December
3, 2003
Attacks
by Arabs on Jews in France Revive Old
Fears
By ELAINE
SCIOLINO
Gagny, France, Nov.
26, 2003 -- The boys hide their skullcaps under baseball
caps. The girls tuck their Star of David necklaces under
their sweaters. Their school in this middle-class suburb
east of Paris has been scorched by fire and fear, and
those are the off-campus rules.
Early one Saturday
in November, unidentified vandals set fire to the new
two-story wing of the Merkaz Hatorah School for Orthodox
Jews that was set to open as an elementary school in
January.
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A
policeman inspected the ruins of part of a
Jewish school that was badly damaged by arson in
Gagny, on the outskirts of Paris, last month.
French Jews are increasingly voicing concern
over their safety.
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The fire prompted President Jacques Chirac to call an
emergency cabinet meeting and declare that "an attack on
a Jew is an attack against France." It also intensified
an agonizing debate over the definition and extent of
anti-Semitism today in France, and indeed all of Europe,
and forced the French government to redouble its efforts
to combat it.
But even as they
praise their government for acting swiftly, some French
Jews, particularly working-class and middle-class Jews of
North African origin, are convinced that France is not
entirely safe for them. They say the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict and the American occupation of Iraq have morphed
into a battleground for French Arab Muslims to attack
Jews. "We Jews in France are paying the price for the
events on the ground in the Middle East that are seen
from morning to night here on satellite television," said
Marc Aflalo, a printer who proudly wears a skullcap and
whose three children go to Merkaz Hatorah, a private
school of 800 elementary and high school
students.
If a Jew goes into
an Arab Muslim neighborhood, he says, "You have to carry
an umbrella to protect yourself from the stones that
fly."
This is not a
revival of the old anti-Jewish hatred of the right that
infused Europe before the Vatican reconciled with the
Jews in the 1960's, but a playing out of the Arab-Israeli
conflict in the streets and salons of France.
France is home to
about 600,000 Jews -- the world's largest Jewish
population except for those of Israel and the United
States -- but also as many as 10 times that number of
Muslims of Arab origin, the largest such population in
Europe, many of them young, poor and
unemployed.
Complicating
matters, public opinion throughout Europe is broadly
critical of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. A
recent public opinion poll of European Union countries
found that most citizens believed that Israel was the
greatest threat to world peace, followed by Iran, North
Korea and the United States.
The poll itself
added to the debate about anti-Semitism in Europe. But it
is in France, where the burden of the wartime government
in Vichy's collaboration with the Nazis still casts a
shadow over the political landscape, that the debate is
the shrillest and the charges of anti-Semitism the
harshest.
Mindful of
demographic realities and the strains of anti-Semitism in
their country's past, French officials are struggling to
denounce and punish acts of anti-Semitism without fueling
racism toward France's ethnic Arab Muslim
population.
Telling Parliament
in November that the Middle East conflict "has entered
our schools," Education Minister Luc Ferry said France
was facing "a new form of anti-Semitism" that was "no
longer an anti-Semitism of the extreme right," but one of
"Islamic origin."
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Interior
Minister Nicolas Sarkozy shook hands with Jewish
children as he visited the site of an attack on
a Jewish school in Gagny last month.
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By contrast, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said in a
television debate recently: "All those who explain the
resurgence of anti-Semitism by the conflict in the Middle
East say something that is false. Anti-Semitism existed
before the existence of Israel."
For that reason he
has called for a plan of affirmative action to help
integrate Muslims into French society, a highly
controversial idea in a country that officially does not
identify its citizens according to race, religion or
ethnicity.
Still, Mr. Sarkozy
added that the horror of the Holocaust meant that
anti-Semitism had to be treated differently than other
forms of racism in Europe. That is a challenge when many
of the young Arab Muslim youths who wander the streets
have no understanding of the Holocaust.
In a book called
"The Lost Territories of the Republic" published last
year, a group of French teachers said teaching of the
Holocaust was impossible in some classes because students
of Arab origin were so hostile toward the
subject.
That
us-against-them attitude is echoed by students at the
school in Gagny, who have little regular exposure to
Muslims except for the all-Muslim cleaning staff from
countries like Mali and Senegal.
