Almost a decade ago, the results of the 2016 Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s first presidential victory made disoriented liberals redraw the ideological battlelines in terms so crude that no one could be left in doubt: On one side were the “bad” populists and authoritarians, a group that lumped together Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro, and their ilk. And arrayed against them were the “good” liberals and progressives, represented by figures such as Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, and Emmanuel Macron.

But this remapping of the political fault lines and alliances in the Western world left an awkward anomaly: Israel. Whether democratic or autocratic, European and especially US governments refrained from sanctioning or even sharply criticizing the illegal actions of Israel and its leaders. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu—a friend of Trump, idolized by Bolsonaro, and feted by Orbán—had made no secret of his hostility to the rule of law. He had been indicted in 2019 for fraud, corruption, and breach of trust, charges that would have discredited any other “populist” leader—especially one on the left.

While liberal governments in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere spared Netanyahu their criticism, he was busy courting the European far right and entrenching ethnonationalism at home. Yet almost everyone looked the other way. Most liberal democracies, along with their media and tame intellectuals, “forgot” to include the Likud leader in the “reactionary international” they claimed to be fighting.

Now, barely a decade later, looking the other way is no longer a plausible excuse: Israel’s flagrant disregard for international law cannot be ignored. Netanyahu, whose governing coalition includes supremacists who would be hard to distinguish from the Ku Klux Klan of old, has invaded Lebanon and Syria, bombed Iran and Yemen, razed Gaza to the ground—exterminating many of its people and starving the rest—redoubled its settlement-building in the West Bank, and strengthened Israel’s apartheid regime.

Since last November, Netanyahu has also been the subject of an international arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. What has been the West’s response? Imagine for a moment Western powers’ reaction if it was Israeli territory that was being occupied and dozens of civilians killed daily by an Arab army of occupation.

In plain sight

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October 2025 Issue

And all this is happening in plain sight. Blinne Ni Ghrálaigh of South Africa’s legal team described the situation in Gaza to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 11 January 2024 as ‘the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time, in the desperate, so far vain, hope that the world will do something.”

There is no doubt that supposedly democratic Western leaders’ indulgence toward a government so blatantly at odds with their own espoused values would normally be seen as suspect—or abject. There would be speculation about some dark realpolitik motive, oil interests (often cited to explain handling Saudi Arabia with kid gloves), the need for shareholders with bottomless pockets to buy up bankrupt football clubs (as with Qatar), or arms sales to clients who are rarely beacons of democracy. Corruption, too, would be mentioned. But the apparently against-the-grain support for Israel has a different explanation—all the more remarkable for being barely noticed.

Consider the weekly Le Point: Almost every cover story it publishes presents a new Islamo-leftist plot, Russian spy ring, or exposé of Algerian, Chinese, or Qatari agents of influence. It’s a safe bet that it will investigate the Nepalese, Peruvian, and Monegasque lobbies before it gets round to the Israeli one. On June 26, it splashed across its front page “The mullahs’ networks in France: How they manipulate journalists, researchers and politicians.” “The Islamic Republic of Iran,” it warned, “has infiltrated almost every level of French media, politics, and academia.”

Iran, really? Yet just days before Le Point’s shocking revelations, neither the Élysée nor the Quai d’Orsay had condemned Israeli or US air strikes on Iran, though these were clear violations of international law. And in any case, who could name 10—five—even three prominent French journalists or academics who consistently speak up for Iran?

When it comes to Israel, by contrast, staunch defenders are legion. You need look no further than Le Point’s leader writer Franz-Olivier Giesbert, editor Étienne Gernelle, and diplomatic specialist Luc de Barochez. And let’s not forget the great influencer in chief, Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL), a columnist for the magazine, publisher at Grasset (part of the Bolloré group), and chairman of the supervisory board at Arte, who has late-night Telegram chats with fellow insomniac Emmanuel Macron.

Why is this? Why has a nuclear power like France, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, so long behaved like a silent accomplice—or apologist—for a rogue state? Let’s consider three possible explanations. First, France’s gradual alignment with a “diplomacy of values,” which assumes the West’s civilizational and moral superiority, with Israel cast as its defender in the Middle East. Second, France’s own political reconfiguration, which has imported the rhetoric of a clash of civilizations to unite the right, the far right, and Macron’s centrists in a common front against a left, which they associate with insecurity, Islamism, and antisemitism. And third, the particular effectiveness of France’s pro-Israel lobby.

