{"id":45054,"date":"2014-07-28T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2014-07-28T11:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=45054"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:33:36","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:33:36","slug":"why-israel-needs-anti-semitism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/07\/why-israel-needs-anti-semitism\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Israel Needs Anti-Semitism"},"content":{"rendered":"

.. And French Jews<\/em><\/p>\n

Last July 12 [2014], Jewish Defense League (JDL) militants provoked some participants in a Paris protest demonstration against the Israeli attack on Gaza into violent clashes in front of a synagogue in the rue de la Roquette.\u00a0\u00a0The JDL militants were protected by police, whereas several pro-Palestinian demonstrators were arrested.\u00a0\u00a0The incident was loudly denounced by influential pro-Israel Jewish leaders as an act of French anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n

It was no accident that this incident was falsely attributed to anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n

It was no accident that Jeffrey Goldberg characterized the violence as \u201cJews Trapped by Rioters in Paris Synagogue\u201d and questioned whether or not the incident was a cause for\u00a0migration.<\/p>\n

It was no accident that Avi Mayer of the Jewish Agency of Israel described the incident as an \u201canti-Semitic riot, which masqueraded as an anti-Israel rally.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was no accident that Yair Rosenberg, a writer for Tablet Magazine and employee of the Israeli State Archives, posted a video describing the incident as \u201cEuropean anti-Semitic attacks spiking during Israel\u2019s operation\u201d.<\/p>\n

It was no accident because this incident was deliberately organized in order to brand a protest against attacks on Gaza as evidence of rampant \u201canti-Semitism\u201d in France.<\/p>\n

Above all, it was no accident because it fits perfectly into an official campaign of the Israeli government to lure French Jews to leave France for Israel.<\/p>\n

Recruiting for Aliyah<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last December, the Israeli press announced a new three-year program designed to entice 42,000 French Jews to settle in Israel by 2017.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In 2013, 3,120 Jews left France for Israel, compared to 1,916 in 2012.\u00a0\u00a0The campaign by the Israeli Ministry of Aliyah and Integration and the Jewish Agency aims to double the number of immigrants each year: targets are six thousand new Franco-Israelis in 2014, 12 thousand in 2015 and 24 thousand in 2016.\u00a0\u00a0France\u2019s Jewish population of about half a million is the largest in Europe and the third largest in the world, after Israel itself and the United States.\u00a0\u00a0It is a tempting target for Israeli recruitment.<\/p>\n

The carrot for this immigration will be government measures to recognize a range of French professional diplomas as well as funding to provide appropriate housing, education and employment.<\/p>\n

And the stick?\u00a0\u00a0Israel can count on fear of anti-Semitism, real or imagined.\u00a0\u00a0Precisely by its support to Israel coupled with constant denunciations of anti-Semitism, the French government gives the impression of strong favoritism toward Jews which Arab and African immigrants interpret as discrimination against themselves.\u00a0\u00a0In some mixed neighborhoods, a fringe of marginalized youth increasingly assert themselves by displays of hostility toward Jews (or women, or \u201cnative\u201d French). Such incidents create fear that is stoked regularly by alarmist web sites and deliberate exaggerations. Lists of \u201canti-Semitic incidents\u201d are padded with random personal insults which would pass unnoticed if addressed to someone for being female, badly dressed or too fat.\u00a0\u00a0These scratches from prickly reality are by no means a re-emergence of \u201cFrench anti-Semitism\u201d.\u00a0They are much more the result of a tendency to experience ethnic inequalities as a reflection of Israel\u2019s domination of the people of Palestine.<\/p>\n

Israel needs new immigrants from countries with a Jewish population, and France is high on the list.\u00a0\u00a0And what is needed most to recruit new immigrants?\u00a0\u00a0Anti-Semitism.\u00a0\u00a0The conclusion is clear: Israel has a vital need for anti-Semitism.\u00a0\u00a0The more there is, or seems to be, the better for Israel as the only \u201csafe haven\u201d for threatened Jews.<\/p>\n

This fear is kept alive by Israel\u2019s many volunteer propagandists in France, the\u00a0sayanim,<\/em>\u00a0a category described in a novel by Jacob Cohen,\u00a0Le Printemps des Sayanim<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0Cohen\u2019s novel features an extremely prominent and influential\u00a0sayan<\/em>\u00a0who is obviously meant to represent Bernard-Henri Levy, thinly veiled with a pseudonym.\u00a0\u00a0For decades, BHL has promoted the theme that France is singularly and essentially \u201cfascist\u201d in nature, the very heartland of fascism\u00a0\u00a0\u2013 which is historical nonsense considering that in the heyday of fascism, the 1930s, France alone in Europe had a Jewish prime minister, Leon Blum, while Mussolini ruled Italy, Hitler ruled Germany and fascists flourished in much of the rest of the Continent.<\/p>\n

