On October 7, Jonas Pardo was not surprised, but still. When the tweets and political statements began to come out in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel, he saw, to his shock, that something was happening that was sadly familiar to him. That day, the left seemed to procrastinate on the mode “Certainly, Hamas’ abuses are unbearable but…”. Within LFI, while many have denounced acts “terrorists”, some (Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Louis Boyard, Mathilde Panot, Danièle Obono, Adrien Quatennens, etc.) did not wish to use this term. Others went so far as to welcome, like the NPA, in a press release, a “resistance offensive”.
No, really, he didn’t imagine “that there were so many personalities in [son] own political camp which confused fascism and emancipation”. After the astonishment, in the weeks that followed, he witnessed, heartbroken, the explosion of anti-Semitic acts and remarks and the uproar which now serves as a public debate – until the recent “Netanyahu, a kind of Nazi, but without a foreskin” which earned comedian Guillaume Meurice a warning from the management of Radio France.
This sequence has, for this Jewish and left-wing activist, an air of déjà vu. It was in 2015. On January 9, his mother, a regular at the Hyper Cacher at Porte de Vincennes, in Paris, stopped at the post office before going shopping. He often thinks that she could, without this letter to submit, have been caught in the killing, because she was Jewish. Around him, he attended, stunned, speeches “at best, off the mark” And “at worst, frankly anti-Semitic”.
In meetings and at the cafe, everyone was talking about Islamophobia, the rise of “security delirium” or some “drifts” of the #jesuischarlie movement. There were those who said, knowingly: “It’s serious, but at the same time, given what’s happening in Israel…” Not many people spoke of anti-Semitism to describe the Hyper Cacher killings. Come to think of it, they didn’t talk much about Hyper Cacher.
Addressing all forms of anti-Semitism
Jonas Pardo remembers the immense feeling of loneliness he felt in the days and weeks that followed. He decided that it wasn’t fair and that he shouldn’t keep quiet. There were a few of them who thought like him that winter, so they met again. Between 2015 and 2019, this small group of activists, more to the left of the left, met twice a month to reflect on the question of anti-Semitism. There are Jews and non-Jews, intellectuals, farmers, artists, researchers (the writer Lola Lafon, the researcher and activist Léa Nicolas-Teboul, the CGT trade unionist Tiziri Kandi, etc.). Since then, their words have been more audible. Some have created collectives (the VNR Jews, Revolutionary Jews, etc.), others express themselves on social networks and in the media.
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