Ha'aretz gives an Israeli view of French maneuvers:
War and memory
Israelis who this week watched France reneging on its commitments as a member of the NATO alliance will find it difficult not to recall the bleak days of waiting before the 1967 war, and how France cynically abandoned Israel. Older people will remember the 1930s, and the inability of enlightened nations to distinguish between reasoned postponement of a moment of decision and appeasing a power-hungry dictator.
In Paris, it seems, they have not learned a thing from that grim period, nor from the black years that followed. America's undertaking to twice save Europe in the same generation, and to rehabilitate the trampled pride of France, have seemingly been forgotten. Chirac's bombastic statement after September 11 - "We are all Americans" - was proved to be hypocritical theatrics that evaporated in national pretensions mixed with economic opportunism.
True, even a French leader with more rectitude than Chirac would have had to gently and cleverly weigh his country's moves in the Iraqi crisis, given the large number of Muslim immigrants living in France.
But that is precisely how leadership is measured in countries that are Western, democratic, and pluralistic. The French president has something to learn from Tony Blair on this issue, and so does German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
Berlin, the ally of Paris in the de facto dismantling of the NATO alliance - an ungrateful and shortsighted move - has developed a kind of post-modern political doctrine that regards every war as a war crime.
That, they say, is their legacy from the horrifying years in the middle of the last century.
But during the Cold War, which came after Hitler's war, West Germany's army was rightfully considered a major element, primed and ready for action, in the West's defense against the Soviet forces.
If the German army had been used then, its soldiers would have fought shoulder to shoulder with tens of thousands of American and British troops who were stationed there to protect free Europe. Now, presumably, even if the rupture between France, Germany and Belgium, and the U.S. and most of the West, is somehow papered over, the days of that army which protected the peace are numbered.
Cracks have opened in the political foundations on which global strategic stability was based for more than 50 years.
The day after tomorrow, Friday, now appears to be the day of the dramatic test.
If France dares to cast a veto on the American-British proposal in the Security Council, not only NATO, but the United Nations too, will be rendered irrelevant.
Even if Paris stops before it crosses that final red line, the damage that has already been done will not be easily repaired.
The ramifications of the conflict among the Western countries will be sorely felt among the members and candidates for membership in the European Union. That body's ambitions to shape its own, uniform foreign policy, will founder. European ambitions, led by France, to play a major diplomatic role in our region - for example in the framework of the Middle East peace "Quartet" - will become an anachronism in the new world order unfolding before our eyes.
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