In a move that somehow surprised no one who has been paying attention, French lawmakers recently managed to introduce, nearly pass, and then quietly shelve a bill that would have made criticising Israel a legal offence. The draft legislation, introduced in 2024 by National Assembly member Caroline Yadan, was ostensibly aimed at combating antisemitism. But as is often the case when politicians wrap censorship in the flag of fighting hate, the actual target turned out to be anyone who dares say anything unflattering about Israel.

The bill proposed widening the existing offence of “glorifying terrorism” to include “indirect incitement” - a concept so vague that even the former anti-terrorism investigating judge Marc Trévidic warned it would lead to “total arbitrariness”. It also created a new offence for “inciting the destruction or denial of a state”, which would conveniently make it illegal to question Israel's existence while leaving France's own colonial history conveniently untouched. A petition against the bill gathered a record 700,000 signatures, five UN rapporteurs expressed concern, and the Ligue des droits de l’homme called it an attempt to “shield the state of Israel from criticism”. The government, sensing the political winds, withdrew the bill at the eleventh hour.

But the bill's death hasn't ended the crackdown. Since October 2023, prosecutors have been busy going after everyone from influencers to athletes to trade union activists for “glorifying terrorism”. The media outlet Orient XXI noted that while some of those prosecuted had described the 7 October attacks as acts of resistance, “few explicitly glorified the massacres or rejoiced in the deaths of Israeli civilians”. High-profile figures like academic François Burgat were charged before being acquitted. French-Palestinian MEP Rima Hassan of La France Insoumise was arrested last month for an X post quoting a Japanese terrorist from 1972, then subjected to a leak campaign that falsely claimed synthetic drugs were found in her belongings. The drug probe was dropped, but only after days of negative coverage. Le Parisien later admitted it had jumped the gun, but by then the damage was done. Meanwhile, police violently repressed university students protesting the bill, drawing condemnation from the International Federation for Human Rights and the World Organisation Against Torture.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, in a speech that seemed to miss the point, argued that anti-Zionism had become “the mask of an old antisemitism”. The Yadan bill is dead, but its spirit lives on in a broader effort to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism and narrow the space for pro-Palestinian discourse. As writer and activist Rokhaya Diallo puts it, the disproportionate response to pro-Palestinian activism raises questions about the lengths deployed to restrict a form of expression essential in a democracy. Or, as anyone who signed that petition might say: we told you so.