Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  PART FIVE

  THE FACTS ON THE GROUND IN FRANCE

  MARIE BRENNER

  France’s Scarlet Letter

  IT WOULD TAKE many months for David de Rothschild to realize that what was happening to Jews in France was a powerful predictor of a war that was coming down history’s long stream. In May 2001, when he and a group of French business leaders arrived in Jerusalem for meetings with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and members of his Cabinet, he reluctantly agreed to speak to a reporter from the Jerusalem Post. Then fifty-eight and the head of the French branch of his family’s banking dynasty, he was just beginning to be aware of a wave of attacks on French Jews by French Muslims that would escalate into an unimaginable nightmare and affect France, the United States, and the Muslim and Jewish populations of both countries.

  Street protests against American and British military action in Iraq have escalated into attacks by Muslim youths on Jewish demonstrators, sparking fears of a new wave of anti-Semitism across France.

  —London Sunday Telegraph, April 6, 2003

  Rothschild was actively involved in Jewish organizations in France, but, as he told friends, he was not particularly croyant, or religious, by nature. In restaurants, however, if he overheard a conversation that struck him as anti-Semitic, he was known to walk over to the table and silently present his card. That day in Jerusalem, he did not yet comprehend how dangerous the situation in France had become. The facts were these: Between January and May 2001 there had been more than 300 attacks against Jews. From Marseille to Paris, synagogues had been destroyed, school buses stoned, children assaulted. Yet very few of the incidents had been reported in the French media, which have a distinctly pro-Palestinian tilt. So Rothschild was largely uninformed concerning the accurate numbers. He and his friends were still operating in a near vacuum, because of what is called in France la barrière du silence, which minimizes and mystifies reporting on French Jewish matters and the Middle East.

  Rothschild would later be disturbed that he had not been made more aware faster of the degree of violence, which would be perceived outside France as the return of classic antiSemitism and anti-Americanism and would infect France and much of Europe over the next two years. By the spring of this year, the number of hate crimes had risen above 1,000, and the relationship of the United States, poised to declare a war on Iraq, and France, implacably opposed to such a war, was glacial.

  ABOUT SIX MILLION Muslims live in France, nearly 10 percent of the population, a potential voting bloc. In contrast, there are only about 650,000 Jews, but it is the third-largest Jewish population in the world, after Israel and the United States. The victims of the attacks appeared to live mostly in working-class areas in the banlieues, or suburbs, on the outskirts of Paris, a laboratory of assimilation where much of the unemployed Muslim population also lives. The situation, Rothschild later told me, was fraught with complexity. In addition to a large number of distinguished Arab intellectuals, France was also home to cells of terrorists, fundamentalist imams, and firms with strong business ties to Baghdad. When Rothschild arrived in Israel in May 2001, he had also left behind him another, subtler struggle, going on behind closed doors, between the establishment Ashkenazi Jews of central Paris and the pieds-noirs, French citizens formerly of North Africa, many of them lower-middle-class Sephardic Jews who live in the suburbs. The Sephardic communities in the Paris outskirts were the principal targets of anti-Western paranoia spewing up out of the Middle East. A widely shared position of the upper-class Jewish establishment in France was to let such things alone and not jeter de l’huile sur le feu (throw oil on the fire).

  Rothschild and the Jewish intellectual establishment would be caught in the vise of a vicious debate at a time of intense political correctness in France. Their country was marginalized as a world power and owed billions of dollars by Iraq for the brisk trade between the two countries. In addition, before the 1991 Gulf War, France had been a major supplier of weapons to Iraq. Yet France trumpeted its moral superiority. By the time Rothschild saw the reporter from the Jerusalem Post, France was too busy “feeding the crocodile,” as one historian remarked, to notice the danger that lurked within. In May 2001, Rothschild was worried principally about the growing popularity of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right-wing candidate for president. Notoriously anti-Semitic—Hitler’s gas chambers were a “minor detail” in World War II, he has said—Le Pen had won 15 percent of the vote in 1995 on an anti-foreigner hate platform, and was strong in the polls for the 2002 elections. Rothschild believed, he told the reporter in Jerusalem, that the wave of attacks was likely coming from “neo-Nazis, a hostile, aggressive, anti-Semitic, right-wing population, among which you may have some Moslems. But it’s not being led by the Moslems.”