The pro-Israel lobby

Unlike the phrase “Jewish lobby,” often used to support conspiracy theories, we are using the term “pro-Israel lobby” here to refer to the forces—not all of them Jewish—that support Israel’s policies at every critical juncture. In the United States, this includes disparate actors ranging from official interest groups (such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC) to evangelical churches convinced that full Jewish colonization of Palestine will lead to the Second Coming and God’s triumph.

The pro-Israel lobby in France is a similarly broad coalition, including established organizations such as the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF), which is aligned with Likud; parliamentary friendship groups; and the France-Israel Association; community media organizations such as Radio J; figures sincerely committed to defending, at any cost, a state they view as a safe haven for Jews; and a looser network of media and public figures engaged in a struggle against Islam, who see Israel as being in the vanguard of their cause. In times of crisis, this whole galaxy becomes Tel Aviv’s mouthpiece.

These three forces—diplomatic, political, and influence-based—are interlinked and mutually reinforcing, a fact that is particularly evident in the French conservative press. When it comes to hunting for lobbies operating on behalf of foreign powers, Le Point’s (willful) blindness has echoes elsewhere. Le Figaro Magazinerecently accused two members of parliament of this—one supposedly an agent of Algeria, the other of Hamas (July 11, 2025). Both are, of course, members of La France Insoumise. Marianne has also expressed concern about “a France subject to foreign influence” (June 12, 2025). But they mean Qatar, not Israel.

How can we explain this myopia, which works to Tel Aviv’s advantage? The answer BHL gave CNews journalist Sonia Mabroukon on June 24 was telling: “Claude Lanzmann made a film called Israel, Why. His response was: Because the fate of the West depends on it.… If Israel had never come into being or were to disappear, it would represent such a symbolic and moral collapse for the West from which it would never recover.”

“Israel is defending our democracy”

The idea of Israel as a moral and democratic outpost surrounded by regimes that are neither has long been part of the ideological arsenal of Tel Aviv’s propagandists. Israel is said to have an even greater claim to the “right to defend itself,” because it is also defending our democracy. Lanzmann made Israel, Why in 1972–73 and even then had to strive to refute the idea that Israel was a colonial enterprise.

The film opens with footage of Gert Granach, a former member of the German Communist Party, playing the accordion and singing an anti-Hitler Spartacist song. It then features a poet, left-wing activists who survived the Holocaust, a young pacifist, a kibbutz secretary. In other words, an Israel that no longer exists: Only a handful of the old German Communists remain. They’ve been replaced by French citizens resident in Israel who backed Éric Zemmour in the last presidential election; 53.59 percent of this cohort voted for the far-right former contributor to Le Figaro and CNews in the first round—eight times his national result.

In Lanzmann’s later film Tsahal (Army, 1994) an Israeli general says: “Our army is pure.… it does not kill children. We have a conscience and values, and because of our moral code, there are few victims.” It would be startling to hear one of his successors say that today. Israeli soldiers have made Gaza a slaughterhouse. They deliberately target and kill journalists and medics. Yet BHL has imperturbably insisted, “I have never seen an army—you may not like this, but it’s the truth—that takes such precautions to ensure that when it comes to civilian casualties, there are [here, he stressed every syllable] as few as possible” (LCI, October 6, 2024).

The right and far right in the West give a more realistic answer to Lanzmann’s Israel, Why. Because it provides their most radical elements with an example of a security-obsessed ethnonationalist utopia: a tough, militarized, virile society at war with Muslims. A society determined to reduce Muslims to second-class citizens at best, and at worst, to terror suspects under constant surveillance by the latest AI and video-surveillance technologies. Could the old saying,“Tomorrow in Jerusalem” one day become the rallying cry of supremacists longing to subject “their” Arabs to the fate Israel inflicts on the Palestinians?

De Gaulle’s coherent foreign policy

It’s clear why the pro-Israel lobby has boosted its strength on the right of the European political spectrum. It has also played a role in the reorientation of French foreign policy over the past 20 years. France once had a coherent policy toward the Arab world. Iconic moments stand out: General de Gaulle’s press conference on November 27, 1967, in which he noted that Israel was “organizing on the territories it has taken an occupation which necessarily involves oppression, repression, and expulsions, and these are met with a resistance, which it in turn calls terrorism”; his successor Georges Pompidou’s stormy visit to the United States, where on March 1, 1970, demonstrators outraged at a French arms embargo against Israel jostled the president and his wife; the pointed question of French foreign minister Michel Jobert in October 1973, when asked about Egypt and Syria’s offensive against Israel: “Is trying to set foot back in your own home necessarily a surprising act of aggression?” And President Jacques Chirac’s anger in October 1996 when Israeli police attempted to prevent him from meeting residents of Jerusalem’s Muslim quarter.

