French rabbi Delphine Horvilleur says the antisemitism in the U.S. following Hamas’ attack on Israel is not so surprising — and all too familiar. ](https://archive.vn/drHpx)

Horvilleur is a French rabbi who is a fixture in the media and public debates in her home country. She is passionate, learned and, even when conversation turns dark, funny. The weariness is recent. She is politically a woman of the left, a not shy critic of Israel’s government and a feminist. But now she finds herself sounding like her ideological sparring partners when it comes to Israel and the threat of antisemitism. In the past three months, her world was turned “upside down,” and she is struggling to “find stable ground.” Her experience is not uncommon for liberal Jews on either side of the Atlantic.

Or, to put it bluntly, she's a liberal whining about how tough it is for her that people are mad about a genocide she supports.

She was visibly disturbed. By the dangers faced by her children; her teenage son had just refused her request to take off his Star of David necklace for his safety in Paris, a decision that she says she accepted. As well as by anxious calls from congregants of her synagogue in Paris.

Not for a single moment does she or the hack interviewing her ponder the dangers faced by Palestinian children or the anxiety the victims of the Gaza massacres are experiencing. They could as well not have existed in the first place.

For years, her different approach brought her applause from a wider French audience and criticism from more traditional Jews who regarded her as too far to the left, too willing to call out Israel’s policies, somehow not Jewish enough. Oct. 7 was a turning point for her in a way that she believes it was for many of her American Jewish friends, going back to the years she spent at New York’s Hebrew Union College.

She's a leftist okay. She has said that the illegal zionist entity should eradicate Palestine in a cleaner, more civilised way.

While Jews had experienced rising hatred in France since the early 1990s, and were killed for being Jewish there, Gaza changed her perspective by making her more aware of Israel’s fragility. Then the outrage over Israel’s conduct during the war, in particular from allies on the progressive wing of politics, suddenly left her with fewer friends. She sees the human toll in Gaza but speaks more of the hurt she feels by the lack of condemnation of what Hamas did and of understanding for the hurt of the Jews. She makes sure to say she doesn’t believe “every criticism of Israel is antisemitism.” Israel “has always needed criticism, especially from the Diaspora,” and “is still threatened by a lack of criticism.” She never hid her distaste for Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing allies in government. Yet she is more reticent to criticize now. She is asked repeatedly to join calls for a ceasefire in Gaza — and demurs.

Behold, the utter moral bankruptcy of liberalism. People not condemning KHamas enough is worse than the zionists committing an active genocide. The whole world revolves around her and her feelings and somehow the wider public needs to know how sad it is for her that supporting a genocide makes people not want to be her friend.

Lol about her realising the fragility of the settler colonialist project though.

Instead she notes that so much of the current discourse, a word she often uses, crosses a clear line for her, where “Israel has become demonized in a way that is beyond crazy.” Portraying Israeli soldiers “as modern-day demons thirsty for children’s blood,” she says, could be “in competition with the worst antisemitism of the Middle Ages.”

The zionist stormtroopers have literally murdered thousands of children and continues to do Tiktok dances in the rubble where said children are still buried. Calling someone demonic for doing so is descriptive.

In the 1930s the Jews were figures of femininity,” she continues. “Now the Jew has become the Alpha Male incarnated by the Israeli soldier. Before Jews were accused of being stateless. At a time of colonial sin, the Jew is the stereotypical colonial master. I’m pretty sure in the future Jews will be accused of pollution more than others

The wokes are at it again, calling people colonisers simply because they occupied someone else's land, and continues to murder and displace them.

In her telling, French Jews know the “loneliness” and anxiety that American Jews say they now feel well. You had the Dreyfus affair at the turn of the past century, a manifestation of official French antisemitism. The Vichy regime rounded up and sent French Jews to the Nazi camps.

Do you remember the Holocaust? You wouldn't think so, but somehow the genocide against European Jews, carried out by white Christian fascists 80 years ago, is of utmost relevance to the Palestinian liberation struggle today.

As for Israel, she adds, “Oct. 7 shattered the idea of Israel being a strong guardian for us.

It’s as if Israel itself became part of the Jewish Diaspora.” She finds that in the current climate, “whether I want it or not,” she has to be an “advocate for Israel” in ways that she couldn’t imagine before.

No you don't, you slimy fuck. You see a genocide and choose to support it.

By that, she points to conflicting voices in her head. One pushes her to continue to seek allies among the French who, 80 years ago, joined the resistance against the Nazis. The other warns her of the collaborationists in her midst. “Your neighbor,” she says all French Jews know, “could be your killer.”

Stop yourself. Nobody wants to kill a whining self-infatuated liberal with shit politics.

People are actually being murdered in the thousands in Palestine and she chooses to obsess about what a non-specific generalized neighbour might do, maybe, instead. The self-victimisation is reaching ludicrous levels.