The school is a
sheltered place where boys and girls are taught
separately, male administrators and teachers do not shake
hands with women, and students learn that evolution is
only one theory of creation.
"Outside of school,
they call the boys in yarmulkes `dirty Jew' and they tell
us to go back to our country," said a 17-year-old student
of Moroccan origin who identified herself only as
Siona.
After the
firebombing of the school on Nov. 15, the government set
up a commission to investigate incidents and classified
it as a hate crime under tough legislation passed
unanimously by Parliament this year. Teachers have been
told to combat anti-Semitism, and the police have stepped
up surveillance of synagogues and Jewish
schools.
In Strasbourg a
court sentenced six men in their early 20's to 18 months
to three years in prison for setting off a homemade bomb
in a Jewish cemetery last year. Yet even after the
government initiative, swastikas were scrawled on tombs
in a Jewish cemetery and on two Jewish-owned shops in
Marseille.
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In
Gagny in early 2001, vandals covered a street
sign with a sticker saying "Avenue Adolph
Hitler."
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Anti-Semitism, of course, existed before Muslims started
immigrating to Europe and has continued at a low level
for years despite laws all over the continent. But such
incidents have not been limited to France.
Europe, broadly,
has been struck in recent months by anti-Jewish acts,
including arson at a synagogue near Manchester, England,
in November, the defacing of headstones and the gate of a
cemetery in Germany with Nazi slogans in October, a
botched explosion of a vehicle loaded with gas canisters
in front of a synagogue in Belgium in June and an attack
on a Hasidic rabbi in Vienna as he walked home from
prayers in May.
Indeed, an
unpublished draft report prepared earlier this year for
the European Union concluded that a wave of anti-Semitic
acts had occurred since the Palestinian uprising started
in 2000.
Underscoring the
extreme sensitivity of the issue, the European Union
group that commissioned the report said it had been
poorly done and refused to release it, prompting charges
among Jewish groups and the Berlin institute contracted
to prepare it that the European Union was suppressing
it.
Despite the
findings, Interior Ministry figures show that physical
and verbal attacks against Jews plummeted to 96 in the
first 10 months of this year, compared with 184 during
the comparable period last year. Justice Ministry
investigations into alleged anti-Semitic offenses for the
same periods fell from 129 to 29.
But the philosopher
Alain Finkielkraut, author of "In the Name of the Other:
Reflections on the Coming Anti-Semitism," for one, calls
a statistical analysis of the problem an absurd way to
measure it.
"There is a new,
dangerous phenomenon of the Nazification of Israel that
justifies hatred of Israel and therefore the Jews," he
said.
One result has been
a closing of ranks among some Jewish activists, which has
made it more difficult for them to tolerate criticism of
Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, polarizing the
debate still further.
"Intellectuals who
were not used to considering themselves Jewish are now
doing so," said Olivier Nora, the publisher of the
Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle publishing house.
"The tradition in the French Jewish community is to feel
French first and Jewish second, but there is more and
more pressure to define yourself and to take a position
on Israel's policies. You're either in or you're
out."
But Theo Klein, a
lawyer and former head of the umbrella group of Jewish
organizations known as the Representative Council of the
Jewish Institutions of France, or CRIF, urged the Jews of
France not to be carried away by emotion. He criticized
the government's decision to define the school
firebombing as an act of anti-Semitism in the absence of
conclusive proof.
"The Jews are fully
integrated into French society," he said. "They should
reaffirm their rights as French citizens and not set
themselves up as separate."
Indeed, when
Israel's ambassador to France, Nissim Zvili, said after
the school fire that French Jews were so "afraid of
anti-Semitic attacks that many of them are thinking of
emigrating," Roger Cukierman, the current head of CRIF,
called the claim "really exaggerated" and an Israeli
effort to attract immigrants.
Meanwhile,
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the head of the far-right National
Front, who has been accused by opponents of being
anti-Semitic as well as racist against the influx of
Muslim immigrants to France, said in a statement that the
government had overreacted to the school fire. He called
the new measures against anti-Semitism "laughable,"
adding: "There is no rise in anti-Semitism in France.
There are the inevitable effects of an untamed
immigration."
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