On Dec. 9, four activists who support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement will be tried in a court in Toulouse, France, under a month-old precedent that rendered the movement illegal. That shift occurred on Oct. 20, when France’s highest appeals court upheld a ruling convicting 12 activists of provoking “discrimination, hatred or violence” on the basis of ethnicity, nationality or religion for their call to boycott Israeli products. In a statement after the decision, the activists denounced Israel’s seeming immunity to French law and likened the ruling to banning the boycott of apartheid South Africa.

The verdict is a testament to France’s convoluted free speech laws, which are hardening tensions between its Muslim and Jewish communities and compromising the country’s commitment to civil liberties, already under strain amid the restrictive state of emergency that has reigned since the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, which left 130 people dead. It shows what happens when an issue as toxic as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is arbitrated by France’s steadfastly secular judicial system. And curiously, the verdict condemns BDS, a movement that targets Israeli products — and poses no direct threat to French Jews — as hate speech, undoubtedly as part of the government’s attempts to insulate its Jewish community from rising anti-Semitic attacks. But that strategy is misplaced.

Free speech laws in France are all over the map. Holocaust denial has been criminalized since 1990; last year, a right-wing politician received a hefty fine and a nine-month jail sentence for a racist remark. At the same time, French leaders rallied around the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo after the January attack at its offices, framing the paper’s cartoons — which many Muslims consider blasphemous — as central to the republic’s liberal identity.

France’s often contradictory and inconsistent approach to free speech has become particularly apparent since the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket. A crackdown on hate speech followed those incidents, with authorities opening nearly 40 cases under a much-criticized 2014 counterterrorism law. As part of that surge, Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, a controversial comedian whose shows have been canceled on numerous occasions for his anti-Semitic gestures, was convicted of condoning terrorism. Attacks against Muslims and Islamic places of worship spiked, and they have continued to rise since Nov. 13.

France, which is home to the European Union’s largest Jewish and Muslim populations, has seen the Israeli-Palestinian conflict play out on its turf for some time. A week after the West Bank arson attack that left three members of a family dead in August, the opening of Tel Aviv sur Seine, an event celebrating Tel Aviv’s beaches, stoked protests from pro-Palestinian activists. As Gaza burned in 2014, members of the Jewish Defense League, which the FBI considers a right-wing terrorist group, clashed with protesters, leading to a ban on pro-Palestinian rallies that was ultimately defied. Days later, Palestinian sympathizers attacked a Jewish supermarket in the suburb of Sarcelles, known as Little Jerusalem for its large Jewish and Muslim populations. On Oct. 22 of this year, Jewish Defense League supporters assaulted a BuzzFeed reporter as they rallied in front of the offices of Agence France-Presse, whose reporting the group labeled anti-Israel.

Amid tension last year and a surge in attacks on Jews since 2012, Jewish leaders lamented that their community was being imperiled by the conflation of pro-Israel sentiment with the mere fact of being Jewish. French Jews proved that conflation false: After the January shooting at the kosher supermarket, they displayed their attachment to France — and not Israel — by breaking into the French national anthem in response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s calls to “come home to Israel.” However, French Jews have flocked to Israel in unprecedented numbers, with more than 4,500 émigrés last year, a 25-year high. (Rampant unemployment has contributed to this trend.) French authorities are working hard to curb their mass departure.