'The left has really let us down.' Why many American Jews fe

After a group of protesters gathered in Montgomery County to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, a group of anti-Palestinian protesters gathered to oppose them. One demonstrator using a megaphone said “we will secure America against you animals […] we’ll take your heads, we’ll take your lives […] because we are white, and you are murderers.” Shouting at a pro-Palestine protester, one counter protester said “you Muslim, we kill your brothers.”

Over 100,000 March in France Against Antisemitism
The demonstrations in Paris and other cities came amid a rise in tensions in France over the Gaza war and a surge in antisemitic incidents.

More than 100,000 demonstrators in Paris and cities across France took to the streets on Sunday to show their solidarity with the country’s Jews and to deplore antisemitic acts that have multiplied across the nation since Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7.

The marches were called by the leaders of both houses of the French Parliament, the Senate and the National Assembly, and unfolded under gray skies mostly without incident, with 3,000 police officers in Paris alone patrolling the route. The marches in France came a day after a huge pro-Palestinian protest in London that police said involved about 300,000 people.

Tensions have been rising in France and particularly in Paris, home to large Jewish and Muslim communities, after Hamas’s attack and during Israel’s subsequent military campaign in the Gaza Strip. In the past month, over 1,240 antisemitic acts have been reported in France. The police had made 539 arrests as of Nov. 10.

President Emmanuel Macron condemned “the unbearable resurgence of unbridled antisemitism” in France in an open letter published in Le Parisien newspaper on Saturday, and said there would be “no tolerance for the intolerable.”

The president of the Senate, Gérard Larcher, and the National Assembly leader, Yaël Braun-Pivet, said the march was not intended to be a political statement about the war, over which political parties in France have clashed in recent weeks.

Instead, Ms. Braun-Pivet, who herself has been the target of antisemitic threats and is under police protection, said the march was an appeal for French citizens to show one another and the world “what France is today.”

The fact so many people participated in a march organized only six days ago — according to the Interior Ministry, more than 182,000 people marched across France, including 105,000 in Paris alone — showed that the French were “capable of assembling rapidly, reuniting around our values, our history, and what I’m sure will be our future,” she said.

Demonstrations in the cities of Strasbourg, Marseille and Lyon were joined by thousands. In Lyon, which has recorded 50 antisemitic acts in the past month, three times the total in all of 2022, Richard Zelmati, the regional president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, denounced “the impotence of public authorities against the surge of hatred.”

France has been on high alert for terrorist attacks, with extra police officers and soldiers on the streets, armed with machine guns. A week after the Hamas assault, a man armed with knives killed a teacher and injured three other school employees at his former school in the northern city of Arras in what the police called an Islamist terror attack.

The government has also deployed 10,000 police officers and soldiers to guard synagogues and Jewish schools and centers around the country, mindful of attacks on such institutions during previous flare-ups between Israel and the Palestinians.