Since late September, French high school students have marched and blockaded schools over missing teachers, long days and run-down buildings. On October 8, Israel Hayom ran a column by a former Israeli ambassador calling it an “Intifada in France”. One word carries the whole headline. Intifada is the name of the Palestinian uprisings, and it moves a fight over French classrooms into Israel’s war. What the word covers is one reported scene: masked youths waving a Palestinian flag beside a burning bin at a Carpentras high school on October 1, which Israel National News sources only to unnamed reports. The column’s subhead says the riots, Palestinian solidarity and the immigration debate “are all connected”. Neither headline nor subhead names a teacher, a timetable or a building. The column’s first section says “Some 400 schools have been destroyed or damaged”. On September 29 the education ministry’s 400 were schools affected by protests or disruptions, out of some 3,700, with about 40 blockaded. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said “Burning down a high school does not improve the state of high school buildings”. He also said “the anger of young people does not come from nowhere”. The tell: a word borrowed from another country’s war, with no count beside it. The frame travels. RealClearPolitics ran “an Intifada In the Heart of Europe” on October 7, a day earlier. Charisma News headlined an “Islamic Surge”, The Blaze “thugs”. Jacobin makes the mirror move from the left: “Beaten, Choked, and Gassed”, with no one doing it. Le Monde’s line names who marched and how many. Filed as an intifada, a dispute over France’s school budget becomes a front in Israel’s war, and the reader is asked to pick a side in that war instead of this one.
