broaching the subject. “I understood that, for the rest of my family, October 7 represented a continuation of this anti-Semitism which never disappears, with this idea that the new catastrophe is for tomorrow,” he analyzes.
Elie’s case is far from unique. If many French Jewish families closed ranks in the face of the violence of the October 7 attack, in others, on the contrary, the event heightened already existing tensions between generations, or even brought new ones to the surface. . For most Jews in France, the Israel-Hamas war is not a disembodied subject: it refers to a painful past, to concerns for the future. It also questions a way of being Jewish in France.
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