All around him, thousands of angry demonstrators were swarming the square with fake rockets, Palestinian and Hamas flags, even the black-and-white banners of ISIS. It was Saturday, July 26, , and a pro-Palestinian demonstration turned into a day of terror in one of the most fashionable neighborhoods of the city. Do you see what is happening here? For years, the chairman, a longtime anti-racism activist, has turned up at rallies like this one to see which politicians and which radical groups were present.
For reasons of personal safety, the chairman asked not to be identified for this story. But hate speech is a criminal offense—people may express their opinions, but not to the extent of insulting others based on their race, religion, or sex. But if the police were to move in too quickly, the riots might continue all summer long—suburbs in flames, mobs in central Paris. By early afternoon, some of these reached Sammy Ghozlan, a year-old retired police commissioner who has spent his career working the banlieues, the belt of working-class, racially mixed suburbs that surround Paris.
Its purpose is nothing less than to protect the Jews of France. Ghozlan and his 19 volunteers are on the front lines in the most troubled areas, documenting, trying to confirm, hoping to get a reporter or a police prefect or a court to take action. Their destination was the Don Isaac Abravanel synagogue. We are terrified here. Only six police officers were assigned to be on demonstration duty that day. After an hour, a counterterrorism force rescued the chief rabbi, but everyone else was left inside, behind doors barricaded from the inside with chairs and tables.
Together, it took them three hours to disperse the crowd and safely evacuate the synagogue. Almost immediately afterward, the reports of the July 13 demonstration would be challenged and debated. The numbers would be skeptically parsed—were there really so many? The Jewish population of France is in the neighborhood of , Among those he recognized in the crowd were a local concierge and bank teller, along with members of the current Socialist government.
Le Neuf Trois is the rap name for this district, which has the honor of being, by reputation anyway, the most violent in France. We all knew—it is time to go. More than a decade ago, I spent weeks with Ghozlan at the height of the second intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation that began in September of and lasted more than four years.
