Several hundred pro-Palestinian demonstrators rampaged through the Jewish quarter of this northern suburb of Paris in July, some chanting, “Death to Jews.” As the rioters attacked a funeral home and set fire to a pharmacy, a band of young Jews formed a human shield in front of the city’s main synagogue, brandishing motorcycle helmets as weapons, reports The New York Times.
Foot soldiers of a French offshoot of the Jewish Defense League, a far-right Zionist group that advocates muscular self-defense in the face of violence and anti-Semitism, they faced off with the crowd as protesters clashed with riot police officers.
“If it wasn’t for those boys, this whole neighborhood would have been burned and turned into hell,” said Fortunée Fitoussi, a cashier at Boulangerie Nathanya, a popular bakery in a large Jewish neighborhood of kosher grocery stores and blocky apartment buildings in Sarcelles often called Little Jerusalem.
But while members of the group are being embraced as heroes by some Jews, it has also added a volatile element to France’s sometimes violent street protests as the Gaza war has fueled tensions, especially between Muslims and Jews, in a climate of burgeoning anti-Semitism in France and elsewhere in Europe.
The group models itself loosely on the Jewish Defense League in the United States, an organization founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was assassinated in 1990, and whose Kach party was banned in Israel for being racist. The American group has been listed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a terrorist organization. The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, warned in July against “excesses” of the French League, prompting speculation that he is considering banning the group.
The French news media has characterized the French League as a dangerous vigilante group, though experts say the French offshoot is small and disorganized and less militant than its American counterpart.
Founded in France in 2003 by former members of Betar, the youth movement linked to the Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the French League has roughly 400 members. They are predominantly young Sephardic men from working-class suburbs, some trained in krav maga, a hand-to-hand martial art used by the Israeli military. Critics accuse the group of advocating violence and racism, noting a past entry on the League’s Facebook page that referred to Arabs as “rats.”
“They are dangerous, violent and anti-republican,” said Sihem Souid, a human rights activist whom the League has lambasted on its website and accused of encouraging anti-Semitism. Ms. Souid, who works for a victims’ organization attached to the Justice Ministry, vehemently denies the accusation and has called for the group to be banned.
In a rare interview, one of the group’s senior officials, a burly 62-year-old former law enforcement official who declined to give his full name.
He said the group did not trust the government to protect French Jews and was prepared to meet anti-Semitic violence with violence. He said most of its work was aimed at deterring attacks, for example by tailing people it suspects of being Islamic radicals and tipping off the police, sometimes with the help of an underground network of informers, including sympathetic North Africans who he said had infiltrated radical Islamic groups.
Eliahou said the League had no qualms about harassing people wearing kaffiyehs, the black-and-white scarf that is a symbol of Palestinian resistance, on the Rue des Rosiers, a street lined with Judaica shops and falafel joints in central Paris. “This is our neighborhood,” he explained. “Our aim is to annoy people who hate Israel and are anti-Semites.”
But he insisted that the group did not target Muslim-owned shops or mosques, or use illegal weapons. “Were the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto who killed Nazis extremist?” he asked.
Eliahou said anti-Semitic violence was swelling the group’s ranks, with 10 recruits joining every day, while donations had poured in from as far away as Canada. Though his claims were not possible to verify, the group is being embraced across Jewish neighborhoods in the French capital as gutsy, if hot-headed, protectors, residents said.
During another attack in July at a synagogue in an eastern district of Paris, on the Rue de la Roquette, several witnesses, including Jean-Yves Camus, director of the Observatory of Political Radicalism at the Jean Jaurès Foundation in Paris, credited the League with helping to fend off up to 150 pro-Palestinian demonstrators as congregation members cowered inside.
Several congregation members who were there said demonstrators, some wielding metal bars and bats, tried to scale the walls while League members forced them back by tossing tables and chairs. Palestinian groups accused the League of provoking the attack by taunting demonstrators and throwing projectiles.
While such attacks may be expanding the League’s appeal in some quarters, the group remains deeply divisive, even among Jews.
Read more of this report from The New York Times.