And then there was Dominique de Villepin’s famous speech on February 14, 2003, opposing the Iraq War—unlike several other European states that would soon fight alongside American troops. But for France, the glory stopped there; the speech turned out to be the swan song of its independent voice.

Then came the fall from grace. France’s full reintegration into NATO, announced by President Nicolas Sarkozy in Washington in November 2007, marked the beginning of the end of France’s independent course within the Western bloc. By prioritizing European over national positions, President Macron has normalized a practice that has replaced France’s once original and respected Middle East policy with vapid rhetoric that can be easily reconciled with the stance of Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, and former Warsaw Pact countries. As soon as diplomatic decision-making is handed over to the EU—whether a trade agreement or sanctions—the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

Asked why the European Union relentlessly sanctions Russia but spares Israel, Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s head of foreign policy, gave a revealing reply: “We apply as much pressure to Israel as we can. The difference is that on Russia the situation is fairly binary, and all the member states share the same view, whereas on Israel there are very different opinions” (La Tribune Dimanche, July 13, 2025). In other words, Brussels’s first “package of sanctions” against a heavily armed military that massacres defenseless civilians and posts it as entertainment on Instagram is unlikely to get off the ground. So the primacy of EU foreign policy has become Israel’s main lever of influence over French diplomacy.

The effects of outsourcing it in this way are in keeping with the shifts in the positions of France’s major political parties on the Middle East. The Gaullist right once maintained good relations with those Arab states that were concerned about the Palestinians’ fate—Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon—and it protected Yasser Arafat until his death in a military hospital outside Paris in 2004.

“Let them all die!”

Today, however, parties claiming de Gaulle and Chirac’s mantle—such as Les Républicains (LR)—compete to proclaim their pro-Israel credentials, which they present as proof of their anti-Islamist resolve. On September 26, 2024, Louis Sarkozy, the former president’s son and a favorite of LCI, spoke about Tel Aviv’s assassination of the Lebanese Hezbollah’s military leadership: “I think I speak for many French people when I say: Let them die! Israel is doing humanity’s work here. Absolutely no remorse on that front. Let them all die!” Since expressing this view, his popularity within LR has soared, and his media platform has grown still further.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that the right-wing National Rally and its ecosystem of sympathetic media outlets have also heaped praise on the Israeli government since the Hamas-led massacres of October 7, 2023. The party’s political affinity with Netanyahu has given it a golden opportunity to disavow its antisemitic past and applaud without fear of criticism the large-scale ethnic cleansing and mass expulsion of “the Arabs.”

Now that the claim that Israel has a right to defend itself is so widely accepted—even when exercised with such rage—how can anyone still take offense at the most inflammatory rhetoric or ruthless demands from the most vehemently anti-immigration politicians? None of their comments or proposals come close to what Israel is inflicting on Palestine.

The complacency of liberal parties is harder to explain. Between October 2023 and spring 2025, their leaders showed support—sometimes even “unconditionally”—for the far-right Israeli government’s policies in Gaza, including the president of France’s National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet, and ministers Benjamin Haddad and Aurore Bergé—all Macronists.

“Israel is our first line of defense against terrorism,” Bergé had already tweeted back in November 2019. In Paris, as in Berlin and London, governments that claim to oppose authoritarian regimes on liberal grounds also moved to suppress, even criminalize, political and artistic expressions of solidarity with Palestinians, recasting them as either glorifications of terrorism or antisemitic speech.

“Gaza is a tragedy, but…”

“Gaza: a tragedy undoubtedly—but October 7…” This refrain played almost uninterrupted for over a year. But in early March 2025, Netanyahu’s government broke the ceasefire agreement with Hamas reached on January 15 through US mediation and proceeded to starve an already devastated population and fire on crowds trying to access water and food. At that point, the October 7 justification was no longer enough. In France, the ruling class began to fear it might one day have to answer for too close an association with the atrocities in Gaza. Macron finally decided to call the actions of the man he once referred to as “my dear Bibi” unacceptable. And, after 148 countries had already done so, he announced that France would recognize the state of Palestine during the next session of the United Nations General Assembly.

