The chief representative of the Jewish Agency "Sokhnut" in France, Menachem Gurari, has for two years now been dispatching hundreds of emissaries across the country, urging French Jews inclined to change their place of residence to move to Israel. And although ensuring the relocation of Jews from any country in the world to their historic homeland is already the main, core task of Sokhnut, in France Jews have real cause for concern.
The country's 5.5-million-strong Muslim diaspora has been radicalized to a significant degree owing to the activity of hundreds of self-styled imams calling for jihad against all infidels, and especially against Jews. The number of violent crimes motivated by anti-Semitism in France doubled in just the first half of 2004 compared with 2003, which was also not the calmest year in this regard (135 such crimes were recorded in total).
Most of the crimes were committed by Arabs, and Jewish schoolchildren suffer in particular, subjected to outright harassment by their Muslim classmates. So is Sharon right, then—should French Jews leave for Israel?
Gurari, at least, is convinced of this. "Thirty thousand French people of Jewish origin are literally sitting on packed suitcases," he recently assured the Israeli press. However, French Jews themselves, as it turned out, do not think so. "Israel cannot bandy about such statements over our heads," says Roger Zuckerman, chairman of the Central Council of Jews in France (CRIF). "We have no intention of becoming a 'tennis ball' for Israeli politics."
And the 600,000 Jews in France have no doubt that Ariel Sharon was pursuing precisely this goal with his statement: the Israeli prime minister urged them to leave for Israel as soon as possible, because "unbridled anti-Semitism is spreading and gaining strength" in the country.
In response, President Jacques Chirac immediately declared Sharon persona non grata in France—Parisian diplomats assumed that Sharon's attack was aimed not so much at Islamists living in France as at Chirac himself and his foreign minister, Michel Barnier. The prime minister has long felt France's anti-Israeli stance as a considerable hindrance—take, for instance, the latest vote in the UN General Assembly on the construction of the security fence on the border with Palestine. It was France that took on the role of leader of the anti-Israeli bloc, lending weight to the traditionally anti-Israel Arab delegations.
It must be admitted that since the sharp cooling of relations between France and Israel in the era of Charles de Gaulle, all French governments have indeed adhered mainly to anti-Israeli positions. But this is connected not so much with the state of Israel itself as with France's unremitting desire to establish itself as the absolute political leader of Europe by opposing the United States. Accordingly, if the Americans, say, had long supported Mongolia, the French would just as sharply oppose that country's policies.
So Sharon repaid Chirac in kind: France votes against Israel with the United States in mind, while Israel calls Jews to their historic homeland, inadvertently striking the French leadership.
"It is precisely with this kind of everyday politicking that French Jews do not wish to have anything to do," says Joëlle. The 31-year-old schoolteacher from Paris is among those who are indeed thinking of moving to the Promised Land. What she suffers from most is everyday hostility. "The French media undoubtedly take a pro-Arab stance on any issue related to Israel," she believes. And at the school where Joëlle teaches and where 90% of students are Muslims, she has to listen to utterly disgusting remarks directed at her almost every day—not as a teacher, but as a Jewess. "No, we are not afraid, but we are alarmed," Joëlle emphasizes.
Nevertheless, the anxiety of French Jews has not yet completely undermined their trust in the French state: if in 2002, 2,500 people left France for Israel, their number subsequently dropped to a couple of hundred a year. Most likely, this happened because the French government declared open war on anti-Semitism.
The sharp attacks on anti-Semites—and by no means only verbal ones—sometimes prove almost too swift: no sooner did a certain young woman declare herself a victim of an anti-Semitic attack than President Chirac immediately took the matter under his personal control. And although the girl turned out not only not to be Jewish but simply a liar seeking fame, the publications in the French media provoked a powerful wave of solidarity with the Jews of France across broad sections of society.
Perhaps that is why a joke circulates among young French Jews: "The only Western country in which Jews die for being Jews remains Israel."