Anti-Zionism Won’t Save France

R iots have engulfed French streets in recent weeks. Thousands have been arrested, and hundreds of businesses and schools have been burned down or forced to close their doors. Mere days before the violence erupted, when French President Emmanuel Macron took the dais at the United Nations, he didn’t rail against the burdensome regulations or the nihilism that has left his nation and others on the continent fractured and lagging in economic growth and political freedom. Instead, Macron spent an inordinate amount of time condemning Israel.

But railing against Israel won’t save France. Indeed, the opposite is true: Historically, fixating on the world’s sole Jewish state often coincides with national decay, and doing so comes at the expense of focusing on solutions to France’s many problems.

Those problems have been decades in the making. France lost more than a quarter of its young men in World War I. The nation began importing workers from its colonies in an attempt to offset the labor shortage. Migration only increased in the subsequent decades as the world remade itself after two devastating global conflagrations.

France was one of Israel’s leading supporters and acted as the Jewish state’s chief arms supplier in its first two decades. Paris did so partly as a hedge against the United Kingdom, its historic rival and the chief patron of many newly created Arab monarchies and states.

But everything began to change in the 1960s after the creation of the Fifth Republic and Charles de Gaulle’s return to power. As the late historian David Pryce-Jones chronicled in his 2006 book, Betrayal: France, the Arabs, and the Jews, de Gaulle and his successors prioritized restoring the nation’s status as a “Muslim power,” a strategy long championed by the Quai d’Orsay, France’s foreign ministry. They believed that shoring up relations with the Arab world would give France both independence and leverage over other European countries and the United States. And this, they thought, necessitated turning their back on Israel.

The break was sudden. Days before the 1967 Six-Day War, while Egypt, Syria, and other nations were massing for an attack on Israel, France canceled weapons shipments to the Jewish state. At the time, Israelis were digging mass graves in public parks in the expectation that they would be slaughtered.

Ultimately, Israel historically routed its opponents anyway. Yet France remained wedded to its Middle East pivot.

In a November 1967 press conference, de Gaulle said that “Jews are still what they had always been — an elite people, sure of themselves and domineering” and responsible for “provoking ill will in certain countries and at certain times.”

In one of his last acts in office, de Gaulle made the turn from support of the Jewish nation complete by allowing Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, a terror group committed to Israel’s destruction, to operate in Paris. Within less than a decade, France would grant visas to Abu Daoud, a terrorist responsible for the murder and torture of Israeli Olympic team members in 1972. In January 1977, Daoud was received at the Quai d’Orsay, only to later be detained at Interpol’s request. The French foreign ministry responded by apologizing to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) representative, and Daoud was subsequently released to Algeria.

In 1980, PLO terrorists killed four Jews and wounded 30 more in a terror attack outside the rue Copernic synagogue. In 1982, another Palestinian terror attack killed six Jews and injured 22 others. On the former occasion, then-Prime Minister Raymond Barre said that “two innocent French people were killed,” implying, as Pryce-Jones noted, that the Jewish victims had it coming.

De Gaulle’s successor, Georges Pompidou, called Israel’s ambassador to France, Asher Ben-Natan, “the perfect prototype of a Nazi officer.” Pompidou himself said that Israel must cease being a “racial and religious state” and accused Israelis of not wanting peace.

The rhetoric itself wasn’t exactly new. As early as 1948, when Israel was still fighting for its independence, the French consul general in Jerusalem called the country “the most racist and totalitarian of governments” and a “stain” on the Arab world.

When Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat was murdered by jihadists in 1981, French Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson viewed his murder as positive and exclaimed that it “would remove an obstacle to the coming together of the Arab peoples.” Sadat had made peace with Israel in 1978, an achievement that the French president had the temerity to criticize.

When Israeli troops entered Lebanon in 1982, they even found evidence that French diplomats had alerted Palestinian terrorists of the military incursion in advance. Hezbollah, an Iranian-created terror group, would soon take the place of Arafat’s men and turn Lebanon once more into a vassal state. And this too was an occurrence that the French government had made possible by providing Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini with sanctuary.

Khomeini left from his reprieve in Paris for Tehran, where he launched the Islamic Revolution, forever changing Iran and the Middle East itself. Regarding his exile in France, Khomeini later detailed that the French government was “kind to us and we could publicize our views extensively, much more than we expected.”

As Pryce-Jones reported, local French police even provided the tyrant-to-be bodyguard permits for a limited number of weapons, including machine guns. France also played a starring role in helping Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program, which the Israelis promptly destroyed in 1981.

Yet France has been poorly served by its turn against Israel. In 1981, gunmen linked to Iran murdered Louis Delamare, France’s ambassador in Beirut. In 1983, Hezbollah suicide bombers drove into a compound where French peacekeeping troops were quartered, murdering 58. France itself has been targeted repeatedly by Islamist terrorists, perhaps most infamously in the November 2015 Bataclan terror attack in which 130 people were horrifically slaughtered by ISIS.

France is perpetually beset with internal divisions and rioting, and its economy is in the doldrums, having been plagued by slow growth and burdensome regulations. Fixating on the world’s sole Jewish state has been, at best, a catastrophic distraction. The country offers a cautionary tale about how anti-Israel obsession only fuels the fires of extremism. Those in the remaining vestiges of the West should take heed.