On May 1, cries of “dirty genocidal Zionists” and violence from hooded far-left activists targeted not only Jérôme Guedj, who is becoming accustomed to such treatment, but also, for the first time, several elected officials present at the Socialist Party’s stand. Bruno Karsenti provides a timely clarification and analysis: the logic of contemporary anti-Zionism does not merely lead to antisemitism; it is irresistibly anti-socialist.
Those who enjoy wearing lilies of the valley on May 1st rarely suspect that the choice of this white flower, replacing the revolutionary red rose, is a legacy of the Vichy regime and its attempt to hijack Labor Day from the left, transforming it in 1941 into a major nationalist holiday. Rest assured, this oversight is of no consequence, since the attempt was never successful. Whether with lilies of the valley or wild roses in hand, it is the left, the embodiment of the workers’ camp, that traditionally occupies almost the entire stage on this day. The opposition of labor against capital is enough to unite the socialist, communist, and anarcho-syndicalist voices, and the right has never managed to break this monopoly. There was indeed a far-right offensive in the 1980s, which consisted of anticipating the feast of Joan of Arc by a few days in order to regain a foothold on May 1, not without recalling the Pétainist origins of the sanctification of work, alongside the homeland and the family. But the strategy backfired, as the normalization of the RN rendered the operation obsolete. If the party’s legal woes have forced it to return to the fray this year, it is by using the populist argument of “democracy subjugated by the law”—an argument that the self-proclaimed “rebels” have no intention of abandoning—rather than by reviving these old themes.
And yet, May 1, 2025 was undoubtedly innovative. It was the scene of a split within the left, which showed that, for one of its blocs, it was not only possible but desirable to trade the monopoly of the workers’ cause for the more profitable one of antisemitism.
There was no need for pressure from the far right to do this. On its own and without anyone’s help, the left is perfectly capable of promoting this other cardinal value of Pétainism on Labor Day. For LFI—with some complicity from communists and environmentalists—this is a golden opportunity. Expelling a Jew from the jubilant procession, directing against Jews the frustration and resentment accumulated against all those currently in power, using the representation of Israel as the quintessence of colonialism and oppression, compared to which the Russian, Iranian, Afghan, and Chinese dictatorships pale in comparison, is a good way, if not to rally broad support, then at least to indicate what the left has to gain, in its view, by joining forces.
This march toward victory could be called the “conquest of the lily of the valley”—without forgetting, this time, where the choice of flower comes from. But what May 1 also revealed is that this march has a cost, which is not limited to what is being done to Jews by directing general opprobrium toward them under the guise of their putative affiliation with Israel and Zionism.
What has been revealed is that the “conquest of the lilies” is not only anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist: it is anti-socialist, and proud of it. That was the real novelty of May 1.
This cost is borne by the left itself, and more precisely by its socialist wing. “Zionist” and “socialist” were suddenly united in the same invective, the same rejection, and the same violent expulsion. This was certainly true in the case of a Jewish member of parliament, but the sentence was extended to anyone who dared to claim to be a socialist and to contest that, regardless of the criticism levelled at Israel’s policies and the war that state is currently waging, anti-Zionism must be the dominant axis of the left of the future, its primary rallying point and the vehicle for its policy of conquering power in France. In short, what has been revealed is that the “conquest of the lilies” is not only anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist: it is anti-socialist, and proud of it. That was the real novelty of May 1.
This development deserves a moment’s reflection. What is at stake is nothing less than the establishment of the rallying cry of the entire left, and thus the marking of a hegemony within it. And it reaches the ultimate point of the dissolution of socialism as such in this marking. Thanks to the operator of anti-Zionism, we can thus recognize with certainty which current dominates, but also what is intended to be the basis for the real distinction between the left and everything that is not it.
Make no mistake: the cry had been heard long before October 7 and the war in Gaza. The recurring outbursts of the far-left French political party LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon since the mid-2010s had set the tone.[1] And, as we immediately pointed out in K., it was precisely when the left had reunited to make its mark in the 2022 legislative elections that anti-Zionism emerged as its spearhead, its emblematic and urgent political proposal. In an aberration that attracted too little attention at the time, the first demonstration of radicalism by the newly formed Nupes rushed to seize on this issue. A draft resolution was formulated in July 2022, aiming to make the boycott of Israel a common position of all components of the coalition and to condemn Israel for having “institutionalized apartheid against the Palestinian people.” A few months later, in April 2023, the resolution, slightly amended, was finally tabled: it won the votes of LFI, the Communists and the Greens, while the Socialist group, uncomfortable but unable to react, abstained. Only one left-wing MP voted against it: Jérôme Guedj (once again) was the lone dissenter. His justification was simple: he saw it as nothing more than visceral and irrational anti-Zionism, and not as anything resembling legitimate criticism of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, which are indeed unjust and reprehensible.
