July 14, 2001

The story goes that UNESCO, the United Nations specialized agency headquartered in Paris, announced “the year of the elephant” and invited countries to sponsor research on the huge animal.

At year’s end, UNESCO published the titles of the various research projects. From France came “101 Ways to Make Love to an Elephant,” from Denmark “1001 Recipes for Using Elephant Meat in Open-Faced Sandwiches,” from Italy “Can Elephants Be Trained to Sing Verdi Arias?” and from Israel—what else?—“Elephants and the Jewish Question.”

This story came to mind recently as my wife and I were sitting with some Geneva-based Jewish friends at a lakeside restaurant. The setting couldn’t have been more picture perfect, the company more agreeable, yet for the first hour or two we found ourselves talking obsessively about the respective difficulties we had encountered as friends of Israel during the past year in Europe.

At this point, I’m inclined to invoke for the reader a National Car Rental slogan I saw on one of their trucks in Paris, which in English translates as: “We’re not here to complicate your life.” Bear with me; our dinner conversation may have begun on a down note but it ended on a happy note.

Concerned about their professional positions in the UN system, our friends would not wish to be identified, but they described a work atmosphere in Geneva that ranged from chilly to openly hostile. They spoke of instances when anti-Israel bureaucrats tried to target those few officials seen as “too eager” to hire Jews (not just Israelis, which would have been bad enough, but Jews generally).

We in turn described, among other episodes, the most recent incident at our children’s school.

On June 1, the school organized an International Day. A high-school girl from Israel chose to wear an Israeli flag as part of her dress that day. It wasn’t long before she found herself face to face with a student from an Arab country. He told her to remove the Israeli flag. She refused. He brandished a knife and reportedly said: “I feel like killing someone today.” She ran away, only to be surrounded by a group of Arab students a short while later.

She was still wearing the flag, and this time one of the older students ordered a younger student to throw a cup of soda on the girl. She began crying and ran away. She saw two school administrators and told them what happened. Their astonishing response: “This is a matter between countries. It does not involve us.”

To date, despite the efforts of several students and parents, as well as the intervention of a respected Swiss antidefamation organization, CICAD, the school has taken no action, choosing the path of denial instead. Over the course of the past few weeks, we learned that more or less similar events had occurred at several other private schools in Switzerland.

So here we were, with delicious fresh fish from Lac Léman on our plates and a magnificent sunset filling our view, and yet the four of us were managing to depress one another all the same. But then one of our friends turned to us and said: “Let’s change the subject. What’s been your happiest discovery this year?” Without a moment’s hesitation, my wife and I both blurted out in more or less identical words: “France. We have fallen in love with France.” And our friends immediately responded by saying that they, too, had developed a passion for what the French sometimes call the Hexagon, referring to the six-sided shape of France.

In my case, this requires full disclosure.

I grew up in a predominately French-speaking home. Until my parents both learned fluent English, their only common language was French, though in both cases it was not their native language. In fact, every person in my family older than I spoke French and had lived in France until the war or, in some cases, during and after the war as well.

My parents were not uncritical about France. Despite their love of the language and memories of happy moments, they harbored some negative feelings. My mother recalled how, as a refugee child from the Soviet Union, she was made to feel unwelcome in her Paris school, and later how French anti-Semitism affected the lives of Jews, especially after Nazi troops occupied the country in June 1940.

The authorities, with malice aforethought, sent my father, who had volunteered for the French army’s division for foreigners, to the very different Foreign Legion in Algeria, where, as a Jew, he was greeted with a less-than-welcome reception. Later, when France fell, he was arrested by the Vichy regime and put in Kenadsa, a concentration camp in western Algeria. He spent three difficult years there before managing to escape.

Moreover, I could never forget that France was the country that had had intimate ties with Israel from the very creation of the state until the 1960s, only to do an about-face on the eve of the Six-Day War, when it imposed an arms embargo on the region. For practical purposes, the embargo damaged only Israel, a major purchaser of French weapons, including fighter planes. This was followed by President De Gaulle’s notorious comment after the war, which was ostensibly directed at Israel but which some Jews assumed was more widely aimed: “An elite people, proud and domineering.”

France, once Israel’s most valued ally, redefined its national interest in the mid-1960s and concluded that, in this post-Algerian war era, there was much more to be gained politically, strategically, and commercially from close links with the Arab world than with Israel. Franco-Israeli cooperation suffered a major blow, as France over the years vigorously pursued Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, pushed the European Common Market to take a more critical line on Israel, and made backroom deals with the PLO.

