As the Israeli army goes on slaughtering Palestinians in the Gaza Strip — as they have done in the past and will do in the future as long as nobody prevents them from defying the international law — one feels particularly ashamed of those hypocritical statements made by politicians and intellectuals alike, heard all across the board, statements such as, “Please be careful not to over-react” and “Be careful to not to fall into anti-Semitism”, which in fact starts the very day one criticises Israel.
In France, where some demonstrations in favour of the Palestinian people were banned, the situation is confusing. French President François Hollande’s inability to oppose his neoconservative foreign affairs team, coupled with Prime Minister Manuel Valls’ declared pro-Zionist empathy, have resulted in potentially one of the most serious threats to democracy: not the risk for protesters to be deprived from basic civil rights (despite the French Socialist Party’s historical record on the issue), but a far more serious one, the risk of seeing a stigmatised component of the population identified as an inside enemy.
Regarding Gaza, there is little else to add to what has been already expressed worldwide: the so-called ‘balanced’ comments putting Hamas and the Israeli army on equal footing when it is an asymmetric war, the calls for ‘self-restraint’ and the warnings on the ‘resurgence of anti-Semitism’, and the embarrassed comments by ‘Jewish’ intellectuals — when it is not pure abjection as in the case of French essayist Bernard Henri Lévy writing in Le Point: “Gaza is a kind of jail but since the Israelis evacuated it ten years ago, one can hardly see how they could be considered the gatekeepers …”
As for the international community, it is well known that one can criticise Russian President Vladimir Putin but not Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is probably why the Quartet Special Envoy Tony Blair did not even deem it necessary to go on site — it’s also true he was busy in the UK preparing a lavish birthday party for his wife. In the end, a well-shared opinion is that any solution to the conflict mainly relies upon an Israeli decision — and not any kind of ‘pressure’ on it to live in peace with its neighbours, something that has always proved futile and which Israel is not overly concerned with.
Meanwhile, Middle Eastern conflicts continue to reach Europe and notably France. One has already noted French ‘jihadists’ coming back from Syria, and representing an obvious future threat to domestic security. Another step is being reached after Valls’ recent comments on pro-Palestinian demonstrations, about “those youths from the periphery, who don’t even know where Palestine is on a map”. Stigmatising, as he did awkwardly, part of the French population, especially this fringe of left-over people which has been abandoned a long time ago by the whole political class, cannot indeed be considered as a sensible move towards a successful integration. It is what makes one’s gorge rise, more than any hypothetic resurgence of anti-Semitism.
Of course, some of the demonstrations were staged by faithless hooligans or other members of society with the aim to provoke. Incidentally, why is the role of quasi-fascist Jewish youth organisations hardly mentioned? Commentators prefer to focus on the idea that demonstrators assimilate ‘Jews’ to ‘Israelis’ and Israelis to ‘Palestinian killers’ — hence the supposed resurgence of a ‘new anti-Semitism’ which is spreading over France.
Of course, as well, a preliminary alignment of Hollande on the Israeli far-right positions, a ban in principle on solidarity demonstrations, an assimilation of that solidarity to anti-Semitism whilst knowingly confusing it with anti-Zionism — all that only reflects the perverse effects of the biased opinions of those surrounding the French President and advising him on foreign affairs.
Political mistake
Yet, having transformed the youth of the popular periphery quarters into a ‘dangerous class’ marked by its ‘hatred for the Jews’, as Valls said, is a political mistake — and incidentally shameful. It is also another proof of the French failure in its so-called integration policy. Researcher Malika Sorel-Sutter emphasised it recently in Le Figaro: “Trapping the immigration children into the ‘diversity box’ has no other effect but to strengthen the importation of conflict.”
The point, therefore, is not to wonder, as some intellectuals do, on how not to import Middle East quarrels into Europe: here they are. It should be, on the contrary, to know if and when any republican government is one day going to tackle the integration issue seriously in France. Especially when means exist, as Sorel-Sutter reminds us: “Integration consists in appropriating principles and values which constitute the identity of the welcoming people,” before concluding that as an example, “it is vital to restore the republican meritocracy” in France.
It is consequently possibly a long road before football gatherings — or solidarity demonstrations with whoever is slaughtered in any part of the world by a ruthless entity — can take place in France peacefully, without being disrupted by non-integrated elements. But it has little to do with ‘anti-Semitism’, or any supposedly French genetic ‘hatred for Israel’. It has to do first with France itself.
Luc Debieuvre is a French essayist and a lecturer at IRIS (Institut de Relations Internationales et Strategiques) and the FACO Law University of Paris.
