The French: Not Anti-Israel – Just Anti-Everybody

According to the Jerusalem Post, a new poll shows mixed results regarding French attitudes towards Israel. While the French are broadly more supportive of the Palestinians than they are of Israel, most of them refuse to take sides. More strikingly, the broadly negative French attitude towards Israel comes with a deeper hostility towards Iran, Hamas and radical Islam in general. Maybe the French hate everyone. Or maybe things are a little more complex than a poll.

It is always tempting to generalize on these kinds of subjects. Once a country, say France, is regarded as hostile to Israel, such a judgment tends to taint every piece of news more or less dealing with the subject. A pro-Hamas demonstration in Paris, a French vote at the UN Security Council, a more or less anti-Semitic statement by a French diplomat, the murder of a young French Jew, the events in France during the Second World War and the general bias of AFP reports will be seen as part of a general trend of French hostility towards anything Jewish or Israeli. That was particularly the case when France was taking its daily bashing in the US conservative media in 2003 to 2004 (which I personally found rather funny, but not always completely fair), and more recently in a piece from Caroline Glick, which is very good but maybe a little pessimistic. ”Public opinion”, to the extent that such a thing exists, is a complex matter, and so are French — and to a certain extent European — attitudes towards Israel and the Jews.

To start with, no French person will be surprised to hear that his countrymen seem to dislike Israel and its foes at the same time, and not only because those are not the same persons. Putting aside the Palestinian question, the French have some accounts to settle on their own with radical Islam and Middle Eastern terrorism. The love affair with Khomeini lasted about as long as Khomeini had not taken power in Tehran. From then on, French and Iranian interests were generally at odds. Iranian-sponsored terrorists killed French paratroopers in Beirut at about the same time they were killing Marines in 1983. France was hit by Middle Eastern, mostly Iranian-sponsored terrorism in 1986. French hostages were kept for months and one of them, Michel Seurat, died in captivity. While French governments reacted in a relatively soft fashion, the French public were generally pushing for a stronger reaction — which did not happen — and haven’t yet forgotten what the Tehran regime and its allies, particularly Hezbollah, are capable of. Of course, Hezbollah will find some level of support in France among some diplomatic and intellectual circles, but I don’t see the French government or public trusting them for long.

During the 90’s, France was again confronted by Islamic terrorism, this time related to the civil war in Algeria, a country from which many of the Arab and Muslim populations living in France come. In 1995, a wave of terror attacks perpetrated by the GIA — the Algerian Islamist rebels — hit France, in retribution for the support Paris provided to the Algerian government. Eight people were killed and dozens of others wounded. The leader of the terror network, one Khaled Kelkal, an Algerian immigrant, was finally identified, chased by the police and apparently executed on spot. Absolutely no one objected.

What is more, some Algerian immigrants — though clearly not the majority — have taken sides against radical Islam. French anti-terror agencies reputedly have been able to recruit a number of North-Africans who apparently proved very useful. Some people like Mohammed Sifaoui have also positioned themselves in the clearest possible way, not only against radical Islam, but also against Palestinian terrorism. The search for moderate Muslims might yield some results in France.

At a political level, radical Islam may be getting support inside immigrant communities, but it hardly finds apologists outside them (though you can always find crackpots). The veil ban in state schools, for instance, was easily passed in 2004 with very weak opposition inside the political spectrum. France’s policy may be ambiguous on a number of issues, but the French seem generally willing to confront radical Islam.

The fact that the French hostility towards radical Islam does not translate into support for Israel is mainly due to the fact that the French have not yet connected the two issues, but they have been making some progress.

Until the 90’s, radical Islam was generally described as being primarily a threat to Arab “secular” regimes or movements, which we consequently had to support in order to keep their less desirable alternative out of power — as in Algeria. Nowadays, not only has radical Islam made progress, but so-called “secular” Arab political regimes and movements have been making so many concessions to them that they can hardly be described as “secular” at all.

