From Damascus to Paris: How I found antisemitism twice

I was born in Syria, in a country where antisemitism was not a marginal opinion but a state doctrine. At school, in textbooks, in teachers’ lectures, in mosque sermons, and on television, Israel and the Jews were portrayed as the absolute enemy. Anti-Zionism was glorified, taught, and transmitted as an unquestionable truth.

When I left Syria for France, I thought I had escaped this morbid obsession forever. And I found more than just a refuge: I discovered the Republic. Its values, its freedom, its openness saved me. It offered me a second life, the possibility of deconstructing the culture of hatred I had inherited.

In France, I also discovered a part of history that had been hidden from us in Syria: the Holocaust. The memory of the extermination of European Jews shook me to the core. It changed my perception, shattered part of the lie in which I had grown up. Thanks to the Republic, and thanks to this historical truth, I came to believe in coexistence—not only in Europe, but even in the Middle East.

The painful contrast

But today, I must say with sadness: France is no longer the country I first encountered. The nation I admired, which reconciled me with the idea of possible coexistence, is changing. I am rediscovering antisemitism—the same I knew in my country of origin. Sometimes it looks identical, sometimes it wears new faces, but it always revolves around the same obsession: Israel and the Jews.

Part of the French political class fuels this climate—out of ignorance, electoral calculation, or sometimes through barely concealed antisemitism. Some of my fellow Arabs and Muslims, who like me left our countries, have carried with them the hatred instilled since childhood, and they continue to nurture it on European soil.

When the head of state bows to propaganda

What is most alarming is that this drift has reached the highest level of the state. Emmanuel Macron, who calls himself a centrist and a guarantor of national unity, now echoes the rhetoric of the worst antisemites of the Arab world. He relays the propaganda and demands of Islamists. He welcomes their representatives to the Élysée as if they were respectable voices. In doing so, he legitimizes their narrative and, in effect, fuels hatred of Jews.

I must admit: When I first arrived in France, still full of prejudices inherited from Syria, I would have applauded this discourse. I would have recognized my own obsessions in it. But today, after my personal journey, after the liberation the Republic gave me and my confrontation with history, I see it for what it is: dangerous, complicit with extremists and Islamists.

My journey, my warning

I speak this way because I have lived this reversal myself. The Republic allowed me to dismantle an inheritance of hate, to access a historical truth that had been hidden from me, to encounter Israel, to meet face-to-face the “enemy” I had been taught to despise. This journey freed me.

But it is in the name of that same Republic that I now express my concern. For what I fled in Syria, I see reappearing in France—draped in “humanitarian” slogans and appeals to “international law.” The language changes, but the hatred does not.

I say this as a witness of both faces: France was my salvation, it offered me freedom, historical truth, and the possibility to rebuild myself. But today, it is changing. It is drifting away from its own values, normalizing discourses that remind me of those I once heard in Damascus. If even the country of the Enlightenment can yield to such a drift, then it is a warning—not only for the Jews of France, but for all French citizens, and for Europe as a whole.