Why Were Rioters Angry About Rent Waving Palestinian Flags?
AI-generated editorial illustration; not a documentary photograph.
France’s October 17 protests were supposed to be about groceries, rent, and failing schools. They began with high school students blocking their own school gates, and within three weeks they were the worst riots France has seen in years. Hundreds of thousands of people were in the streets from Lille to Marseille. Around two thousand shops were looted, Limoges City Hall burned to the ground, more than five hundred police officers were injured, and the interior minister admitted his forces had “lost control.”
Through all of it, one flag kept appearing. A Palestinian flag was raised above the Marianne statue at Place de la République, the symbol of the French republic itself. Protesters carried it into Marseille City Hall. It led the march in Milan that ended with paving stones thrown at police and barricades burning in front of the Duomo. In Marseille, Bruno Benjamin of CRIF said the crowds carrying it were chanting “Intifada” the same weekend Jewish-owned shops were set on fire. In Paris, rioters broke into the Ohalei Yaakov synagogue and left prayer books and tefillin on the floor.
A riot about the cost of living has no need for a flag from the Middle East. This one carried it everywhere.
What the news left out
You would not have learned any of this from the evening news. The BBC described the protests as “mostly peaceful” and blamed “an opportunistic minority.” CBS said they had been “hijacked by masked rioters,” and ABC explained what they “were supposed to be about.” Every outlet found room for the rent, the deficit, and the underfunded schools. Reuters photographers caught the flag in frame after frame, and the anchors reading over those pictures never mentioned it.
That is not an oversight. A newsroom that reports the flag has to explain the flag, and the explanation is one these newsrooms have spent three years refusing to print. The movement they have been calling a protest is a mob, and it has been one all along.
AI-generated editorial illustrations based on reference imagery; not photographs of the riots.
The state Macron recognized
On September 22, 2025, Emmanuel Macron stood at the UN, at a summit France co-hosted with Saudi Arabia, and recognized a State of Palestine that does not exist, with no agreed borders, no functioning government, and half its territory run by Hamas, which was still holding 48 hostages in tunnels at the time. France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe, and no French politician wins without it. Macron called the recognition a step toward peace. Israel called it a reward for terror, and Israel was right.
Thirteen months later, the movement he had honored was burning his cities under the flag he had legitimized. That is not bad luck. It is what the movement is and what it has always been, and after this weekend the Free Palestine movement itself, not just its tactics, deserves to be looked at with a fresh lens.
The PLO’s 1968 covenant denied Israel’s right to exist and called for armed struggle to end it. The PLO struck those clauses in the 1990s under American pressure and never replaced them with anything. Hamas’s 1988 charter calls for the murder of Jews and has never been withdrawn. These documents have been public for decades, and for decades anyone who quoted them was called paranoid.
October 7 woke most of the world up, but some people refused to wake. They watched the massacre, the hostages, and the encampments cheering for “resistance,” and decided it was still a dispute about borders. Now the same flag and the same chant are torching Limoges and looting Milan, and there is no border anywhere in sight. For anyone still looking through the old lens, this is the moment to put it down.
The Free Palestine movement was never only about Israel. It is against Jews first, and after that against every society that lets Jews live in peace. France has just been given the demonstration, and everyone else is on the list.
What starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews. It was never just against Israel. It is against all of us.
