Jack Jedwab: In France, as in Canada, yesterday’s ‘dirty Jew’ is today’s ‘dirty Zionist’

French national flag flaps in the wind under the Arc de Triomphe on May 8, 2026. (Photo by Ludovic MARIN / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)

Article content

“Yesterday’s dirty Jew has become today’s dirty Zionist.”

Article content

That stark warning came from Caroline Yadan, the Deputy for the 8th constituency of French citizens living abroad in France’s National Assembly and architect of what has become known as the “Yadan law,” during my interview with her in Paris on June 1. For Yadan, the issue is not whether Israel, like any other democracy, can be criticized. Of course it can. The issue is whether the language of anti-Zionism is increasingly being used to legitimize something far more dangerous: the denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination and, ultimately, calls for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.

Article content

Article content

Article content

In Yadan’s view, the contemporary demonization of Zionism cannot be treated as a neutral semantic debate. The word “Zionist,” she argues, has become a pretext — a more acceptable way of saying “Jew” while avoiding the appearance of traditional antisemitism. For too many people, a Jew is deemed acceptable only if he or she renounces attachment to Israel, declares opposition to the Jewish state, or accepts the charge that Israel itself is illegitimate.

Article content

Article content

This was the logic behind Yadan’s legislative initiative. As she explained it, the law did not seek to punish criticism of Israeli policy, nor did it refer to Zionism as such. Its purpose was to sanction calls for the destruction of a state formally recognized by France, in violation of the right of peoples to self-determination. In other words, it drew a line between criticism and eliminationism.

Article content

The reaction to her initiative underscored her point. Yadan’s effort was met not simply with political opposition, but with a flood of virulent antisemitic attacks and several death threats. The campaign against her became a grim illustration of the very phenomenon she was trying to name: the ease with which hatred of Israel, or of those who defend Israel’s right to exist, slides into hatred of Jews themselves.

Article content

Article content

That distinction is too often missing from Canadian public discourse.

Article content

Article content

On June 1, Prime Minister Mark Carney was right to say that Canada is failing its Jewish community. He was also right to acknowledge that antisemitism in this country is specific, severe and in need of a targeted response. But his instruction to the new Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality and Inclusion to examine the nature, scale and drivers of antisemitism risks treating the central driver as though it were still obscure.

Article content

A serious advisory council should study data, enforcement gaps, institutional failures, online radicalization and the social settings in which such hate is normalized. But it should not pretend that the principal contemporary vocabulary of antisemitism is a mystery. The question is not whether antisemitism has many channels. It does. The question is whether Canada will name the ideological current that has made antisemitism newly acceptable in so-called polite spaces.

Article content

If antisemitism is the council’s first order of business, then its members must be prepared to answer a basic question: do they accept that calling for the elimination of the State of Israel is antisemitic?