In early June, Le Nouvel Obs published an open letter signed by 153 “friends of Israel”— journalists, intellectuals, business leaders, diplomats—alarmed by Tel Aviv’s deadly intransigence. Even this show of defiance was short-lived, as Western reactions to Israel’s air strikes on Iran on June 13, made clear. Just nine days later, the leaders of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom issued a warning… to the country under attack: “We urge Iran not to take any action that would further destabilize the region.” Imagine, for a moment, if they had addressed Ukraine in this way instead of Russia…

These two parallel conflicts make comparison inevitable. In the Russian case, the European Union has imposed 18 rounds of sanctions, frozen assets, banned athletes from sporting competitions, censored media outlets, and sent weapons to Ukraine. And in the Israeli case? Nothing—apart from the somewhat shamefaced continuation of cooperation agreements with the aggressor, sales of military components to its army, and the occasional reprimand when it kills too many civilians the same day. As journalist Nesrine Malik puts it, these words “simply bounce off Israel’s iron dome of impunity” (The Guardian, May 26, 2025).

Those who criticize all this support for Tel Aviv are often met with identical responses. Yes, Israel kills Palestinian civilians in exercising its “right to defend itself” and yes, that’s very sad. But in the first place, the real blame lies with Hamas for using civilians as human shields. And second, democracies must sometimes resort to overwhelming force, as the United States did in Hiroshima. Anyway, why focus on Israel rather than Congo or Darfur, if not for antisemitic reasons?

This line of argument deploys language that suggests an equivalence between the October 7 attacks and those at the Bataclan and Charlie Hebdo in 2015. If Hamas is effectively the same as ISIS, then France and Israel are fighting a common enemy. And anyone who refuses to call Hamas “terrorists” is, by that logic, guilty of both antisemitism and complicity with the perpetrators of the attacks in France.

“Our battle is your battle”

These narratives, shaped by the Israeli authorities, reverberate easily around the echo chamber of the right-wing press and rolling news channels, where the pro-Israel lobby is well established—CNews, BFM TV, LCI. On October 23, 2024, Netanyahu gave an interview in Jerusalem to journalist Laurence Ferrari, whom he told, “We’re fighting for you too. It’s a civilizational war against barbarism. We share a war. Our battle is your battle.”

Having aired his talking points, Netanyahu praised CNews: “I appreciate that your channel fights for freedom, since you are fighting for Judeo-Christian civilization, which has given so much to the world and is under attack by Islamic fundamentalism.” Less than a month later, National Rally president Jordan Bardella echoed his words on the same channel: “What happened in Israel was the Bataclan and 9/11 rolled into one. We have a common enemy: Islamic fundamentalism” (November 12, 2024).

The pro-Israel lobby is not confined to far-right media or pundits. Its credibility stems from the fact that it includes elements of the center and left who embrace the “shared war” narrative and defend Israel not as a model but as an ally: an Enlightenment stronghold besieged by Islamist obscurantism.

Whenever tensions rise in the Middle East, an informal network of prominent figures launches attacks on supporters of the Palestinian cause—undifferentiated from Hamas—and in particular targets La France Insoumise: Sophia Aram, official comedian on France Inter; Philippe Val, who formerly ran Charlie Hebdo and France Inter; Frédéric Haziza, star journalist at Radio J and contributor to Le Canard enchaîné; essayist Raphaël Enthoven, cofounder of the newspaper Franc-Tireur; the imam of Drancy, Hassen Chalgoumi; actress Charlotte Gainsbourg; founder of the far-right monthly Causeur Elisabeth Lévy; and Amine El Khatmi, former member of the Socialist Party and cofounder of Printemps Républicain, a fundamentalist secularist movement.

Natacha Polony, former editor of Marianne, has noted how far this milieu—to which she once belonged—has drifted: “The tendency aligned with Printemps républicain (founded in March 2016, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in France) has veered toward supporting not only Israel, but Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies,” she wrote in Marianne on January 2, 2025. The weekly itself has followed a similar trajectory: Its shareholders ousted Polony in favor of a journalist who wouldn’t be out of place at neoconservative, pro-Israel publications such as L’Express or Le Point.

The pro-Israel narrative also spreads via “explainers” from experts in step with Tel Aviv. When essayist Frédéric Encel commented on the Middle East in Le Figaro Magazine, he modestly stated that, “unlike too many loquacious and/or dogmatic activists,” he has “conducted a number of academic studies on the issue.”