The Palestinian movement has followed a similar trend, and that has not completely escaped the French public’s attention. What is striking when one looks at a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Paris is that the demonstrators generally belong to two categories: most of them are Arabs or Muslims, which is unsurprising, and a very small minority consists of relatively old people, essentially leftist survivors from the 70’s who still think of the Palestinian movement as the kind of revolutionary party once fashionable on the left bank of the Seine – like a Middle Eastern Vietcong. Direct support for Palestinian movements seems to be increasingly limited to the French Arab and Muslim community plus the usual fringe groups, which is not insignificant in itself, but hardly convincing for the rest of the public. During Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, pro-Hamas demonstrations were essentially Arab demonstrations, with chants in Arabic. I walked past one pro-Hamas demonstration in January. There was a man distributing leaflets, so I walked in his direction and told him with a smile that it made me very happy that his friends were being crushed by the IDF at that very moment. But the man did not understand French and answered me with a very warm “thank you”.

As for the Arab population, while more Muslims and more Arabs means more supporters for the Palestinians, more or less mechanically, immigration also means more defiance, and sometimes hostility, on the part of the host population. Immigration in France is another subject for another day, but the point here is that its effects, including the demographic long-term trends, are more complex than a simple, gradual shift towards a general Islamisation of France (and Europe). While the demographic trends are what they are, their political effects are usually not “gradual” at all. Leaving aside the possibility of a successful assimilation (which seems to be proving more difficult every year), different groups cannot impose their views more easily just because their numbers get bigger. Interactions are complex, and one aspect of this phenomenon is that non-Arab French are starting to get a better sense of the Israeli experience and the difficulty in dealing with an important Muslim minority. The 2005 riots, along with episodes of civil unrest in 2007, while not generally referred to as a “French Intifada”, do confirm the existence of a new and difficult challenge, not entirely different from the one faced by Israel, which in turn is better understood by the French public. As French policemen are starting to get shot at in some suburbs, as happened in Villiers-le-Bel in 2007, even the media seem to be refraining from bashing the IDF as they used to.

Anti-Semitism is of course a factor in the French attitudes towards Israel, but here again, things are more complicated and an overall-rise in anti-Semitism need not result in a pro-Arab diplomacy.

Anti-Semitism is rampant in some parts of the Muslim populations and no one seems to have the slightest idea of how to deal with it. It also exists amongst the non-Arab population, but is nearly impossible to measure due to hate speech legislation. No one will admit being racist or anti-Semitic, even when answering a poll. On the other hand, France is at least as philo-Semitic as it is anti-Semitic. Jews have never been alien in France. There were Jews in France before there were Franks, that is, before this country was even referred to as “France”. Judaism has simply always been a part of French culture. While the Dreyfus Affair prompted Hertzl to consider building a Jewish state, this episode finally resulted in the building of an “anti-anti-Semitic” political consensus which was never seriously threatened before or after WWII. Even after the Vichy episode, few French Jews moved to Palestine. When Algerian Jews — who had been granted French citizenship in 1870 – were expelled from their country in 1962, most of them chose to move to France instead of Israel.

As for attitudes towards Israel, the existence of a still important Jewish population in France means, first, that Israel will find at least some relatively vocal support. It also means that a lot depends on whether anti-Zionism is perceived as a brand of anti-Semitism. During the 80’s and the 90’s, no one would have described Palestinian nationalism as anti-Semitic (remember: the PLO was a leftist liberation movement). Then came the second Intifada, along with the Internet, anti-Semitic slogans and banners during demonstrations and the burning of a number of synagogues in France — something unheard of since WWII. From 2000 on, it only became clearer that this conflict was not only about territory. The debate over anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism would be too long to describe here, but it is taking place. While the government has been slow to react to the wave of anti-Semitic incidents (which made Alain Finkielkraut describe 2001 as a “year of crystal”), things have changed and the problem is at least recognized, if not clearly identified for what it is.

The point here is not that France has become Israel’s new best friend. Rather, it is that Israel is no longer the object of the artificial and hypocritical consensus that used to prevail. Before 2000, the public could simply accept that Israel was a non-typical Western country abusing its power and stealing territory, as it was generally described by the media. After 2000, depending on the way you look at it, Israel became either the perpetrators of such horrors as the so-called Jenin massacre, or the object of an irrational hostility on the part of people you wouldn’t have thought of as extremists. Put simply, many masks fell off and while the debate has become less pleasant, things have become clearer. Many people have stopped talking to each other over international issues such as Israel, 9/11 or the Iraq war. To put it briefly, the French foreign policy consensus is dead and that is not necessarily a bad thing.