Articles from Christian Science Monitor and Financial Times 
Pro-Israeli demonstration, Paris, July 2014. Photo by Christian Hartmann/Reuters French Jews stand firm as anti-Israel voices grow louder in France Support for Israel is strong among French Jews despite – or perhaps because of – deep public anger against Israel for its military offensive in Gaza. By Mildrade Cherfils and Sara Miller Llana, CSM August 11, 2014 PARIS — When Karen Maruani sends her 12-year-old son back to school this fall in a working-class district in Paris, the young Jewish mother has added new wisdom to typical back-to-school advice: He should remove his yarmulke on his way to and from the Jewish school he attends to prevent being attacked. This is not just the admonishment of a nervous parent. Young children have congregated outside the school to taunt the Jewish pupils, she says. And now many French Jews say the anti-Semitism that has existed for years just below the surface is boiling over after the latest deadly conflict in the Gaza Strip, which has taken nearly 2,000 lives, most of them Palestinian. The controversy is forming new divisions in France that many don’t expect to lessen even if a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, accepted Sunday, paves the way to a truce. Support for Israel among American Jews tends to grow with age. But in France, Jewish leaders and community members say that support for Israel is robust among both young and old – in part as a reaction to growing anti-Semitism. Unlike in the US where pacifists and Jews protest alongside Palestinians for peace, in France, even young Jews who would be the most likely to criticize Israel’s actions were they in the US have instead found themselves siding with Israel’s right to defend itself. “We have long thought that anti-Semitic prejudices would go away with the new generation,” says Yonathan Arfi, the vice president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France. “Events [of late] show that the new generation is not at all immune to anti-Semitism, on the contrary.” He says it’s been most critical in disenfranchised neighborhoods. Growing anti-Israel – and anti-Semitic – sentiments Tensions from the fighting in Gaza have spread well beyond the Middle East, leading to pro-Palestinian marches that have put some European governments in uncomfortable positions. In Germany, a tinge of neo-Nazism has surfaced at some of the demonstrations against Israeli aggression. A British foreign-policy minister resigned over what she called Prime Minister David Cameron’s “morally indefensible” support of Israel. But nowhere has the prospect for a flashpoint been greater than France, which has Europe’s largest Muslim and Jewish communities, with an estimated 2.1 million practicing Muslims and 500,000 Jews. Tensions in France’s Jewish community were already high, after a March 2012 attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse left seven dead* and a May attack at a Jewish museum in Brussels killed four. That has happened against the backdrop of the political rise of the anti-immigrant National Front, which has anti-Semitic roots. And marches this summer against Israel have devolved into anti-Semitic violence, especially after the government attempted to preemptively ban pro-Palestinian marches in July. Protesters responded with clashes in the heavily Jewish Parisian suburb of Sarcelles, known to some as “Little Jerusalem,” which also has a strong immigrant population. Some Jewish locales were specifically vandalized. The government widely condemned those attacks, with French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve responding that “nothing can justify anti-Semitism.” But his words, and the bans on certain marches, come as a public and private wariness of Israel’s role in the conflict in Gaza grows. French President François Hollande spoke his toughest words yet against Israel’s actions, while public opinion in support of Palestinians has grown to new highs in Europe. Although 4 in 10 Americans sympathize with Israel – far higher than anywhere else in Europe – among those who choose a side in Europe, more sympathize with Palestinians. A poll by YouGov in July, for example, showed that during the recent conflict the number of those in Britain siding with Palestinians rose to a high of 27 percent, while for Israelis it fell to a low of 12 percent. In France, support for Palestinians is 18 percent, compared with 11 percent for Israel. ‘In the same basket’ At Patistory, a kosher bakery in the 19th arrondissement, owners Patrick and Martine Belaiche say that they attended a pro-Israeli assembly held in Paris in July – to counter pro-Palestinian marches – to “show that we are here,” says Mr. Belaiche. He says Jews and Muslims in France have a lot more similarities than differences. “We’re in the same basket, Jews and Muslims. Normally those who don’t like Jews also don’t like Arabs because we are not like ‘them.’” But the “us” versus “them” has become a powerful theme that has touched the lives of youths, including their five adult children. Mrs. Belaiche worries incessantly that her daughters will be attacked, and both parents advise their son to cover his yarmulke with a cap while on the metro or not wear it at all, as Ms. Maruani advised her son. “That’s not normal,” Mr. Belaiche says. At its zenith, fear has led hundreds of French Jews to leave for Israel. The Belaiches hope to retire to Israel, too. Mr. Arfi says that Jews have always left for Israel, for spiritual and ideological reasons, but today there are also negative motivators. “Those who are leaving are doing so for various reasons – religious, Zionist commitment, economic reasons – but also some have the feeling that the atmosphere has become hostile for them, especially in certain working-class neighborhoods.”
