French lawmakers are on April 16 set to vote on a government-backed draft law based on the idea that rising anti-Semitism in the country with Europe’s largest Jewish population is grounded in an “obsessive” hatred of Israel.
The legislation has been drafted and redrafted since it was first introduced to the National Assembly at the end of 2024. Earlier drafts would have outlawed any comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany as “trivialising” the Holocaust and banned public speech calling for the ill-defined “denial” of a state’s existence.
If passed, the law in its current form will broaden the definition of “apology for terrorism” – defending or justifying terrorist acts, considered an offence in France – to include speech that “implicitly” justifies or downplays acts deemed terrorist. The law would also make it illegal to call for the “destruction” of any country recognised by France, punishable by five years in prison.
The draft law’s preamble leaves little doubt which country the authors have in mind.
“Today, anti-Jewish hatred in our country is fuelled by an obsessive hatred of Israel, whose very existence is regularly delegitimised and criminalised,” it reads.
“This hatred of the State of Israel is now inseparable from hatred of Jews,” the law says.
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The proposed law – dubbed the “Yadan law” after lawmaker Caroline Yadan, who introduced it – has split the National Assembly. Critics say it is a misguided attempt to crack down on anti-Semitism that could backfire, possibly even fuelling further hatred against the Jewish community.
A petition on the official site of the National Assembly protesting the draft bill had garnered more than 160,000 signatures as of Friday.
France has experienced a steep rise in anti-Semitic acts since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023 and Israel’s devastating military campaign in the besieged Gaza Strip. In 2025, more than half of all reported anti-religious acts targeted the Jewish community.
But the 2024 annual report released by France’s National Consultative Commission on Human Rights on the fight against racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia said its surveys have not found a statistically significant connection between respondents holding a negative view of the political or religious ideology of Zionism and anti-Semitic prejudices.
“It is therefore difficult to view anti-Zionism as the key driver of contemporary anti-Semitism,” the report read.
Lawmakers on the left – from Socialist Party leaders to the Greens and the hard-left France Unbowed – have slammed the law as an attempt to stifle legitimate criticism of the Israeli government by defining it as fundamentally anti-Semitic. The far-right National Rally, the right-wing Les Républicains, the centre-right bloc and a handful of Socialist Party members including former president François Hollande have backed the bill.
The French government has not been shy about its support for the law – or its assertion that opposing the creation of a Jewish state on what was previously Palestinian territory is fundamentally anti-Semitic.
Speaking at the 40th annual dinner of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions in February, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said that the government would bring the bill – first introduced by Yadan in 2024 – to a vote in the spring, arguing that the country needed new laws to deal with what he described as a new form of hatred against France’s Jewish community.
“Contemporary anti-Zionism has become the mask of an old anti-Semitism,” he said, echoing the spirit of the draft law.
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Lecornu went on to say that calls for Palestine to be free “From the River to the Sea” – a common slogan among activists – was an explicit call for Israel’s destruction since it refers to Israeli territory. Activists maintain the cry is a demand for freedom for those living on historically Palestinian land.
While Lecornu said that criticising the Israeli government and its military actions was legitimate, he accused those describing Israel’s war on Gaza as a “genocide” of “stripping Jews of their history and transforming them from victims into executioners”.
“Talking about ‘genocide’ in Gaza erases their memory of the Holocaust,” he said. “It downplays it and reverses it.”
An earlier version of the draft law proposed to make it illegal to compare Israel to Nazi Germany – an article that was removed on the advice of the Conseil d’état, France’s highest administrative court.
The International Court of Justice in 2024 warned that Israel’s devastating Gaza campaign could plausibly amount to genocide. A UN Commission of Inquiry the following year went further, labelling Israel’s actions in the Palestinian territory as genocidal in nature.
‘Dangerous’
Nathalie Tehio, the president of France’s Human Rights League – a staunch opponent of the proposed law – warned that legally tying the protection of France’s Jewish community to protection of the State of Israel could very well fuel anti-Semitism rather than fight it.
“In reality, it equates French Jews with Israel – which is dangerous in and of itself, as this very equation fuels anti-Semitism,” she said. “But it also gives the impression that there is a double standard, because it is a law that targets the issue of anti-Semitism while also serving as a defence of Israel – so there is a double risk of reinforcing anti-Semitism.”
Other critics have slammed what they describe as overly broad or vague wording that makes it difficult to predict what statements would or wouldn’t fall afoul of the new legislation.
The French Lawyers’ Union in January warned that criminalising statements that “implicitly” justify or incite acts of terror would effectively turn judges into unwilling “thought police”.
Others have questioned the need for such a law in the first place.
François Dubuisson, a professor in international law at the Université libre de Bruxelles, said that France already had a raft of legislation targeting incitement to racial hatred and against “glorifying” terrorism.
“In my view, the current legislation in France is sufficient, because what remains in the amended version of the bill – after taking into account the opinion of the Conseil d’état – is primarily a broadening of the offense of advocating terrorism,” he said. “But it’s important to note that, even under current law, the offense of advocating terrorism is extremely broad and is, in fact, often heavily criticised by a number of international human rights organisations.”
Since the Hamas-led terror attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, France’s “apology for terrorism” law has been used to summon hundreds of activists, trade unionists, researchers and left-wing politicians for police questioning over statements they’ve made in connection to the attacks.
Rima Hassan, a hard-left member of the European Parliament, was taken into police custody on Thursday, accused of justifying terrorism in a social media post quoting a far-left Japanese militant involved in a deadly attack on Israel’s Lod Airport in 1972. Hassan, who later deleted the post, has been summoned for police questioning in 16 cases, 13 of which have been dropped without charges.
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Dubuisson said that the need for a law banning calls for a state’s destruction seemed even less clear.
“To my knowledge, this does not exist anywhere in the world,” he said. “I’m not aware of any legislation – and particularly in Europe – that contains such an offence.”
He argued that calls for the violent destruction of a state and its people would already leave the speaker exposed to a raft of existing laws criminalising incitement to violence.
And while the text’s preamble specifically mentioned Israel, the current wording would also cover calls for the destruction of the state of Palestine, which France recognised in September last year – a decision that prompted Yadan to leave French President Emmanuel Macron’s parliamentary group.
Tehio pointed out that Israel’s existence as a Jewish state continues to be fiercely debated, including by anti-Zionist Jews campaigning for what has become known as a “one-state solution” – Israelis and Palestinians sharing a single state with full and equal rights for all.
“There are some, for example, who believe that there should be a single state comprising both Israel and the Palestinian state together,” she said.
Just what statements the law would ultimately penalise remains deeply unclear. Tehio said that the French PM’s example of a direct call for Israel’s destruction – “From the River to the Sea” – can also be heard on the lips of far-right Israeli activists, though in very different contexts.
“Those who use that phrase will indeed be penalised, because it would be interpreted as implying either the destruction of the Palestinian state or the destruction of the Israeli state,” she said. “But that actually makes no sense.”