And as an American who had traveled to France often since my teen years, I was acutely conscious of the strain of anti-Americanism that seemed to pervade France and that often translated as well into what Americans perceived as a barely concealed arrogance in personal contacts.

Today, I can’t, in all honesty, report a totally revamped country, especially when it comes to Israel, but some things have undeniably changed for the better.

It took decades and several presidents, but, to his everlasting credit, President Chirac, shortly after assuming office in 1995, accepted France’s responsibility for the crimes of the Vichy regime when he said: “Yes, the criminal folly of the occupier was assisted by French people, by the French state.”

Two years later, the Roman Catholic bishops of France issued a Declaration of Repentance in Drancy, the notorious wartime detention and transit camp, which declared in part: “In face of the magnitude of the tragedy and the unprecedented nature of the crime, too many of the church’s pastors, through their silence, committed an offense against the Church itself and its mission. Today we confess that this silence was a mistake…. We beg God’s forgiveness and ask the Jewish people to hear our words of repentance.”

Most recently, in a letter to the American Jewish Committee dated June 28, 2001, the French foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, referring to the outrageous attempt by some nations to avoid speaking of the Holocaust and instead talk of “holocausts” at the upcoming World Conference Against Racism in Durban, reaffirmed the European Union position that “the Holocaust is a unique tragedy in history and this term must be reserved exclusively for this tragedy of European history.”

On the other hand, French policy toward the Middle East, I’m sorry to say, hasn’t experienced a significant turnaround, as witnessed by last month’s red-carpet reception in Paris for Syrian president Bashar Assad, the eagerness to engage Iran, pro-Palestinian sympathy, and the frequent second-guessing when it comes to Israel. (“What Gaul!” friends of Israel might well say.)

At the same time, France regards itself as a major diplomatic player; after all, it holds a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, is a key factor in European Union decision-making, and has long-standing interests in the Middle East. Accordingly, being sidelined on Arab-Israeli peace process issues while Washington enjoys the confidence of the major parties cannot be a happy state of affairs.

This may have been on Chirac’s mind when Israeli prime minister Sharon visited Paris on July 5. Sharon didn’t get quite the same warm reception he received at his first stop in Berlin, but he could not have missed hearing President Chirac declare: “France is an ally of Israel.”

What exactly the word “ally” means in Chirac’s mind remains to be seen. Was the French leader simply angling for the image of greater evenhandedness, the assumed entry card required for a more active role in Arab-Israeli diplomacy, or was there more to it?

Sharon, who doubtless recognized that Israel’s interests were not served by publicly emphasizing the political divide between the two countries, replied by speaking of “the friendship” between the two countries.

Nor has France suddenly become an uncritical admirer of the United States. A headline in the current issue of the prestigious Le Monde Diplomatique said it all: “The dreams of empire of the American presidency.”

French politicians and intellectuals, with few exceptions, have their laundry list of concerns about America and are seldom shy about articulating them.

The French anxieties are quite well known: concerns about America’s “disproportionate” power, the tendency toward American “unilateralism,” a “cowboy” instinct in foreign policy, competition for influence in Francophone Africa and elsewhere, accusations of industrial spying using the Echelon satellite system, the persistence of the death penalty, perceived indifference to the danger of global warming, cultural “imperialism,” etc.

That said, the truth of the matter is that France and the United States really do have far more in common than that which divides them. Yes, Airbus and Boeing are in a bitter struggle for supremacy in the world market for planes—and this should not be glossed over—but the common history and shared values of these two nations do form a very strong bond, whatever the current differences may be.

And I am convinced that the French have improved in their attitude toward Americans generally. As one letter-writer to the International Herald Tribune recently stated: “As an American living in Paris, I remember the bad old days, but things have changed for the better. Subject to rare exceptions, the French, even in Paris, are as friendly to Americans as anyone would want.”

Our family has spent time this year traveling throughout France and can only report pleasant encounters. Imagine, the French—the very same people who not only didn’t speak English but showed disdain for the language—now speak it, so much so that it’s been hard at times for us to practice our French.

Okay, maybe I’m going soft; after all, France is a magnificently alluring country. Indeed, it is the number-one tourist destination in Europe, if not the world.

Paris is for me the ultimate urban expression, especially bearing in mind that its uninspiring physical location meant that the city’s magic was entirely created by the genius of its people, save those responsible for the atrocious 685-foot skyscraper in Montparnasse that stands as a permanent defacement of the city skyline.

In reality, it’s easy to understand the words of Montaigne, the sixteenth-century essayist who wrote: “I love Paris dearly, including its warts and stains.”

