Israeli paper of record Haaretz found little difficulty in identifying the deeper causes of Hamas’s merciless October 7 attack on southern Israel. It cited Benjamin Netanyahu’s responsibility for the war, including the long campaign to strangle Gaza. But faced with the atrocities against Israeli civilians — and despite the dire conditions in a bombarded Gaza now facing a likely ground invasion — this level of nuance is increasingly inaudible in Western Europe. In France, as elsewhere, even politicians who do squarely condemn Hamas’s attack are under scrutiny. Any attempt to invoke context — Israeli raids on the West Bank, occupation, a sixteen-year blockade on Gaza — is cited as an attempt to justify terrorism.

This has been particularly true of France’s leading left-wing force, La France Insoumise (LFI), whose initial statements about the crisis had them accused of providing “apologias” for terrorism. Its leader in the National Assembly, Mathilde Panot, faced particular criticism for referring to Hamas’s attack as “war crimes” and not “terrorism” — a word which, she explained, did not permit a serious “thinking through” of the years of occupation and colonization of Palestine. This statement came days after an LFI press release on October 7 alluded to the attack by Hamas — which the European Union officially designates as a terrorist organization — as an “armed offensive.”

From President Emmanuel Macron to Marine Le Pen, the Israel-Hamas war is an opportunity to attack and delegitimize the left-wing opposition at home. Both ministers and the far-right Rassemblement National have in the past derided LFI as “Islamo-leftist,” and it is again now tarred with this brush. “The positions of France Insoumise are well-known,” Macron’s prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, lamented in an interview on BFM-TV, lambasting an “anti-Zionism” that, she says, often approaches “antisemitism.”