Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

More Than Half Of France Says Zionism Is A Jewish Conspiracy

(JTA) — Zionism is a Jewish conspiracy meant to manipulate Western societies to benefit Jews.

That’s the belief of a majority of 1,007 French respondents to a poll about the Jewish nationalist movement.

Some 53 percent of the respondents to the survey conducted this year by the Ifop polling company agreed with the statement that “Zionism is an international organization that seeks to influence the world and societies to the Jews’ benefit,” the Union of Jewish Students in France, or UEJF, said in a report this week about the poll that it commissioned Ifop to perform.

Of those, 11 percent said they “strongly agree.” Half of the respondents said Zionism was a “racist ideology.”

At the same time, 54 percent of respondents agreed that anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism and 59 percent agreed with the statement that Zionism is a “movement of liberation and emancipation for the Jewish people.”

Twenty-six percent of respondents said they thought a boycott Israel was justified. Israel’s existence “feeds anti-Semitism,” 38 percent of the respondents said.

The poll also revealed widespread hostility toward and ignorance about Israel.

Almost a quarter of the respondents said that Israel declared its independence after 1980. A third indicated correctly that the nation was established in 1948.

Israel was described as a “threat to regional stability” by 57 percent of respondents and as a “theocracy” by 51 percent. The assertions that Israel is a democracy and is a “normal country like all other” received approval ratings of 46 and 48 percent, respectively.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.