Since World War II, the French alliance with Israel went so far as to include secret cooperation on building nuclear weapons in the 1950s. But the ever-present theme of \u201cFrench anti-Semitism\u201d serves to keep French leaders endlessly apologetic and submissive to Israeli demands<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cFrench Jews have every reason to be wary\u2026\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

An article by Sam Knight in Mondoweiss correctly reported that the July 12 clashes in front of\u00a0\u00a0the rue de la Roquette synagogue were deliberately provoked by the Jewish Defense League,\u00a0citing as eye witness Mich\u00e8le Sibony, of the\u00a0Union Juive Francaise pour la Paix (the French Jewish Union for Peace).\u00a0\u00a0However, even as he set the record straight regarding the fake\u00a0\u201canti-Semitic attack on a synagogue\u201d, the author paid lip-service to the prevailing myth of \u201canti-Semitic France\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom multiple expulsions in the Medieval era to\u00a0L\u2019Affaire Dreyfuss<\/em>\u00a0(sic) and Vichy collaborationism, French Jews have every reason to be wary of anti-Semitism\u201d, the Mondoweiss article conceded.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, this sort of reference to \u201cFrench anti-Semitism\u201d has become so standard, especially in the United States, that it may be considered required background even to an article casting doubt on the phenomenon.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s look at the three assumptions supposedly confirming the danger of French anti-Semitism mentioned above.<\/p>\n

1. As for the Medieval era, there were all sorts of reasons for various people to be \u201cwary\u201d in those days; serfs had reason to be wary of the Lord of the Manor, for example.\u00a0\u00a0The Medieval era is over, and was abolished by the French revolution which was first to give equal rights to Jews. A few now complain at having lost their Medieval privileges, but you can\u2019t keep your cake and eat it.<\/p>\n

2. The main historical significance of the Dreyfus affair is that defense of a Jew in the end prevailed over the honor of the Army, which wanted to cover up its judicial mistake in condemning the wrong man.\u00a0\u00a0The incident served to align the progressive intelligentsia with defense of the Jews, even at the expense of the Army, which marked a basic ideological change.\u00a0\u00a0The long-term losers of the affair were the aristocracy (linked to the Army officer corps) and the Catholic Church, as secularism triumphed in France in the 20th<\/sup>\u00a0century and the status of Jews was strengthened.\u00a0\u00a0In other countries, many comparable miscarriages of justice \u2013 especially military justice \u2013 have surely gone unnoticed.<\/p>\n

3. As for Vichy collaboration, how well is this really understood? Jews were persecuted and deported all over Nazi-occupied Europe, but most of France\u2019s Jewish population was spared.\u00a0\u00a0Last year, Alain Michel, born in France but now a rabbi in Israel and member of Yad Vashem, published a book,\u00a0Vichy et les Juifs,<\/em>\u00a0which argues that the Vichy regime of Marshal P\u00e9tain and Pierre Laval set out to protect French Jews from Nazi persecution and was largely successful.\u00a0\u00a0When Nazi Germany defeated France in 1940, there were 195,000 Jews in France with French citizenship as well as 135,000 Jewish refugees, many having fled anti-Semitism in Poland and Germany. Vichy\u2019s concern was to protect the French Jews, and succeeded in saving 95% from persecution and deportation.\u00a0\u00a0As for stateless Jewish refugees in France, Vichy\u2019s attempts to persuade governments in the Americas to take them in failed, and over a third were deported to Nazi camps, while the rest escaped deportation thanks in part to evasion and stalling by the Vichy regime, as well as protection by ordinary French citizens.\u00a0\u00a0Alain Michel\u2019s evaluation echoes the conclusions of earlier French historians, such as Leon Poliakov, who concluded that Vichy\u2019s collaboration saved many Jewish lives which would have been lost had \u201cJewish policy\u201d been left to the Nazi Occupation authority alone.<\/p>\n