A man lays flowers as he pays his respects in front of a makeshift memorial at the entrance of the Jewish Museum in Brussels, on May 25, 2014, where a deadly shooting took place the day before. Belgium’s Jewish community was placed on high alert as police hunted down a gunman who shot dead three people at the Brussels Jewish Museum in an attack blamed on growing antisemitism. An Israeli tourist couple and a French woman died from gunshots to the face and neck after a man apparently acting alone fired two successive rounds into the museum on May 24, 2014 before escaping minutes later on foot. Photo by Georges GobetE/AFP/Getty Images)©AFP Anti-Semitic attacks rise in France as Gaza conflict stirs tensions By Adam Thomson in Paris, Financial Times August 16, 2014 When Jewish and Pro-Palestinian youths clashed last month outside a Parisian synagogue on the fringe of an otherwise peaceful demonstration against Israel’s invasion of Gaza, things soon turned nasty. The next day, several hundred pro-Palestinian demonstrators armed with metal bars and wooden clubs attacked a synagogue and a Jewish-owned grocery store in Sarcelles, a northern suburb of Paris. That followed two other attempted attacks on synagogues the week before. Anti-Semitism is on the rise in France, home to the Jewish Diaspora’s second-largest community after the US. According to France’s Society for the Protection of the Jewish Community, the average annual number of anti-Semitic acts so far this century is seven times higher than during the 1990s. Some have been particularly shocking, such as the 2012 slaying of a rabbi and three Jewish children outside a Jewish school in Toulouse. But the latest outbreak has renewed leaders’ concerns. Manuel Valls, the prime minister, called the recent incidents “intolerable”, adding “to attack a Jew because he is a Jew is to attack France”. The Jewish community in France says that it has not felt as threatened as now in decades. “It is unforgiving,” Shimon Samuels of the European office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which combats anti-Semitism and extremism, told the FT. “We are reaching new thresholds.” Unsurprisingly, the catalyst for the spike is the conflict in the Middle East and the anger and frustration that it has produced among France’s estimated 6.5m Muslims – about 10 per cent of the population. Mr Samuels has identified at least three “waves” of anti-Semitic violence in France over the past 35 years and each one coincides neatly with heightened tension between Israel and its neighbours. The Gaza conflict has led to a rise in anti-Semitic incidents and attacks elsewhere in Europe, including Britain and Germany. But Andrew Hussey, who heads the University of London Institute in Paris, argues that today’s anti-Semitism has deep roots that have tangled with the country’s colonial past and that has now found a home among the swelling ranks of disaffected Muslim youth. “Whenever a group feels under threat in France, anti-Semitism has served as the classic way of blaming a mysterious Other for your own precarious sense of self,” says Mr Hussey, author of the recent book The French Intifada. “What is happening in France now is a mutated version of this.” On the gritty Rue de la Goutte d’Or, Ibrahim and his friends mingle in track suits and baseball caps by the gloomy entrance of a rundown tenement block. It may be just a stone’s throw from the Gare du Nord station. But it could hardly be further from what draws millions of tourists to Paris every year. All of them were born in Paris to Algerian parents but they do not feel French. “At first I did, but then I opened my eyes,” says Ibrahim, a 29-year-old who runs a small textile shop. “If you feel French but are not accepted as French, what is the point?” He and his friends say they did not participate in the recent pro-Palestinian demonstrations. But they resent what they describe as discrimination towards them and blame others, including the Jews, for the resulting lack of opportunities. “When it comes to jobs, it is whites first, then the Jews,” says one. “We are last along with the blacks.” Another puts it more bluntly. “We are Arabs. Arabs do not like Jews.” More generally in France, academics and policy makers worry about what they describe as the gradual creep of Holocaust denial as an obscure conspiracy theory known as “negationism” towards the mainstream, particularly in the depressed banlieues. The popularity of Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, a comedian who has repeatedly been found guilty of inciting racial hatred and whose recent performances contain overtly anti-Semitic sketches, has taken many French people by surprise. Even Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right, has distanced herself. “Mr Dieudonné has nothing to do with the National Front,” she said this year. Fears in the UK In Britain, anxiety about rising anti-semitism was summed up by the front page of this week’s Jewish Chronicle, whose poll revealed that two-thirds of Jews have “questioned their future in the UK” following protests against the violence in Gaza. Nonetheless, France’s most controversial comic is a personal friend of Jean-Marie Le Pen, her father, the party’s founder and the man who once described the Holocaust as “a mere detail of history”. Mr Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Center believes that anti-Semitism is becoming more ingrained in France. This week, he wrote a letter to Bernard Cazeneuve, the interior minister, asking him to change the name of a hamlet near Paris because he and other Jews found it offensive. The name in question was “La Mort aux Juifs – Death to Jews. When questioned by the AFP about the demand, Marie-Elizabeth Secretand, deputy mayor of the local jurisdiction, said: “Why change a name that goes back to the Middle Ages or even further? We should respect these old names.” Such attitudes have only added to the fear and growing sense of victimisation among France’s approximately 500,000 Jews. Many have started to leave: the Jewish Agency for Isreal, which encourages immigration to Israel, said that more than 1,400 French Jews immigrated to Israel between January and the end of March, four times the number than during the first quarter of 2013. Note * Four Jews (1 adult, 3 children, were killed by Mohamed Merah in Toulouse, March 2012. His first victims were French, non-Jewish, soldiers. See Political winners and losers from Toulouse killings
