In 2006, following a wave of violent demonstrations in Europe over the Muhammad caricature controversy, I wrote a short article titled “An Honesty Test: Are You Enjoying the Danish Caricature Affair?” Here’s part of its first paragraph:
“A lot of people are watching European media outlets, European diplomats and European public opinion polls with some amusement. Those naive, peace-loving, goodhearted, wishy-washy darlings. Isn’t it nice to see their astonishment as fundamentalist outlaws burn their embassies and scare them away from the places they came to save? Well, let’s admit the obvious: As long as nobody gets killed, it is a joy for many.”
Obviously, this is no longer a joy. It is a tragedy, but not a surprise. All comparisons to 9/11 are false: In 2001, there was a sense of astonishment, of disbelief. In 2015, there is a sense of we-all-knew-it-was-coming. France has a huge problem on its hands, and it is not at all clear that its government has a clue what to do with it. Rallies, like the one the French had on Jan. 11, are merely a declaration of a new beginning; the actual work begins when the rally ends.
Do Jews have a future in France? This is a frequently asked question nowadays. James Kirchick posed the question in the Daily Beast last weekend and concluded his article with a reference to 1933 Berlin. Although his article makes many good points, this comparison (and he was not the only one making it) is problematic: In Germany, anti-Semitism was government policy. In France, the government fights against it. Maybe not in the right way, maybe not with the proper level of efficiency. But it is still important not to confuse the two: France is not an anti-Semitic country, it is a country in which there are too many anti-Semitic people.
If you want proof, read Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview in The Atlantic with French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, some of which is quite unpleasant to Israeli ears:
“ ‘There is a new anti-Semitism in France,’ he told me. ‘We have the old anti-Semitism, and I’m obviously not downplaying it; that comes from the extreme right, but this new anti-Semitism comes from the difficult neighborhoods, from immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, who have turned anger about Gaza into something very dangerous. Israel and Palestine are just a pretext. There is something far more profound taking place now.’ ”
To Israeli ears, here’s what this means: The more you protect yourself from the radicals of Gaza, the less secure French Jews are likely to become. Because Israel does not tend to abandon its own security for the sake of Jews living elsewhere, its remedy for the problem becomes obvious: Come live with us, in the “home of all Jews.”
In the interview, the French prime minister seems to prefer to make this about anger over Gaza rather than about radical Islamists. But, in fact, Valls doesn’t shy away from telling the painful truth. At a Jan. 10 rally, he said that France is in “a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity.”
It is much too early to tell how France is going to conduct this war. The Jews of France, considering their next move, are afraid, as recent studies have shown. Conversing with some of their leaders leads to the conclusion that their faith in their government is not very high. They know that the government of France does not want the Jews of France to get hurt — but they aren’t sure that there is sufficient determination within the government to prevent that from recurring. The higher the price all of France has to pay for protecting its Jews, the higher the risk that, at some point, other segments of the French public will feel that the Jews are more a burden than an asset.
Here is a problem the next government of Israel is going to have to struggle with: Its most urgent project is to lower the cost of housing. Yet, if many more Jews from France make aliyah, this project will become much more complicated. Immigrants need housing, and they need it now. Israel would have to provide it — adding more strain to an already strained housing market. The Jews of France, surely, are not going to come to Israel to live in mobile homes — like the ones built for Russian immigrants in the early 1990s. They are not that desperate. Not yet.
Who from Israel went to Paris? Benjamin Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman, Naftali Bennett and Eli Yishai. The leaders of Israel’s right clearly believe that the wave of terror in France strengthens their cause (and they also believe that the immigrants from France are more likely to vote for them).
Finally, on Jan. 12, the Israeli press was filled with reports about Netanyahu’s insistence on going to the rally in Paris amid great French reluctance to host him. In these reports, most of them (if not all) by newspapers unfriendly to Netanyahu, the prime minister is portrayed as small and petty — the unpopular kid-bully making his way to the front row. Surely, it is not very elegant to force oneself upon a host. But assuming that these reports are accurate, and assuming that the leaks came from French sources, the ones being petty are not Netanyahu and his entourage — it is the reluctant host that first did not want Netanyahu (why, really?), and then rushed to smear his visit by making that known.
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