Interpretation of history has its oscillations between the glass half empty and the glass half full. In 1972, the influential film \u201cle Chagrin et la Piti\u00e9\u201d, and a year later, the publication of the French translation of American scholar Robert Paxton\u2019s\u00a0Vichy France<\/em>\u00a0contributed to a radical shift away from idealization of the French Resistance which had flourished under the post-war influence of De Gaulle and the French Communist Party. The loss of influence by both de Gaulle and the Communists among the post-war generation that emerged in May \u201968 favored identification of France as a whole with the regime of Marshal P\u00e9tain in Vichy.\u00a0\u00a0Under the influence of so-called \u201cnew philosopher\u201d ideologues such as Bernard-Henri L\u00e9vy, who stressed this identification as essential, it was easy to forget that P\u00e9tain came to power only as a result of France\u2019s humiliating military defeat. His regime never was and never could have been chosen by the French people in free elections. This shift of focus from pride in the Resistance to shame for collaboration has contributed to a prevailing mood of anti-nationalism, even of penitence, centered on commemoration of the Holocaust (or Shoah), which may seem designed to reassure French Jews, but can make them uneasy as well.\u00a0\u00a0It may be too much to hope that the pendulum will stop swinging from one extreme to another and seek balance and accuracy in evaluating the complexities of the past.<\/p>\n

\u201cImporting the Israeli-Palestine conflict into France\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

France today rivals the U.S. Congress as Israel\u2019s most important overseas occupied territory.\u00a0\u00a0Considering the incredible rise of BHL to the role of a sort \u201cspiritual guide\u201d to French presidents, advising them to go to war in Libya and Syria and claiming that he does so \u201cas a Jew\u201d, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the most active Jewish community leaders and their organizations, far from \u201chaving reason to be wary\u201d, know full well that they have\u00a0no reason<\/em>\u00a0to be wary<\/em>of anti-Semitism in France.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>French politicians, media and even school teachers are overwhelmingly devoted to commemorating the Shoah and defending both Jews and Israel (with varying degrees of subtlety). The Jewish Defense League has close relations with French police, even training in their headquarters, on the pretext of \u201cprotecting their community\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0No other ethnic group enjoys such favors.<\/p>\n

That is why certain Jewish organizations and individuals dare engage in the most outrageous provocations, acting as both master and victim, sure that they get away with it. If they really had reason to be \u201cwary\u201d, they might\u00a0act\u00a0<\/em>wary. They might worry (and with reason!) that by constantly claiming to be persecuted in a country where they enjoy every privilege, they could easily be arousing the very hostility to Jews they claim to fear.\u00a0Instead, the leading Jewish organizations flaunt their unrivaled influence, in blatant contrast to a large Muslim community which is on the constant defensive.\u00a0\u00a0They are sure that in a contest between French Jews and Muslims, the Muslims will lose.<\/p>\n

Exploiting this favorable position amounts to more than just plain chutzpah.\u00a0\u00a0It is primarily an \u201cIsrael first\u201d policy.<\/p>\n

On the French national holiday, July 14, President Fran\u00e7ois Hollande denounced the rue de la Roquette incident as an attempt to \u201cimport the Israeli-Palestinian conflict\u201d into France as a pretext for \u201canti-Semitism\u201d. Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared that \u201cthe Israeli-Palestine conflict cannot be imported into France.\u201d<\/p>\n

The French Jewish Consistory denounced \u201csystematic exploitation of the Middle East conflict by organized groups and supporters of Jihadist terrorist movements\u201d.<\/p>\n

Roger Cukierman, president of the extremely influential Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), took his complaints in person to President Hollande.\u201cWe are in an unheard-of anti-Semitic climate\u201d, he declared, demanding that such demonstrations be banned.<\/p>\n

Obediently, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve called on local authorities to increase their \u201cvigilance\u201d and to ban demonstrations that risk to \u201ctrouble public order\u201d.<\/p>\n

Claiming that France is unable to \u201cguarantee security\u201d, Cazeneuve went on to ban a pro-Gaza demonstration scheduled for Saturday, July 19. The French government threatened demonstrators and even individuals calling for demonstration with long jail sentences and hefty fines.<\/p>\n

Thus France became the first European country to outlaw a pro-Palestinian demonstration.\u00a0Meanwhile, it goes without saying that all manner of demonstrations of solidarity with Israel are totally kosher.<\/p>\n

The main effect of the ban was to place the French government clearly on the Israeli side of the Middle East conflict. On July 19, several thousand people defied the ban to gather in the Barb\u00e8s section of Paris, focusing their protest on President Hollande\u2019s support for the latest Israeli assault on Gaza. As was bound to happen once the demonstration was declared illegal, it attracted a number of apolitical youth who never miss a chance to fight with police, causing violent incidents in the neighborhood, notably setting fire to vegetable stands in a mainly Afro-Arab market.<\/p>\n