  Rothschild was careful with his language. “The Moslems who have chosen France live there normally, not with the aim of doing any terrorist activity,” he said. “I promise you that in the last ten, fifteen years I haven’t received any kind of anti-Semitic letter, any swastika, nothing like that. . . . Possibly because I am privileged, possibly because I live in a protected environment. . . . I personally do not feel anti-Semitism.” Within hours of its publication, his comment would rocket through E-mails in the working-class areas of Paris and be talked about in catastrophic terms, inflaming an oddball activist cop who had taken the plight of France’s Jews as his mission. It was but one small piece of a dilemma that would grow imperceptibly into a cataclysm as America and France came to a stunning break in their relationship on the eve of the U.S.-led war with Iraq. Rothschild was still trying to analyze the mystery that had led to an international crisis when he spoke on the phone with me this past March. His voice rose as he said, “Who was inhibited to talk? Why did it take so long? Whose fault was it? What was the reason?” He concluded sadly, “These are questions that are hard to answer.”

  I HAVE A STORY to tell. It begins on the northern outskirts of Paris in the town of Le Blanc–Mesnil in October 2000. Le Blanc–Mesnil is half a dozen stops on the Métro line from Charles de Gaulle Airport, a community of matchbox row houses with red tile roofs and cafés where the menu of falafel specialties is written in French and Arabic. It is inhabited by factory hands, accountants, teachers, and garment-industry workers. Along with Drancy, St.-Denis, and a cluster of other towns, Le Blanc–Mesnil is part of District 93, the “Red belt” historically governed by Communist mayors, where for years the underboil of ethnic hatred has been rumbling. Since the 1980s, thousands of Muslim immigrants have moved into the Red belt, a former outpost of French colonials and Sephardic Jews who had emigrated from Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco decades earlier.

  In October 2000, seven months before Rothschild visited Jerusalem, Sammy Ghozlan was home on Avenue Henri Barbusse in Le Blanc–Mesnil, planning the coming appearances of his dance bands. Ghozlan had just retired from the French police force after a long career as commissioner of the department of Seine–Saint-Denis. He was at the top of his game, known all over the Jewish community of Paris as le poulet casher, the kosher chicken, “poulet,” like “flic,” being slang for “cop.” Ghozlan was a pied-noir reared in Algeria. His father had been a police officer in Constantine, a man of influence until suddenly one day he was not, and fled, like thousands of others, during the Algerian war. Sammy Ghozlan was obsessed with his Frenchness. He loved Voltaire and drank the best wines. Ghozlan’s greatest passion was music; he had played piano and violin all his life, and had developed a Vegas-style Hasidic act into a thriving business, with two Sammy Ghozlan bands working the French Bar Mitzvah and wedding circuit. Ghozlan, as conductor, always wore a fresh tuxedo, a white satin scarf, and a perfectly pleated cummerbund. What little English he knew came from lip-synching to Wayne Newton and John Travolta. “I Will Survive” was his signature closer. He was deeply religious and would not pick up the telephone from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday.

  EARLY IN HIS POLICE CAREER, Ghozlan had become a minor celebrity when he stopped the violence in the
projects at Aulnay-sous-Bois, the next town over. He was like a detective in a film noir; his method was to negotiate, to suggest to his adversary that they were allies. He was convinced that success had come to him because he understood the nuances of the term compte à régler (a score to settle). For the exile, life in the banlieues was all about settling scores. Ghozlan had learned Arabic in Algeria and spoke it frequently in the streets so that he could put himself in the skin of the Arabs he had grown up with. “When the Arabs arrived in France, they were humiliated by the French,” he said. “They were not appreciated. They suffered a lot because of that. This is the reason for their rage. They want to take their revenge for the Algerian war.” It was, he said, a way to show their identity.

  On the night of October 3, 2000, Ghozlan was already missing police work, but his wife, Monique, had lectured him about not second-guessing or dropping in on the new commissioner of Seine–Saint-Denis. It was time to move on, she told him; he had no reason not to. He was making 5,000 euros per Bar Mitzvah and had months of bookings in France and Switzerland. Besides, mandatory retirement was not negotiable in France. At fifty-eight he was ready to hit the Sephardic European party circuit in his new life as not only le poulet casher but also the schmoozer and magnet for neighborhood crime gossip. He felt he had earned a festive third act, and he had all the celebrity he needed with a weekly show on 94.8 Judaiques FM radio. There, in his four-room office and studio up a narrow stairwell in the Fifth Arrondissement, close to the Panthéon and the Sorbonne, he could let fly, showcasing Jewish pop stars such as Enrico Macias, promoting the Ghozlan bands, and dispensing crime-protection advice to callers.

