"Old but very relevant article!" (Samah Jabr)
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 Hebrewulpan (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.
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
October, 2004
Samah Jabr, a native of Jerusalem, is a physician currently studying
in France.
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