Charge of “Anti-Semitism” Used to Provoke Immigration of French Jews to Israel

By Samah Jabr


Young Jewish immigrants from France cheer as they arrive at Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion airport July 28, 10 days after after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon urged all French Jews to leave their country immediately to escape what he called “the wildest anti-Semitism” (AFP photo/Moshe Milner-Ho).

JUST 10 DAYS after he called on France’s 600,000 Jewish citizens to move to Israel “immediately” to escape what he called “the spread of the wildest anti-Semitism,” Prime Minister Ariel Sharon welcomed the first 200 French Jewish immigrants to arrive in Israel. The official controlled fury with which Paris greeted his call soon was smoothed over with conciliatory gestures on both sides.

According to Israeli press reports, the Jewish Agency had decided to send several hundred agents to France in order to persuade tens of thousands of French Jews to emigrate because of rising anti-Semitic attacks in recent years. In July, the Jewish Agency, the Immigration Ministry and Prime Minister Sharon’s office agreed to offer additional funds to French Jews who respond to the campaign, including such added benefits as increased assistance with housing, education, business enterprises, and Hebrew ulpan (language school).

A recent survey of French Jews conducted by The Israel Project found that 26 percent are considering emigration due to rising anti-Semitism in France.

Israel’s desire to stimulate emigration is partly motivated by the decrease in new Jewish arrivals now that the wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union has ended. Last year there were fewer than 25,000 such arrivals—down from 200,000 in 1990.

History has recorded that anti-Semites and Zionists are natural allies who have helped each other on several occasions. (See the review of Lenni Brenner’s 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration With the Nazis on p. 86 of the September 2004 Washington Report.) Anti-Semitism in France, real or imagined, and the invitation to French Jews to occupy Palestine is yet another instance of this phenomenon.

Following the advice of Hitler’s Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels—“Lie, and keep on lying, some of your lies shall no doubt take roots in the people’s minds”—Western media eagerly reports incidents of “anti-Semitic attacks.” In France, such attacks very often are blamed on Muslim-Arab youths, and linked to Middle East tensions.

Recently, for example, as 17-year-old Yeshiva student Yisrael Yiftah was heading toward a local grocery store in a northern Paris suburb, “a large man described as of North African origin sprang upon him with a knife. The man screamed, ‘God is great’ in Arabic and plunged the knife into Yiftah’s chest,” according to French press reports.


	Some of the 3,400 Palestinians waiting to return to their homes in Palestine after Israel sealed the Rafah border with Egypt on July 17—the day before Prime Minister Sharon’s invitation to French Jews. On Aug. 6, Israel opened the border from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. (AP photo/Emad Eskandar).

The media and government officials described the attack as anti Semitic—even though that night the same man carried out additional knife attacks against non-Jewish targets, including an Algerian man, and turned out to be psychologically disturbed.

In another incident, after alarming the French public and alerting the world to the dangers of Arab/North African-looking men and their propensity to “violent and irrational” acts, the alleged July attack on a “Jewish-looking” woman and her baby on a commuter train near Paris turned out to be sheer fabrication.

The above are examples of the “anti-Semitic crimes” reportedly on the increase in France. The French Ministry of Interior, moreover, which compiles statistics on reports of discrimination against Jews, does not categorize other acts of discrimination by the ethnicity or religion of its victims.

Yet Muslims also have been victims of racist attacks. The knife attack on Yiftah came hours after a fire was set in front of the Strasbourg home of Aziz el Alaouani, the Muslim representative of the eastern region of Alsace. Racist and Nazi graffiti was scrawled on the walls of his home—but that did not merit comparable media attention. In March, an arson fire damaged a mosque and destroyed a Muslim prayer hall in Annecy, in southeast France. That, too, was barely mentioned by the media.

Whenever there is news of an “anti-Semitic” incident, French politicians vow to tackle the problem and to impose exemplary punishment on its perpetrators. They apologize to Jewish groups in France and throughout the world, and to the state of Israel as well, and send their right, left and Green activists to demonstrate against the incident. There was no French apology to the Arab/North African community, however, following the media’s repeated accusations over the commuter “attack.”

Beyond the short-term goal of ripening the atmosphere for Jewish immigration to and settlement in occupied Palestine, anti-Semitism serves other purposes as well. It is used to silence, if not criminalize, criticism of Israeli policies, leaving moderates at the mercy of extremists, and defenders of freedom of expression censoring themselves. It aids in the effort to turn the colonial nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into an ethno-religious one, as if it is a continuation of Europe’s history of hatred of the Jews. It gives Jews a superior status over other ethno-religious minorities in the West—and, as a secondary benefit, inflames feelings against a perceived enemy and increases a sense of nationalism among Jews.

The insistence of Israel and its supporters on labeling any criticism of its government as “anti-Semitic” constructs a psychological wall around international public opinion, restricting in this case not movement, but freedom of expression. This mental wall serves as Zionism’s first line of defense, stifling any serious debate over Israel’s practices and policies and denying Palestinians’ existence and rights.

We are not living in the 1930s—or are we? The ghettoes Israel is creating, the forced undressing of Palestinians at checkpoints, and the labeling only of Arab laborers to distinguish them from foreign laborers—marking a red “X” on the hardhats of Palestinian workers building the Israeli parliament, for example, who labor within range of an Israeli army sniper—no longer is just a Palestinian story. While these experiences are ours, the story is mankind’s.

Such practices—so ironically and tragically reminiscent of the acts which characterized European oppression of the Jews—unfold unnoticed and unopposed by the same nations which allowed anti-Semitism and human oppression to occur in the not-so-distant past. With their blind support of Israel—in penance, perhaps, for previous Jewish oppression—those nations are condoning and making possible what is taking place in my homeland and the horrors Palestinians are facing today.

Given its obsession with “anti-Semitism” while it turns a blind eye to Israel’s murderous racism, one can only conclude that the “First” World is more concerned with Jewish semantics than with the deadly reality Palestinians face daily in their occupied land.

Samah Jabr, a native of Jerusalem, is a physician currently studying in France.