  THAT SAME NIGHT at a two-room synagogue in Villepinte, a few towns away from Le Blanc–Mesnil, smoke billowed up from the kitchen and out the classroom windows of the religious school. Jacques Grosslerner, a leader of the Jewish community, immediately reached out to the most experienced person he could think of—Ghozlan. “There is a fire at Villepinte,” Grosslerner told him. “Are you au courant?” It was ten o’clock. Ghozlan dialed the prefect of the district and repeated the question: “Are you au courant?” Then he got in his car and drove to Villepinte. The prefect reached Ghozlan on his cell phone. “It is nothing more than a trash fire,” he told him. At the synagogue an hour later, however, Ghozlan ran into a detective he knew who told him, “It is no trash fire. We found six Molotov cocktails.”

  Ghozlan went right to work. He dug a plastic bag out of his car and swept up bits of charred wood, blackened brick, and ash. Within months he would be on a collision course with the French police and several members of the establishment in Paris who ran major Jewish organizations. In Le Blanc–Mesnil, with no resources to draw on except his black plastic address book, Ghozlan was quickly enmeshed in the rising tide of what French Jewish intellectuals would tag “soft-wave antiSemitism,” a new form disguised as anti-Americanism and pro-Palestinianism. It would soon grow into a constant fear on the part of French Jews, a concern bordering on panic in synagogues across suburban America, and forums and articles in the American media. In Europe, however, terms recalling the Nazi era, such as Kristallnacht, were raised only occasionally, and then in a context that portrayed the Israelis as the new storm troopers. The title of an editorial in the New York Daily News was succinct: “The Poison’s Back: Europeans Call It Anti-Zionism, but It’s Really the Old Anti-Semitism.”

  Ghozlan could not foresee any of this as he quietly gathered soot and brick from Villepinte in the moonlight. But for the first time since he had escaped Algeria as a teenager— “You have three days to leave,” an Algerian policeman had told his family—he was feeling an unease that bordered on dread. Over the next ten days, four more synagogues were burned in greater Paris, and nineteen arson attempts were reported against synagogues and Jewish homes and businesses. It occurred to Ghozlan that soon he might be back in police work. Within months he had set up a hot line and a one-man investigative unit called S.O.S. Truth and Security to monitor the trouble. He financed the operation with the money he made from the Ghozlan Hasidic bands.

  ON THE AFTERNOON of October 7, 2000, Clément Weill-Raynal, a reporter and legal correspondent for the France 3 television network, was walking through the Place de la République when he saw hundreds of people massed for a demonstration. Paris is the city of demonstrations—there are so many that a caption in The Economist once satirized the French love of public display as “Another Day, Another Demo.” At first Weill-Raynal tried to ignore the noise, the agitation, and the flags of Hezbollah, Hamas, and certain far-left organizations. “They were shouting, ‘Death to the Jews! Kill the Jews! Sharon is a killer!’ It was the moment when we had arrived at the point that I was afraid of for many years. The junction of leftists, pro-Palestinians, and Arabs had created a new form of anti-Semitism,” Weill-Raynal said.

  Anti-Semitism in France had been considered a right-wing phenomenon that historically had its roots in the Vatican and the libel of the greedy Jew as Christ-killer. It had fueled the crowds howling “Death to the Jews!” in the streets near L’École Militaire during the Dreyfus Affair in 1895, and seethed through Vichy with the deportation of 76,000 French Jews to the death camps. The new form of anti-Semitism, Weill-Raynal understood, was different: it was coming from the left, part of the movement known in France as le néo-gauchisme, and it was connected to the country’s socialist politics and the difficulties of assimilating the large French Muslim population. It was camouflaged as anti-Israel politics, but the issue was immense and complex. Only in recent years has France recognized ethnic subcultures. It is illegal to count race or ethnicity in its census figures, and impossible to record accurate figures for its minorities. There is a spirit of universality in the school system, and a national curriculum. The Jewish issue was a dim, secondary preoccupation if it registered at all in French minds.

