April in Paris might be a fine time for some, but for at least one French woman who happens to be Jewish it has turned out to be a horror show. Global anti-Israel sentiment is buffeting the French capital in increasingly violent ways. 

On Sunday French police arrested an as yet unidentified 32-year-old man suspected of  of having raped, kidnapped, and threatened to kill a Jewish woman in an apartment in a suburb of Paris. The man is said to have justified his actions in the name of “avenging Palestine.” 

According to  French press reports, the alleged culprit will be prosecuted for making death threats while additional investigations into the alleged rape are ongoing. The shocking incident has made nervous ripples in the French press, which is overflowing with stories of the pending Olympic Games at Paris. 

Antisemitic violence in France, home to the world’s third-largest Jewish community, has skyrocketed in the wake of October 7. Last year 1,676 incidents were reported, representing a tenfold increase over those reported in 2022. The violence is not just in the capital region of Paris. Attacks are being reported throughout the country. 

Some of the details of this latest incident are murky, but illicit drugs appear to be one part of the mix. On Tuesday the Nanterre public prosecutor’s office stated that “the use of narcotics and death threats materialized on account of religion.” The second part of that statement is as close as one can come to an official admission that the case at hand will be treated as a hate crime.

The prosecutor’s office added that “the acts of rape require additional investigations” to be carried out as part of a preliminary investigation. 

The suspect, who the woman told police she had met on a dating application in 2023, spent two days in police custody at Nanterre, also near Paris. Upon his release the prosecution requested he be placed under “judicial supervision,” and his trial in the relevant criminal chamber was scheduled for June 21.

All of the circumstances that led to the suspect holding the woman against her will in his apartment, where he allegedly assaulted and threatened her, were not immediately clear. The Jewish woman, though, reportedly met up with the suspect during the week prior to April 21.

Once at his home, he allegedly refused to let her leave. According to a French police source cited in the newspaper Le Parisien, he then stole the victim’s phone and sent text messages to her mother and her former boyfriend. Those messages reportedly included one that said, “Good luck, you will never find your daughter again … I will prostitute [her].” A message to her former boyfriend said explicitly that, presumably by holding her against her will, he would “avenge Palestine.”

It was on Sunday that the woman managed to get her phone back and call her mother for help. Credit the French police for identifying the exact apartment from which the SOS was sent, which led to the arrest of the perpetrator and the freeing of the victim from his racist grasp.

The incident comes amid a tense atmosphere throughout France, which has long wrestled with what some maintain is either a socially ingrained antisemitism or consistently weak response to it. Marine Le Pen of the National Rally party was quick to blame “far-left” inaction for allowing an environment of antisemitism to fester in the shadow of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ms. Le Pen’s party is galloping in the polls ahead of European parliamentary elections in June. 

Some of her opponents on the left side of the political spectrum may be beginning to see the light. President Macron’s fresh-faced prime minister, Gabriel Attal, said this month that he would lead the charge against what he called an “Islamist entryway” into French schools, many of which are plagued by violence.

In the meantime, on Thursday French police broke up an anti-Israel protest by dozens of university students at Paris. France, not for the first time, is, in effect, reeling from a crisis of antisemitism with few mechanisms in place to keep it in check.