“Israel reclaimed the use of force”

On the one hand, he praises “the clear success of Zionism and then of Israel, which have managed to reclaim the use of force.” On the other, such “reclamation” would seem less acceptable in other contexts: “I find the instrumentalization of the Palestinian cause by some political forces in the West troubling—in particular, the far left, sadly aligned with fanatics, the Muslim Brotherhood, and their useful idiots.”

Dominique Reynié, director of the Foundation for Political Innovation, is not a Middle East expert, but that doesn’t stop him from weighing in on France Inter, where he has a regular commentary slot. On June 16, he delivered his take on the two-state solution, which he claimed the Palestinians have always rejected. Though he had just three minutes, that didn’t prevent him from digging up antisemitic declarations to this effect, made by the mufti of Jerusalem in… 1922.

What he didn’t find time to mention, however, was that 73 years later, a Jewish extremist opposed to the Palestinian state envisioned in the Oslo accords (1993), killed Yitzhak Rabin, the signatory to that agreement, firing three bullets into his back. He also failed to note that on July 18, 2024, the Israeli parliament voted by an overwhelming majority (68 to 8) in favor of a resolution that “firmly opposes the creation of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan.”

Reynié’s distortions through omission mesh neatly with the pro-Israel arguments of another expert, historian Georges Bensoussan. Le Figaro Magazine, CNews, and Le Point all vie for his contributions, given how smoothly he purveys Netanyahu’s views: Israeli soldiers “have managed to maintain a very low civilian casualty ratio,” he has said. They “brought life and survival” to Gaza, organizing, for example, “a polio vaccination campaign” there. And the charge of genocide, he claims, is “in itself ludicrous,” since Gaza’s population rose from 400,000 in 1967 to 2.3 million in 2023. The Palestinians, it seems, fail to appreciate how lucky they are to be gunned down by such a considerate army.

Yet another expert, Bruno Tertrais, deputy director of the Foundation for Strategic Research and research fellow at the Institut Montaigne, believes that “whatever one thinks of Israel’s military strategy, there is no deliberate bombing of civilians.” He criticizes the fact that Palestinians receive “disproportionate attention compared with the tragedies in Algeria or Syria” and therefore finds it “hard to believe that the Jewish character of the state has nothing to do with this double standard” (Le Figaro, February 13, 2025).

Critical experts not invited

France Inter, which rates Tertrais, nonetheless prefers to feature the pro-Israel Pierre Servent, Encel, Reynié, and the neoconservative Figaro journalists Laure Mandeville and Isabelle Lasserre—all regular guests on the station. Lasserre once delicately observed that “the Arab street has always washed its hands and feet of the Palestinian question.” More critical experts —such as Pascal Boniface or Alain Gresh—would have been capable of responding to that. But not on France Inter, nor on BFM or CNews, since they are not allowed on those channels.

Nor will you find them in the pages of Le Figaro, which on December 17 last year published an uncompromising exposé of the “growing unease,” “fear,” and “code of silence” created by Le Monde’s supposed pro-Palestinian bias in its newsroom. Journalist Eugénie Bastié went so far as to accuse her rival paper of “indulgence toward Hamas” and “an open hatred of the Jewish state.”

These conclusions were instantly seized on by the far-right media. Tribune Juive also added its view: “Le Monde’s coverage of Israel is disgraceful” (December 18, 2024). Because it’s not enough for the Tel Aviv–aligned lobby to shape France’s foreign policy and exert ideological control over most of the media—it also seeks to defame those who report what they see in Gaza, journalist or not.

In addition to equality and moral rectitude, Claude Lanzmann once offered a third justification for the question “Israel, why?”—the most obvious one in the postwar decades: that there should be a country where Jews from around the world could live safely, free from persecution. But the massacres of Palestinians, Israel’s endless war against its neighbors, and the blind support it receives from Western powers now threaten the very rationale for the state created in 1948.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has warned of the day when “Israel, instead of being seen by Jews as a safe haven from antisemitism, will be seen as a new engine generating it.” To the point where, in his view, “Jews worldwide better prepare themselves, their children and their grandchildren for a reality they’ve never known: to be Jewish in a world where the Jewish state is a pariah state—a source of shame, not of pride” (June 11, 2025). By defending the indefensible, the pro-Israel lobby is hastening that moment.