A French debate on anti-Zionism and antisemitism
JVL Introduction
After the Bondi Beach attack the French paper Le Monde published an opinion piece by Israeli-French sociologist Eva Illouz, entitled: “Global anti-Semitism has made the whole world a place where Jews are not welcome.”
It was left to Orient XXI to publish a rebuttal by Gilbert Achcar, reposted below.
The arguments are familiar ones and the rebuttals well formulated.
As Achcar points out, “Exaggerated, even outrageous, comments are found in every political field, but reducing the entire field to such comments is a deplorable polemical process.”
To play Illouz’s game we could take “comments made by Zionists—comments that are much less marginal because they have been uttered by high-ranking officials of the Israeli state—to argue that Zionism, in all its forms and shades, is equal to Nazism in its genocidal intent.”
That doesn’t deter Illouz: ““Slogans like ‘Globalize the Intifada’ are actually calls for the indiscriminate murder of Jewish civilians all over the world”. It is simply refuted by Achcar below.
And he concludes that Zionism has created a state in which, far from providing a solution to the “Jewish question”, Jews are more insecure than anywhere else.
RK
This article was originally published by Orient XXI on Sat 29 Nov 2025. Read the original here.
Anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism. Eva Illouz’s falsehood
In her column published in “Le Monde” on 18 December 2025, the sociologist Eva Illouz offers unwittingly a striking illustration of “denial” and “accusatory inversion”—two foundations of “the culture of antisemitism” and “the culture of rape” that anti-Zionism shares, according to the author. The researcher and writer Gilbert Achcar points out that the author herself reproduces these mechanisms in her argument.
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Thank you, Professor Achcar. This broader perspective is very helpful in understanding the conflict.
What strikes me about Illouz’s argument – and the same might be said of people like Jonathan Freedland and supporters of the IHRA definition – is its disingenuous starting point, namely that the political expression of Jewish nationalism can somehow be disconnected with its oppression of the Palestinian people and that, therefore, opposition to Jewish nationalism but not to other nationalisms must be motivated by antisemitism.
If some Jews want to establish a state to give expression to their national feelings or protect themselves from persecution, let them do it where the result does not necessitate the dispossession of the already settled majority population of that area.
The fundamental “crime” of Zionism is not so much in its many reactionary ideas and its ethnonationalism but in its inevitable and calculated dispossession of the Palestinian people.
One small point that makes no difference to the central issue: was Edwin Samuel Montagu the only Jewish member of the cabinet? What about Herbert Samuel?
According to Wikipedia, Herbert Samuel had resigned from the cabinet by the time of the Balfour declaration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Samuel,_1st_Viscount_Samuel.