Following an Islamic State terrorist’s attack on a French kosher supermarket in 2015, Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared that if his Jewish compatriots were to leave the country en masse, “France would not be France.” Yet there are no sign things are getting better, with 2018 seeing a 74-percent increase in assaults on Jews since the previous year. Jews also continue to leave the country, though the numbers are down since the 2014 high-water mark. But, writes Robert Zaretsky, citing a recent study, the statistics don’t tell the whole story:

Rather than leaving France for Israel, large numbers of French Jews are instead leaving suburban for urban France. In particular, French Jews are gravitating toward the capital. Jewish centers and synagogues in Parisian suburbs like Saint Denis and Clichy-sous-Bois, home to growing numbers of North African [Muslim] immigrants, have registered sharp membership declines. These individuals and families have, by and large, moved either to neighborhoods inside Paris or to a select number of so-called safe suburbs like Le Raincy and Sarcelles, known as la petite Jérusalem. While the shift partly reflects motivations shared by non-Jews—such as the quest for better schools and opportunities for one’s children—[the authors of the study] believe the principal driver is the chronic sense of insecurity that Jewish parents feel.

Paradoxically, these families are moving closer to Paris but further from France—or at least from a certain idea of France. Rather than rallying to an embattled French Republic built on secular and universal principles, these Jewish families are retreating into their religious identity by enrolling their children in Jewish rather than public schools.

Meanwhile, much as at the beginning of the 20th century, when anti-Semitism became a unifying force for a French right-wing, anti-republican movement, it has once again become a powerful social and political force:

[P]olitical theorists like Pierre-André Taguieff maintain that something new . . . is afoot: an ideology that combines traditional anti-Semitic claims with more recent anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian commitments. Sociologists, including Didier Lapeyronnie, have gathered empirical evidence for this claim, identifying decaying suburbs populated largely by the disaffected offspring of North African immigrants as especially fertile ground for such sentiments. Anti-Semitism, Lapeyronnie observes, makes for the social “cement” that binds together the undereducated and unemployed youths consigned to those areas that constitute, both literally and figuratively, the periphery of Paris.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.