When the City of Paris voted last week to grant honorary citizenship to Palestinian civilians and journalists, City Hall called it a commitment to peace. The new Socialist mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire, addressed the Paris City Council with Palestinian ambassador to France Hala Abou-Hassira seated alongside him as he announced the honorary citizenship. “Honorary citizenship is not just a symbol, but a commitment to peace. We are extending a hand to an entire people,” Grégoire declared. The gesture drew a long round of applause for the Palestinian representative. The Council’s resolution declared that “the humanitarian situation of Gaza’s population remains dramatic.” The political right voted against, pointing to the surging wave of antisemitic acts sweeping France.

The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), the main body representing French Jews, condemned the move, warning that it effectively hands a political victory to the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) party, which will use it, in CRIF’s words, “to further hystericalize the public debate and cultivate a dangerous climate of criminalizing Zionism and stigmatizing Jews, who are supposedly guilty by proxy.” CRIF also demanded to know why the honorary citizenship was not extended to the Israeli civilians of kibbutzim attacked on October 7, 2023. “Empathy for victims must be universal,” the organization’s statement read. “Don’t these civilians also deserve this symbolic recognition?”

Grégoire acknowledged that “we will never forget October 7, 2023,” and noted that Paris had previously granted honorary citizenship to the hostages held by Hamas. But the Sages have a saying that actions speak louder than intentions. Paris has now placed Palestinian civilians and journalists — a category that includes Hamas propagandists and terror apologists, as the evacuee scandal demonstrated — in the company of Ukrainian Kyiv and the people of Nagorno-Karabakh as formal objects of Parisian solidarity. No such gesture has been directed at the Jewish communities of southern Israel, who were massacred, burned alive, and taken captive on that same day.

France already knows what such commitments actually deliver. Last year, it brought 292 Palestinians out of Gaza as part of a government evacuation program. It then suspended the entire program within months after one of the evacuees, a 25-year-old student named Nour Atallah, who had been awarded a government scholarship to study at Sciences Po Lille, was found to have shared images of Adolf Hitler online and posts calling for the death of Jews. A France 24 journalist evacuated from Gaza under the same program was simultaneously suspected of posting antisemitic content online. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced the end of all further evacuations. “She has no place at Sciences Po, nor in France,” he said. The honorary citizenship vote did nothing to slow Paris’s enthusiasm.

It was not the first time. In July 2016, several French municipal councils moved to grant honorary citizenship to Marwan Barghouti, a convicted Palestinian terrorist serving five consecutive life sentences in an Israeli prison for the murders of five people. Barghouti is one of the founders of the Tanzim terror group, an armed affiliate of Fatah, and is widely credited with igniting the second Intifada, a wave of suicide bombings and shootings that killed over a thousand Israelis. He remains unrepentant and continues to incite violence from his prison cell. According to the French newspaper L’Humanité, Paris has declared Barghouti an honorary citizen no fewer than eight times since 2009, and at least 20 other French cities have done the same. In 2014, Valenton, a suburb of Paris, named a street after him. Two months later, nearby Aubervilliers granted him honorary citizenship. Belgian parliamentarians launched a campaign to nominate this convicted mass murderer for the Nobel Peace Prize, a cause taken up by South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu. France did not recoil. It applauded.

LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has announced his candidacy for next year’s presidential election, has for years been identified by French Jewish leaders as a direct threat to their community. He has a documented history of antisemitic statements, including suggesting that Jews killed Jesus, a slander used to justify anti-Jewish persecution throughout the Middle Ages. He previously dismissed rising antisemitism in France as “residual,” a claim that the statistics have since demolished.

A study by the French Institute of Public Opinion published in October 2024 for the American Jewish Committee found that 65% of French Muslims agreed with the statement that “Israel treats Palestinians like the Nazis treated Jews,” 53% agreed that “Jews are richer than the average French person,” and 45% said they condone the murder, rape, and torture of Israelis on October 7 as an act of resistance. These are not the views of a fringe. France has an estimated Muslim population of between 5.5 and 6.5 million people — roughly 8 to 10 percent of the country — making it the largest Muslim population in Western Europe. Pew Research Center projects that figure could rise to 13.2 million, or 18 percent, by 2050 under high-immigration scenarios.

Official data published in 2025 recorded 9,350 racist, antisemitic, xenophobic, and anti-religious offenses in France in 2024, an 11 percent increase from 8,428 the previous year. Between 2000 and the end of 2024, France recorded 16,337 antisemitic acts, a figure that demonstrates that antisemitism in France is not a recent phenomenon but a deeply entrenched reality spanning more than two decades. In June 2024, French police launched an investigation into the gang rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl in Courbevoie, which was treated as an antisemitic crime. One suspect allegedly sought revenge after learning of the victim’s Jewish identity, with investigators finding antisemitic content on his phone, including images of a burned Israeli flag. In January 2025, at least ten Jewish homes, businesses, and a synagogue in Paris and Rouen were vandalized with swastikas and slogans including “Jews pedophiles, rapists to be gassed.” Alarmed by the violence, French Jews have been emigrating to Israel in numbers that surpassed American Jewish immigration by 2014 and have continued to grow.

This is the France that just extended its hand, as Mayor Grégoire put it, to “an entire people.” The same France that cannot protect its Jewish citizens from being stabbed on Paris streets, whose synagogues are set on fire, whose teenage girls are raped for being Jewish, is now bestowing civic honors on the population whose radicalized representatives have made clear, in France itself, what they think of Jewish lives. France first invited Palestinian “journalists” into the country on government scholarships, watched one of them post Hitler memes within weeks of arrival, and is now voting to give the entire population symbolic French citizenship. The City of Light is extinguishing its own lamp, one honorary diploma at a time.