Candles Burn Out. Hatred Does Not.

On February 13, we will mark twenty years since Ilan Halimi was murdered.

Ilan was 23 years old. Kidnapped in the Paris suburbs in January 2006, held captive for 24 days, tortured, burned, beaten, and starved by a gang that believed his family must be wealthy “because they are Jews.” When the ransom did not materialize, he was abandoned near railway tracks, barely alive.

The brutality was shocking. What followed was equally revealing.

French authorities did not immediately interpret the crime as fundamentally antisemitic. The idea that such raw, violent hatred could structure a criminal enterprise in modern France seemed implausible. After the Vichy regime, after decades of Holocaust memory, after institutional commitments to “Never Again,” the Republic believed itself to be protected from that particular blindness.

It was not.

In 24 jours (“24 Days”), Ilan’s mother, Ruth, describes not only the agony of those weeks, but also the disbelief that surrounded the case. Investigators did not imagine that antisemitism could still function as a mobilizing force, as an operating logic. They underestimated its persistence. That miscalculation matters. Because antisemitism does not disappear when it is socially disapproved. It mutates. It embeds itself in cultural narratives, in economic resentments, in geopolitical discourse. It rarely presents itself in the form institutions expect.

Misunderstanding it leads to misdiagnosing it.

Since 2006, France has endured a succession of antisemitic murders: the attack on the Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012; the Hyper Cacher supermarket killings in 2015; the murders of Sarah Halimi in 2017 and Mireille Knoll in 2018. Each event triggered national shock. Each prompted declarations of vigilance.

Yet the structural conversation remained incomplete.

As a French-Israeli myself, and as someone deeply engaged in the dialogue between Europe and Israel, I have often sensed a recurring hesitation, a belief among many that antisemitism is cyclical, reactive, or temporary. That it surges in moments of crisis and recedes when tensions cool.

October 7 disrupted that illusion.

In the aftermath of Hamas’s massacre, some European leaders finally articulated more clearly what had long remained blurred: that antisemitism and radicalized forms of antizionism often overlap, and that hostility toward Israel frequently operates as a socially acceptable proxy for hostility toward Jews. The unmasking was striking.

But it raises a difficult question: why does recognition only come after catastrophe? And how can Jews, Israelis, and anyone who fully understands the meaning of Zionism correct this recurring miscalculation?

In 2023, nearly 200,000 people marched in France against antisemitism: an extraordinary civic response. It demonstrated that French society contains strong democratic antibodies against hatred. And yet, the symbolic absence of President Emmanuel Macron from that march was equally telling. Silence, too, can be the loudest interpretation.

At the same time, certain elected officials across Europe have demonstrated how easily antisemitic narratives can be repackaged into effective PR tools in an age of accelerated ignorance. Comparisons between Zionism and Nazism, once unthinkable in mainstream institutions, are now voiced within parliamentary chambers.

Today, an army of elected officials who normalize hatred profit from it. And when it seems that intelligence is no longer a prerequisite for antisemitism and antizionism, it is because some have learned how to capitalize on ignorance. When the hatred of some is coupled with the dismissal of others, prevention becomes nearly impossible.

This is where Ilan Halimi’s case remains instructive. The 2006 tragedy was not only that he was murdered by the self-proclaimed “Gand of Barbarians” who tortured him physically and his family psychologically. The tragedy was that the possibility of such a level of hatred had been discounted as the main reason behind this crime. Antisemitism had been for years categorized as residual, marginal, or socially contained. It was none of those things.

It was just waiting for the right conditions.

Twenty years later, the central lesson is not outrage. It is perception. When societies treat antisemitism as episodic rather than structural, they build policies around moments instead of patterns. They respond to symptoms rather than causes. They mobilize after violence rather than before.

For European Jews, the sense of precarity has rarely aligned with official optimism. The gap between lived experience and institutional assessment has often been significant.

And yet, Europe also possesses something powerful: democratic resilience. The massive marches, the educators, and the policymakers who have worked to strengthen definitions and enforcement mechanisms, these are real advances.

But clarity must precede tragedy, not follow it.

Marching by the thousands cannot ever be mistaken for a remedy. Slogans and candles have a limited lifespan. Structural vigilance does not.

Ilan Halimi’s name should not be remembered only as a symbol of cruelty. It should be remembered as an early warning, one that was partially heard, but never fully integrated.

Antisemitism’s endurance is not its most dangerous feature.

Our recurring underestimation of it is.

Candles burn out, hatred does not.