October 7 and the war in Gaza changed many things. An antisemitic massacre committed by an Islamist movement in power in Gaza on the one hand, and a defensive war transformed by the reactionary policy of the Israeli government into a murderous and expansionist war violating international humanitarian law on the other, – a war which, according to the intentions now being expressed by a leader galvanized by the warmongering and ultra-nationalist section of Israeli opinion, risks becoming a full-scale invasion – have had multiple consequences in international opinion, with variations depending on the context.
The current reactionary pro-Zionism, wherever it comes from and whatever its areas of influence, is no more consistent than the current anti-Zionism. Both are powerful ideological attractors of the moment.
It can be said, however, that, overall, the same polarization has taken hold in the Western world. On the one hand, it has consisted in blurring the distinction between anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel, making the very existence of the state the touchstone of opposition to its current government policy (which has the effect of simply denying what has been, in the months leading up to October 7, the largest anti-government democratic mobilization in the country’s history, a mobilization that never died down and continued at the heart of the war in the movement for the release of hostages and the cessation of fighting). On the other hand, polarization has come to invent a ” pro-Zionist” camp from scratch, which completely disregards the political meaning of Zionism, but uses the image of Israel as a receptacle and unifying center for nationalist and reactionary tendencies whose development is currently being fostered in many countries—including, of course, Israel itself—by the general crisis of social democracy.
The current reactionary pro-Zionism, wherever it comes from and whatever its areas of influence, is no more consistent than the current anti-Zionism. Both are powerful ideological attractors of the moment, that is all. They are diametrically opposed to an understanding of Zionism in its real meaning—a national liberation movement of the Jews that since the end of the 19th century has formed a base where multiple political orientations clash, from more or less anarchist collectivism to statist nationalism, and including liberalism and socialism—and from the criticism of Israeli policy that is more necessary than ever, so that the oppression of Palestinians in the territories may end, that colonization may finally be defeated, that a Palestinian state may finally be built on the basis of a Palestinian national liberation movement that has finally emerged from its Islamist, authoritarian and antisemitic, and that Israel extricates itself from the political crisis that has been tearing it apart since the beginning of the Netanyahu era. What we are witnessing is this political crisis turning into a crisis of the regime as its democratic institutions buckle under the onslaught of reaction, religious or otherwise. And this is what requires criticism of Israeli policy to operate at full throttle, which today means above all bringing Zionism back to its principles in order to continue to assert itself as a legitimate invention of modern politics.
The fundamental question is therefore how this position, which is neither anti-Zionist nor pro-Zionist, but which simply has the maturity to consider Zionism as a structuring fact of Jewish history, and the State of Israel as a political reality present on the stage of states where it figures among states governed by the rule of law—exposed as such to democratic criticism from within and without—can today be reconstructed precisely on the left.
For it is clear that, on this side of the political spectrum, a collapse has taken place over the last two decades, in France and elsewhere—but particularly in France, which is swept by a powerful populist current, ready to take any shortcut to ensure its hegemony, and therefore throwing itself headlong into the “conquest of the lilies.”
The intentions of a section of the left have been revealed for what they are: exactly the opposite of what historically and politically constitutes the unity of May 1.
This May 1st precipitated a realization, under the impact of a provocation that had never before reached this level of clarity. By firmly linking the names “Zionist” and “socialist,” by violently expelling a Jewish member of parliament from the procession on the grounds that he refused to reduce criticism of Israel to a call for Israel’s disappearance, and by denouncing at the same time, through his refusal, the resurgence of a specifically left-wing antisemitism, a position subjugated by criticism of fantasized dominant forces in defiance of analysis and explanation of the mechanisms of exploitation and domination in capitalist societies structured by the division of labor, the intentions of a section of the left have been revealed for what they are: exactly the opposite of what historically and politically constitutes the unity of May 1.
Perhaps it would have been better if, in the past, the wild rose had been chosen over the lily of the valley as the symbol of the left’s great annual celebration. The choice of flowers is not just a matter of visual or olfactory taste. This was not particularly damaging as long as the left was able to regularly purge itself of the “socialism of fools” that it carries in its flank—the antisemitism that is now openly acknowledged, and which we must now recognize as anti-socialist—the choice of lily of the valley becomes damaging when its least avowable ideological motive conquers the field of ideas and actions through which the entire left undertakes to express itself.
It could then be that May 1, 2025, represented a turning point that was, all things considered, beneficial. By clarifying without any possible ambiguity the struggle that must be waged on the left, it made tangible the nerve center through which the revival of socialism must pass, and with it the revival of a left united around its fundamental and irreducible motives for struggle. The aggiornamento of the left cannot indefinitely avoid criticism, not simply of antisemitism as a regrettable form of hatred similar to all other forms of racism, the secret of which is supposedly held by the right, but of its very own antisemitism, whose current vehicle is none other than anti-Zionism—a position that is merely the symmetrical counterpart of reactionary pro-Zionism, from which neither Jews nor Israel have anything to expect.
If we want to symbolize this turning point and this awareness, the return of the revolutionary red rose may not be a bad solution. But let’s be realistic. Changing customs is much more difficult than changing political orientations. More modestly, we will therefore focus on the second option for the time being.
