Bombings and banlieues

As the world recovers from the terrorist bombing of two of Istanbul's synagogues on Saturday, France is dealing with the repercussions of another attack that took place the same morning: the torching of a Jewish school building in Gagny, a town north of Paris. Though no one was hurt in Gagny, the incident has revealed in France another microcosm of the Middle East.

"When a Jew is attacked in France, it is all France in its entirety that is attacked," French President Jacques Chirac said in response to the arson attack. And memories can indeed be bitter in the country of the Dreyfus Affair and the Vichy collaborators.

But today's French anti-Semitism hardly resembles its World War II ancestor, as it mostly emanates from the Muslim minority, at least in its most obvious form. A recent editorial in the newspaper Le Monde criticized this "ever more virulent Islamism" which "no longer hesitates to make of the 'Jews' the cause of all the earth's evils."

The new wave of anti-Jewish violence began in the fall of 2000 in France when several synagogues were firebombed and a car drove full-speed into a crowd leaving a Jewish prayer service. The shocked president of the Jewish community of Trappes exclaimed: "Not even during the Nazi occupation were synagogues attacked in France! The last time a synagogue was burned was in the Middle Ages!"

In the spring of 2002, more synagogues were burned in Paris, Marseilles, Lyons, and Strasbourg. Jews were attacked in the streets; as a result, a Jewish human rights organization, the Wiesenthal Center, issued a travel advisory warning American Jews against traveling to Paris.

Many of the anti-Jewish attacks have been attributed to young Muslims of North African descent, who often live in poor, segregated banlieues outside of major cities. These beurs, as French-born Arabs are called in French slang, are said to sympathize with the Palestinian grievances against Israel and to take out these feelings on Jews.

No matter that it was a Jew, Alain Geismar, who started the French pro-Palestinian movement and protested against "Israeli intransigence."

The "new" French anti-Semitism has at least subsided somewhat since it sprung up at the beginning of the Second Intifada in Israel. The Interior Ministry has counted "only" 247 anti-Jewish attacks during the first eight months of 2003, compared to 647 in the same period of 2002, according to The New York Times.

Some of France's antagonized Jews have had enough -- more than twice as many emigrated to Israel in 2002 as did in 2001.

But the response of France's leadership has demonstrated its recognition that the new anti-Semitism is closely tied to the problems of Muslims in France. The government will spend up to $8 billion on urban renewal in areas with concentrated Muslim populations, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin announced Monday.

Though nothing excuses violence of the sort that French Jews have suffered, the French system also inflicts a sort of structural violence on much of its Muslim population, which remains largely socially, economically, and politically disenfranchised.

And though the violent acts seem to stem mostly from the Arab population, the traditional French establishment must also share a part of the blame. The government was quite slow to react to the violence: an Interior Ministry report from late 2001 dismissed the numerous fire bombings, attacks, and assaults as the work of "petty criminals." "Inconsequential" verbal attacks included groups of youths gathering in front of synagogues chanting "death to the Jews."

The Socialist party revealed some of its own prejudices when a leading member, Pascal Boniface, published a letter in Le Monde blaming the Jews for the attacks due to their "blind" support of the actions of the Israeli government.

But the past year or so has given such attitudes time to mature. A recent editorial in Le Monde acknowledged that the condemnation of Israel by European leaders "has lowered the borderline, evidently, which was already uncertain for some, between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism."

These events have also led to the formation of a new unit of the French police to investigate "racist and anti-Semitic crimes" and to protect Jewish schools and synagogues. The new French Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has been awarded the 2003 Tolerance Prize from the Wiesenthal Center.

The new urban renewal methods proposed by Raffarin are another important step. The problem of inclusiveness is global, and it has more nuances that Israel's barbed-wire fences might suggest. At this difficult time, France would do well to embrace its pluralism like the Parisian singer Mouloudji did in the 1950's: "Catholic by my mother / Moslem by my father / A little Jewish by my son / Buddhist on principle."