France battles anti-Semitism
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By Tom Hundley Tribune foreign correspondent
They thought she was a Jew. So they sliced open her blouse with a knife and drew swastikas on her stomach with a marker. Then they cut off tufts of her hair as a "souvenir."
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The attackers were young men, about six them, described by police as North Africans ranging in age from 15 to 20. The incident occurred Friday on a crowded commuter train north of Paris. None of the passengers who witnessed the attack intervened. Perhaps they were too afraid. The attackers escaped.
The 23-year-old victim, whose name has not been released, was not Jewish, and was not hurt in the attack. But the incident has become Exhibit A in a nervous national debate on whether Jews can live safely in France.
A surge in the number of anti-Semitic attacks and a spike in the number of French Jews moving to Israel have unnerved the government of President Jacques Chirac.
Last week, a day before the train attack, Chirac traveled to Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, whose residents rescued thousands of Jews during World War II, and used it as a backdrop to warn against the spread of anti-Semitic violence.
"These acts reflect the darkest side of human nature. They are unworthy of France. I will do everything to stop them," Chirac said.
But while acknowledging that France has a problem, Chirac and other senior members of his government insist that France, at its core, is not an anti-Semitic country.
Most French Jewish leaders tend to agree.
"The institutions, the political parties are not anti-Semitic. Nothing in the machinery of the state discriminates against Jews in any way," said Nelly Hansson, director of the French Judaism Foundation.
`New anti-Semitism'
The problem, according to French officials and Jewish leaders, is what they have labeled the "new anti-Semitism." Unlike the old form of anti-Semitism, deeply rooted in Christianity's historic enmity toward Jews and kept alive today mainly by the extreme right and neo-Nazi fringe, the new anti-Semitism flourishes among Arab immigrant groups who see Jews as surrogates for Israel.
"The new anti-Semitism is the denial of the existence of the Jewish state, where the Jew himself becomes a substitute for Israel," said Serge Klarsfeld, France's renowned Nazi-hunter.
The phenomenon is hardly unique to France, but it is more noticeable here, perhaps because France has Europe's largest Muslim population--about 5 million--and its largest Jewish population--500,000 to 600,000.
Europe's new anti-Semitism began to rise to alarming proportions with the outbreak of major Israeli-Palestinian violence in 2000.
Last year, a report commissioned by the European Union (news - web sites)'s Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia blamed anti-Semitic violence on Arab and Muslim immigrant groups. But the monitoring center was uncomfortable with this finding, believing that it unfairly singled out a group that was itself a victim of discrimination. It disassociated itself from the report and commissioned a new one, released earlier this year, that blamed the rise in attacks against Jews on "young, disaffected white Europeans."
In France, at least, the evidence suggests otherwise. According to Jewish groups and unofficial police estimates, 90 percent of the attacks are carried out by young Arabs, mainly from France's large and impoverished North African immigrant community.
The French Interior Ministry, which tracks violence against minorities, reported that the number of anti-Semitic incidents peaked in 2002 with 932 incidents of actual or threatened violence--a six-fold increase since 1999. The numbers declined last year, to 588 incidents, but appear to be increasing again this year.
Last year, 21 people were attacked--the highest number since 1993, according to the Interior Ministry. Several of these incidents were stabbings.
"It's a miracle that nobody has been killed," said Raphael Drai, a Jewish writer who has published several books on French anti-Semitism.
Anxiety rising
The anxiety within the French Jewish community is palpable, and it can be measured by another set of statistics: Between 1999 and 2001, the number of French Jews immigrating to Israel averaged 1,173 per year; in 2002, it nearly doubled to 2,035 and has continued to climb.
In the first six months of 2004, the number was 685, but officials in Israel say they are planning for an influx of 500 this month. While Israel is happy to have the newcomers, leaders of the French Jewish community are disturbed.
"It's a catastrophe for France's image in the world, and it's destabilizing for the Jewish community in France," Drai said.
"If they are going to Israel for spiritual reasons, fine," said Jean-Pierre Allali, a member of the executive board of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France. "But if they are going to escape anti-Semitism, it's very bad."
Allali suggested that despite the increase, the number of Jews leaving France was not significant. "It's not a tidal wave. It's a very small minority," he said.
But Jean-Jacques Wahl, director of a Jewish educational foundation in France, said he sees many French Jews, especially younger ones, hedging their bets.
"Among young people, fewer are choosing professions like the law. Instead they are studying business or computers, because these skills are more transportable. For me that's the most important change," he said.
French Jewry is a multi-layered mosaic that dates to the Roman Empire. From the Middle Ages until the last century, Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition and the pogroms of the czar found a haven in France.
During World War II, while many Jews fought in the French Resistance, the darkest chapter in the nation's history was being written by the Vichy regime, which collaborated with Nazis in the extermination of about one-third of France's Jewish population.
In the early 1960s, another wave of refugees arrived on France's shores. These were Algerian Jews, holders of French passports who had been uprooted by a colonial war. They numbered about 30,000 to 40,000.
Today, it is these Jews from North Africa, living among Muslim immigrants from North Africa in the economically depressed suburbs that ring the cities, who are the most frequent targets of the new anti-Semitism.
"Their lives are hell, and they don't understand why their security isn't assured on an everyday basis, or why the non-Jewish French people seem to be indifferent," said Hansson of the French Judaism Foundation.
Youths affected most
The frictions occur most often among young people in schools where the slur "dirty Jew" has seeped into the vernacular even when the target is not Jewish.
Although the majority of the attacks are carried out by Muslim youths, most Jewish leaders say the French media are partly to blame because of their hostile coverage of Israel.
"We are presented with constant images of violence, gratuitous acts, as though it's the mission of the Israeli Army to kill women and children and old people," said Drai, the writer.
Surveys indicate Europeans, by a 2-to-1 margin, blame Israel for the conflict with the Palestinians. Polls also show that while Israel's "favorability" rating among Europeans is usually in the low 20s, Palestinians are viewed with sympathy.
French Jews felt this most acutely in the lead-up to the Iraq (news - web sites) war, when protesters in large anti-war demonstrations carried banners that conflated the Star of David and the Nazi swastika, and equated Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites) with President Bush (news - web sites).
"When the anti-war demonstrations became anti-Jewish demonstrations, that was the psychological turning point for us. We felt very isolated," Hansson said. |
