(All images Collectif Haverim)
This account of the recent violence against a synagogue in Paris, translated from the French, appeared on July 14 on the website of the Collectif Haverim. It was signed by Aurélie A., who identifies herself as a member of the Synagogue of La Roquette, which was besieged by a violent mob of between 200 and 300 people that celebrated Bastille Day by chanting violent, racist slogans, waving the banners of Hezbollah and Hamas, and attempting to storm the synagogue in what appears to have been an attempt at a new kind of communal terror against French Jews, who have been routinely targeted over the past decade by public insults, attacks, and beatings as well as a few gruesome murders.
Luckily for those inside, the young men of the community fought back, drove off the attackers, and then escorted those inside the synagogue to safety, with the assistance of the police. While there has been an attempt on social media sites to portray the counter-attackers as having initiated the violence against peaceful demonstrators who were only expressing their hope that Palestine will one day be free, there is no support for such a chronology in first-hand accounts of the demonstrations or in reports from the police. Such insinuations also beg the question of what a large number of anti-Israeli demonstrators shouting anti-Israel and anti-Semitic slogans were doing outside a synagogue.
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