‘French Intifada? “Acting Out” the Arab-Israeli Conflict in France’by Professor Lucille Cairns, Durham University

This paper explores an alleged anti-Israeli bias in twenty-first-century France as portrayed in recent Franco-Jewish literature. The vectors of this alleged bias examined in the paper are the French media, the French political class, and the French intellectual class, including some of its Jewish members. The paper also considers the common assertion of a causal link between French hostility towards Israel and the increase of anti-Semitism in twenty-first century France. Finally, it scrutinizes the alleged reproduction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the “acting out” of that conflict within the French banlieues as a form of geopolitical psychodrama.

Lucille Cairns is Professor of French at Durham University. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters, both on French women’s writing and filmmaking and on male and female homosexuality in French literature and film, as well as of six sole-authored monographs, the most recent of which is Francophone Jewish Writers Imagining Israel (Liverpool University Press, 2015).