Pascal Boniface, director of IRIS (the Institute of International and Strategic Relations), and author of\u00a0La France malade du conflit isra\u00e9lo-palestinien (France is sick from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict)\u00a0<\/em>is not the only one to point out that the Middle East conflict has long since been \u201cimported\u201d into France, primarily by Jewish organizations which insist on identifying Jewish interests with Israel and stigmatizing criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism.\u00a0\u00a0In response to the latest demands \u201cnot to import\u201d the conflict, Boniface asked ironically whether that meant banning the annual CRIF banquets \u2013 events to which French politicians flock to proclaim their devotion to the Jewish State.<\/p>\n

Clearly, the most active Jewish organizations feel that they can only gain by doing what politicians keep saying \u201cmustn\u2019t happen\u201d. Importing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Europe is exactly what they have been doing for years.\u00a0\u00a0In Europe, portraying the conflict as a war between \u201csurvivors of the Holocaust\u201d and Islamic terrorists seems a sure way to mobilize public opinion in favor of Israel.\u00a0\u00a0Identifying the Palestinians with \u201cIslamic terrorism\u201d has been an obvious Israeli policy goal since September 11, 2001.<\/p>\n

Pro-Palestinian demonstrations are called by an array of small organizations of diverse ethnic composition, including the Trotskyist New Anti-Capitalist Party, which like other such groups includes people of Jewish origin.\u00a0\u00a0In Belgium more than in France, a certain \u201creturn to religion\u201d among young people of immigrant origin makes it easier to identify the Palestinian cause with Islam, even though this identification is false.\u00a0\u00a0Nevertheless, using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to denounce Muslims is indeed tending to foster a religious civil conflict in France which Jews seem bound to win thanks to their vastly superior social status. The pro-Israel lobby can hope that such conflict will oblige European governments to strengthen their support for Israel, treating defenders of the Palestinian cause as \u201cterrorists\u201d. And indeed, in recent years, European governmental attitudes toward Israel have grown more favorable despite the fact that public sympathy for the plight of Palestinians has probably also increased, but lacks effective political expression.<\/p>\n

The flagrantly unequal treatment is virtually certain to foster the growth of anti-Jewish sentiment among people of Arab and Muslim origin. But this \u201cdisadvantage\u201d can be seen as an advantage if it serves to frighten impressionable Jews into moving to Israel.\u00a0\u00a0Importing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can seem to be a win-win strategy for Israel, by strengthening French political support while increasing the Israeli population with a desirable addition of French Jews.<\/p>\n

It would be ironic indeed if fear of Muslim neighbors in Paris suburbs should lead French Jews to move to a country totally surrounded by millions of hostile Muslim neighbors.<\/p>\n

Such cynical calculations may backfire in various ways.\u00a0\u00a0Meanwhile, the majority of French politicians are themselves responsible for importing the Middle East conflict in total contradiction to their own declarations and to the genuine interests of France as a secular country of equality among individuals regardless of religious or ethnic origins.<\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

Diana Johnstone<\/em>\u00a0is the author of\u00a0<\/em>Fools\u2019 Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions<\/a>. She\u00a0can be reached at\u00a0 diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 counterpunch.org<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Join the BDS-BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, SANCTIONS <\/em>campaign<\/em><\/strong><\/span> to protest the Israeli barbaric siege of Gaza, illegal occupation of the Palestine nation\u2019s territory, the apartheid wall, its inhuman and degrading treatment of the Palestinian people, and the more than 7,000 Palestinian men, women, elderly and children arbitrarily locked up in Israeli prisons.<\/p>\n

DON’T BUY<\/strong> PRODUCTS WHOSE<\/strong> BARCODE<\/strong> STARTS WITH<\/strong> 729<\/strong>, which indicates that it is produced in Israel.\u00a0\u00a0 DO YOUR PART! MAKE A DIFFERENCE!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

7 2 9: BOYCOTT FOR JUSTICE!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last July 12 [2014], Jewish Defense League (JDL) militants provoked some participants in a Paris protest demonstration against the Israeli attack on Gaza into violent clashes in front of a synagogue in the rue de la Roquette. The JDL militants were protected by police, whereas several pro-Palestinian demonstrators were arrested. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45054\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}