The rest of the country, including such cities as Lyon and Strasbourg, the Alps, the Côte d’Azur, Provence, Lake Annecy, the Atlantic coast, and the farmland, is equally breathtaking. Throw in the vitality of French intellectual and cultural life, the enviable sense of style and elegance, the celebration of great cuisine, and the sheer beauty of the French language—or the language of Molière as it is often called—and it creates quite a heady mixture.

Not that the country doesn’t have problems; it has its share.

To begin with, France has had an awkward governing structure since 1995, the “cohabitation” of the right-of-center President Chirac and the left-of-center government led by Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. The two men are expected to vie for the presidency in the next elections, scheduled for 2002, and current polls suggest it would be a very close contest.

Further, it has been slowly losing power within the European Union to a more assertive Germany, which is coming out from under the shadow of its past. And as EU enlargement proceeds, the center of gravity will almost inevitably shift further away from Paris.

Domestically, there are the ever-present financial scandals, including accusations of the misuse of secret funds by Chirac, stepped-up investigations of torture during the Algerian war of independence, and revelations of Jospin’s previously hidden Trotskyist past.

Beyond the immediate issues, France faces the ongoing challenge of integrating the millions of North Africans, Algerians in particular, who arrived decades ago and are in danger of becoming a permanent underclass.

While there are many individual success stories, especially in the fields of entertainment and sports (sound familiar?), entire suburbs have become breeding grounds for unemployment, Islamic fundamentalism, crime, and social alienation. French authorities are now grappling with a set of responses, from debates over affirmative action in elite institutions of higher education to policing methods.

To their collective dismay, the French, who tend to portray America as a crime-ridden and violent nation, learned from a just-published study that in the year 2000 the per-capita crime rate in France exceeded that of the United States, though the murder rate was three times higher in the States.

In the midst of this vibrant and complicated country live 700,000 Jews, who form the largest Jewish community in the Diaspora after the United States. During the course of this sabbatical year, I’ve spent time with the community in Paris, most recently when CRIF, the national umbrella organization, organized an impressive demonstration at the memorial site of the Jewish Martyrs at the Vélodrome d’Hiver.

The occasion was the official visit to France of Syrian president Assad, and the protest was focused on Assad’s anti-Semitism. As one of the flyers announcing the demonstration said: “We cannot accept that the country of the Rights of Man receives with honor a head of state who expressed violently anti-Jewish statements in the presence of the pope.”

By cleverly framing the gathering in this way, rather than as an anti-Syrian political rally, CRIF was able to attract the participation of several leading human rights organizations and representatives of most of the major political parties, as well as the support of the Catholic and Protestant hierarchies. The crowd was variously estimated at 6-8,000, and media coverage was quite extensive.

Subsequently, the mayor of Paris and several local politicians expressed publicly their opposition to Assad’s anti-Semitism. In doing so, they were obviously unmoved by the major ad campaign on Assad’s behalf sponsored by the “Syrian community in France.” For example, one full-page ad in the national daily Le Figaro, which appeared on June 26 and showed a large photo of Assad and Chirac smiling and shaking hands, declared: “The dialogue is above all one between men…. Because France shares the values of tolerance with Syria where, for the past fourteen centuries, exponents of various philosophical and religious beliefs have lived.”

The French Jewish community, given a major boost in the 1960s by the influx of Jews from North Africa, is proud, active, and undaunted, despite the frightening spate of attacks directed at Jews since the surge in Middle East violence last year.

(There had been previous devastating attacks as well, including those against the Copernic synagogue in 1980 and Goldenberg’s restaurant two years later, both in Paris. Memorably, the French prime minister at the time of the Copernic tragedy, Raymond Barre, said in the heat of the moment: “They [the terrorists] wanted to strike at the Jews and hit innocent French,” referring to the fact that two of the four victims were non-Jewish passers-by.)

And French Jewry has built a thriving communal life in Paris, as well as in other cities such as Lyon, Marseille, Nice, Strasbourg, and Toulouse.

More generally, Jews have played an extraordinarily important role in virtually aspect of the life of France. As but one illustration, three Jews, Léon Blum, Pierre Mendès-France, and René Mayer served as the country’s prime minister in the last century, in Blum’s case on three separate occasions.

Truly, the “City of Lights,” like New York, Los Angeles, London, Montreal, Toronto, and a handful of other world-class cities, is a place where the Jewish presence is strongly felt, adding to its magnetic appeal.

Now if only we could return to the glory days of Franco-Israeli friendship…

Happy Bastille Day!

Note: This is the ninth in a series of occasional letters from a sabbatical year abroad. For copies of the previous letters, please contact Alina Viera at the American Jewish Committee, viera@ajc.org or (212) 751-4000, ext. 203.