These pictures, what a shock they were. On the morning of October 31st, Stars of David suddenly appeared on the walls of houses, shops and banks in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. About sixty in total, all exactly the same size, obviously sprayed using the same stencil. The images went around the world and were shared millions of times on social media. They awakened the trauma from dark times.
In the first, reflexive interpretation, this night operation was another sign that anti-Semitism was growing dangerously as a result of the war in the Middle East, especially in France, the European country with the largest Jewish and largest Muslim community. It looked like the houses and businesses were marked.
The stations sent reporters to the 14th district who simply held out their microphones to passers-by. Some of them were crying. “Is this starting again now?” asked a woman whose parents had been killed in a concentration camp, then she lost her voice. France’s Interior Minister, the always very resolute Gérald Darmanin, was also interviewed. He said he would not rest until the people who committed this crime were found. If they are foreigners, he will expel them from the country.
The investigators had doubts
But the investigators were conspicuously reticent to give a clear interpretation right from the start – apparently rightly so, as it now turns out.
Several points struck them as questionable. Firstly, the spray-painted Stars of David were not yellow, but blue, similar in tone to one of Israel’s national colors. Could it be, they asked, that the tags had no anti-Semitic background at all, but were, on the contrary, intended as a declaration of support for Israel? And, secondly: The walls seemed to be chosen at random; they were not houses in which Jewish people are known to live or work.
Well, everything was probably different, more complex. On October 27th, the police arrested a young couple from Moldova because they had painted a Star of David on a wall in the 10th arrondissement. They told investigators that someone from Russia had given them the order and paid them a few hundred euros. They had saved the evidence of this on their cell phone. They live in France without papers and are now being deported.
The domestic secret service assumes that the action on October 31st was carried out by the same Russian direction Le Monde reported. The security camera footage from the 14th arrondissement once again shows a young couple, apparently also Moldovans: They are spraying. A third person photographs the sprayed house walls. They left the country immediately after this operation. At this point, the photos were already circulating on the relevant profiles on Facebook, X and Telegram. Like wildfire.
Is Moscow attempting a new maneuver to destabilize the West, this time fueling political animosity in an already tense climate? The French investigators think exactly that. The Stars of David were only displayed for a few hours, then the city cleaning service washed them off. But by then they were already burned into their heads.