  Although there were Jews on every level of political influence and intellectual stature in the country, the policy of modern France toward its Jews had been set during the time of Napoleon. “The Jews should be denied everything as a nation,” remarked Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre in 1789, “but granted everything as individuals.” Frenchness was what mattered. As one writer said to me, “I am French first, Jewish second. ” The most powerful Jews in France rarely identified themselves as Jews. To do so, one was being “Judeocentric,” a term used with contempt. Additional complicating factors were a long-standing French-intellectual romantic attraction to Third World guerrillas, guilt over the slaughter in the Algerian war, and France’s need for Iraq’s oil and trading alliances from Saudi Arabia to Morocco. All of this was filtered through the thrum of dormant traditional anti-Semitism, which could be revived without much provocation. “Old wine in new bottles,” one historian called it.

  AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS at France 3, Weill-Raynal was well aware of the slanted coverage concerning the Palestinian-Israeli struggle. “We are not Israel,” he told me. “The motto ‘Jews is news’ is a joke around here.” Members of his family had been deported to the Nazi death camps from Drancy, but he was closer in spirit to the “assimilated” Jews of central Paris.

  Weill-Raynal had been initiated early into an understanding of the barrier of silence in the media. The standard was set at Le Monde, which characterizes the Israeli settlers as “colons” (colonizers). In 1987, in the days after the first intifada—the fight waged in the West Bank and Gaza settlements—Weill-Raynal was told by his editors not to file reports on the Middle East.

  “You are too biased,” one told him.

  “I asked them, ‘How am I biased?’ The answer was simple. I was Jewish.”

  The editor explained, “You cannot be fair.”

  “It is a story I know very well. I know the country. I know the people. I know the roots of the problem,” Weill-Raynal said.

  “No,” the editor insisted. “You are too biased.”

  FRUSTRATED, WEILL-RAYNAL began to keep meticulous notes on Agence France-Presse, the wire service, a maj
or source of information in the country. He immediately noticed an item the service used over and over to explain the violence in the Middle East, a controversial visit Ariel Sharon had made to the Temple Mount, the shrine known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, in September 2000. “This ran again and again without any counterexplanation of the terrorist attacks or the provocation,” Weill-Raynal said. “There was no subsequent reporting to place the visit in context. On the anniversary of the second intifada, they put out a revised report, and it was almost as biased. Now the news agency explained that, yes, in fact there were two versions of this incident—the Palestinian and the Israeli. It was as if it was inconceivable that the French might understand that there was a conflicting point of view.”

  Just days after the demonstration, Weill-Raynal received a barrage of phone calls from Sammy Ghozlan about the burning of a synagogue in Trappes. “This is very serious,” Ghozlan said before he rang off to call Le Parisien, a tabloid that covers Paris and suburban news. Weill-Raynal knew Ghozlan as an activist and a minor local celebrity—the Sephardic Columbo with his Hasidic bands.

  “What is this so-called synagogue burning at Trappes?” an editor had asked him.

  “It is not ‘so-called,’ ” Weill-Raynal had said. “It is an anti-Semitic attack.”

  “It was a true French moment,” Weill-Raynal told me. “The editor immediately changed the subject and turned to the reporter next to me. He said, ‘Georges, what are you working on?’ The next day Libération, a left-wing paper, ran it on the front page. The editor came to me and said, ‘You were right.’ ” But no assignment to report the attack was forthcoming.

  As Weill-Raynal walked through the Place de la République that day, he was sickened by the screams of “Kill the Jews!” Hundreds of protesters crowded the streets in front of the Holiday Inn on the Right Bank. TV cameras focused on signs that read SHARON KILLER. For years, he says, he had accumulated reams of skewed reporting from Agence France-Presse. Returning to his apartment near the Place de la Bastille, he turned on the TV. “It was catastrophic,” he said. “No one had reported what I saw, what I heard. No one had felt it was newsworthy to report ‘Kill the Jews.’ ” Weill-Raynal realized that in all of Paris there was only one potential outlet for his dispatch, Judaiques FM. Jewish radio had arrived in Paris when the socialist government of the 1980s changed the licensing restrictions. The station, with a sizable audience in France, has become a powerful independent outlet of information for intellectuals and journalists. When I visited the studio, it seemed to be out of a different era. Just a few blocks from the Sorbonne, it could have been a radio station in wartime London or Nepal.