French Jews Worry Violence May Spread

Concern they might become ‘scapegoats’ if rioting takes on anti-Israel tone.

As France was plunged into a state of emergency Wednesday after nearly two weeks of rioting by poor and disenfranchised immigrant youth, some Jewish leaders worried that the uprising could morph into the kind of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel violence that gripped the country during the height of the second intifada.

Many of the rioters are Arab Muslims, and the concern is that Islamic groups could exploit the situation, shifting the focus away from the domestic issues thought to have touched off the riots — racism, urban poverty and the failures in immigrant absorption — and toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Some Jewish leaders even remarked on striking parallels between the images of masked teens hurling rocks and Molotov cocktails at the French riot police and Palestinian youth throwing stones at the Israeli army, though others downplayed the connection.

“We have seen these actions before, in the West Bank and in Gaza,” said Richard Prasquier, a Paris-based cardiologist and senior adviser to the CRIF, France’s Jewish community umbrella group. “It’s as if they’re replaying a little bit of Palestinian intifada against the French police.”

Prasquier said the urban guerrilla-style uprising, labeled the “French intifada” by some media outlets, has been particularly worrisome for the approximately 600,000 Jews in France.

“We are concerned as Frenchmen, and we are a little more concerned as Jews,” he said.

“When there are problems in these areas,” Prasquier said, referring to the hardscrabble suburban housing projects, home to many of the country’s 6 million Arabs, “Jews are always easy scapegoats.”

Rabbi Yossi Gorodetski, a Paris-based emissary for Chabad-Lubavitch, echoed these concerns.

“We don’t want it to turn into anything more than it is,” said Rabbi Gorodetski, an American who has lived in France for 13 years. “We don’t want it to take on an anti-Semitic or anti-Israel nature.”

He said the civil unrest, which started in the Paris suburbs and spread throughout France and to several other European cities in recent days, is an outgrowth of the anti-Semitic furor — synagogues have been firebombed, Jewish cemeteries desecrated, kipa-wearing Jews intimidated or assaulted — that has plagued French Jewry in recent years.

“It’s obvious that we were left out to dry for a certain amount of time,” Rabbi Gorodetski said, referring to what he sees as the government’s initial failure to acknowledge the scope of the anti-Semitic incidents. “Maybe if the French government had reacted properly when it was only affecting the Jewish community, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”

Had the response to the wave of anti-Semitic attacks been swifter and more severe, he said, “whoever is rioting and burning and attacking the entire French population might think twice about what they’re doing.”

Yonathan Arfi, a CRIF board member and the immediate past president of France’s powerful Jewish student union, UEJF, also sees more than a tenuous link between the uprising and the anti-Semitic violence that preceded it.

“In some ways we were the first victims of these riots,” Arfi said. “The same groups of people [perpetrating] the violent attacks against Jews are now targeting everyone.”

Still, Arfi said, the ongoing riots have more to do with France’s failure to integrate its large Arab and African populations than with either the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the schism between Islamic and Western values.

Unlike the anti-Semitic violence, blamed on misplaced anger about the Middle East conflict, the riots reflect France’s “profound problems” of poverty, unemployment and xenophobia, he said.

During the 1960s and ’70s, Jews and Arabs living in North Africa immigrated to France en masse. Since then the Jewish community, which benefited from services provided by Jewish social services organizations and did not suffer the same superficial racial discrimination of their Arab counterparts, has been largely integrated into France’s educational and professional establishment.

“It’s not a matter of law, it’s a matter of mentalities,” said Arfi, who compared the riots with those seen in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights and South Central Los Angeles in the early 1990s. “Arab people face discrimination when they’re looking for a job or a place to live.”

But violence, he said, is a poor catalyst for change.

“We have to be very harsh with the people burning cars,” Arfi said. “At the same time we need to develop a long-term solution to integrate [immigrants and their children] into French society.”

Still, some French Jews dismissed the idea that there is a connection between the current uprising and the groundswell of anti-Jewish incidents, which have waned significantly in recent months. Though two suburban Paris synagogues last week sustained damage in the riots — a Molotov cocktail blackened the door of a synagogue in the suburb of Pierrefitte on Nov. 3, and the next evening, a Friday night, a device was detonated outside the synagogue in the suburb of Garges-les-Gonesse — so too have several churches, schools, post offices, fire stations and public buses.

“For the moment it is not about the Jewish community,” said Annie Lellouche, who is Jewish and lives in Aubervilliers, a northern Paris suburb that has been particularly hard hit by the riots. “Two years ago it was worse for us, at the beginning of the war in Iraq. Now the problems are internal.”

“The rioters are not distinguishing between hospitals, schools or synagogues,” said Philip Carmel, international relations director for the Conference of European Rabbis.

The violence has affected mosques and churches, as well. At the beginning of the rioting, a mosque was damaged when a bomb containing tear gas was thrown through the window.

“The anti-Semitism we’ve been seeing over the past few years was a warning sign for these events,” Carmel said, referring to the rash of incidents that occurred at the height of the Palestinian intifada.

“It’s not that the French are anti-Semitic,” he said. “It’s that there is something deeply wrong with French society in its failure to integrate its North African youth.”

Although many of the rioters are descended from North African immigrants, local Islamic groups have condemned the violence, and analysts have been quick to point out that some of the perpetrators of the arsons and beatings come from sub-Saharan Africa.

The media’s comparisons between the French riots and the Palestinian intifada have come in for some criticism. Rabbi Gabriel Farhi, with the Liberal Movement of French Jews, wrote on a Jewish community Web site that while the term “intifada” might seem applicable from a certain point of view, the Palestinian uprisings against Israel are much more “difficult” and “complicated” than those of the French suburbs.

For many, the chaos on the French street recalled the civil unrest of May 1968, when the widespread student and worker protests that paralyzed France ultimately toppled the hard-line government of President Charles de Gaulle.

The battle cries of contemporary protesters feature shades of the socialist and anarchist rhetoric of that era, like “Politics is in the streets” and “No replastering, the structure is rotten.”

Rioters who spoke earlier this week with the French newspaper Le Monde said the insurgency is a fitting wakeup call to a government that has long ignored the plight of the nation’s underclass.

“We’re drowning,” said one.

Another said, “We’re rebelling against hate.” n

JTA contributed to this report.