French Antisemitism
Congress Bi-Monthly - August 2002
Antisemitism is Antithetical to France:
Really?
There is a great distance between aspiration and achievement. The government has not paid a great deal of attention to the underclass Islamic population. It has not paid attention to violence in their neighborhoods, as it does not differentiate between ordinary crimes and hate crimes. It was slow to perceive the problem and responded only belatedly and with some outside pressure to attacks against Jews.
Anyone visiting any Jewish institution in France knows that there is a manifest presence of French police to guard these institutions, blockades to prevent car bombs or ramming of the institution, searches upon entry and the presence of uniformed officers outside. So the French formally recognize the possibility of attack against their Jews and have been responsive to security concerns, at a level far more intense than American counterparts.
But one most also pay attention to the aftermath of an attacks.
In the United States after an attack against and synagogue or even the painting of a swastika, there is a virtual ritual. The mayor of the local city arrives to condemn the attack. The police pledge to devote all the resources necessary to catch the perpetrators. Local ministers and priest arrive to condemn the attack. They -- and their congregants -- participate in the cleanup; newspaper editorials are written and the message is communicated clearly and directly that such acts are heinous; they have no place in our communities. So that even in the breech -- especially in the breech -- the values to which the community aspires, the norms of civility and mutual acceptance are reaffirmed. The attack is thus transformed into a defeat of hatred.
In the absence of recognition by government, other segments of society must step forward. In France they did not.
The Jewish community may have reticent to go public for fear that such publicity would provoke more attacks rather than intensify their condemnation.
The American model has proved successful internationally. Notice how quickly Pope John Paul II responded to the desecration of the Jewish cemetery in Rome by writing to the Chief Rabbi and publicly condemning the desecration. The Pope's statement speaks volumes. In Warsaw, when the Nozick synagogue was burned, the damage was shown to the community and a service was held featuring church and government leaders, a rabbi and a priest inside the synagogue. There, as elsewhere, the model works but not without a willingness to go public and a recognition of the deliberate attempt to divide by isolating and stigmatizing and hence the need to unite by joining together and reaffirming communal solidarity. Such was the behavior of President George W. Bush in visiting a mosque after September 11th and such was the behavior of priests, ministers and rabbis in protecting mosques from desecration and visiting those damaged in the aftermath of the attack.
If you need two images to cement this idea in your mind, consider this:
· Picture the cartoon published in Le Monde with a policeman standing in front of six damaged synagogues and asking his superior: “How many do we need in order to start mentioning antisemitism?”
Israel and the French:
The French have been anti-Israel – vehemently so, vigorously so!
I do not read the French papers daily so I relying less on what I know and more upon the myriad of email summaries of anti-Israel press clipping that I routinely receive. One cartoon from Le Monde frightened me to my core. It made me feel that the cartoonist and I are not denizens of a common universe, that one of the two of us is mad.
Naturally, the cartoon invoked an image of the Holocaust. On one side was a picture of Jenin and on the other an image of the Warsaw Ghetto and the caption read: “History Repeats Itself.”
Written at the height of the false allegations of a massacre at Jenin, let me grant the cartoonist the right to accept what we now know is false, that some 500 Palestinians were murdered at Jenin.
Still!
Between the 23 of July 1942 and the 12 of September 265,000 Jews were transported from Warsaw to Treblinka where they were gassed on arrival as part of the systematic murder of European Jewry. When the remaining population rose in resistance, German statistics reveal the dimension of the mismatch. In the end, the entire ghetto was destroyed, burned building-by-building, block-by-block.
I am certain that the cartoonist had access to the same photographs I saw on CNN showing the area of confrontation, the site of the alleged massacre
The comparisons are false. They are odious. One wonders how any journal, yet alone one as prestigious as Le Monde could publish such trash. Yet its publication reveals a desire to equate what is happening in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the German assault against the Jews.
One can speculate as to the reasons why. Perhaps it alleviates guilt for what was done by the Jews. Perhaps it is moral comeuppance, most especially after the collapse of the comfortable French myths regarding the Jews of the Charles De Gaulle era. Perhaps it is antisemitism. Above all, it is false and deliberately misleading. Perhaps, the French do not know how to deal with an empowered Jewish people, with the ability to defend itself and not just suffer and plead.
As to all comparisons to the Holocaust, let us be clear.
Israel has the power and the opportunity to annihilate the Palestinians. It also has the provocation. It has not annihilated the Palestinians.
In fact, it was resorting to hand-to-hand combat in order to avoid the collateral loss of civilian life resulting from aerial bombardment. Major German resources were dedicated to the annihilation of the Jews even at the cost of resources needed to fight the World War and to provide food and labor for the German population and the war effort. No one can seriously offer a comparison.
There is no significant evidence of an increase of antisemitism in the United States – the experience of the college campuses not withstanding. The support that George W. Bush offered Israel has robbed even those few who thought this an opportunity to attack Jews of the fuel to ignite the flame. It has starved even the critics of Israel of the oxygen they need to gain attention to their attacks.
In France, the vehemence of anti-Israel opposition from every segment of the society – the government and the press included – is interpreted as license. It is fuel to the flames of hatred.
Ironically, as Michel Gurfinkel reports some French Jews are now contemplating aliyah. Some perspective is required: unlike the attack on the Rue Copernic synagogue two decades ago, no Jews have been killed in the recent attacks – not yet. And Israel is tragically now the most dangerous place for Jews to live as Jews.
Michael Berenbaum is incoming director of the Sigi Ziering Institute on the Holocaust and Ethics at the University of Judaism. The author of 13 books on the Holocaust, he most recently edited with Michael Neufeld The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should The Allies Have Attempted It? He is the former Project Director and Director of the Research Institute of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and former President of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
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