BONIFACISME
Last August, Pascal Boniface, a top foreign policy adviser to Lionel Jospin, wrote an open "Letter to an Israeli Friend" that appeared in Le Monde. The echo of the "Letters to a German Friend" that Albert Camus had written in 1943 and 1944 was not lost on Jewish readers. The lawyer Pierre Francois Veil remarked that if Boniface had wanted to reach an Israeli friend, he could have written to the Jerusalem Post. The letter was, of course, addressed to the Jews of France, and many read a threat in its closing lines: "In France," Boniface wrote, "should it permit too much impunity to the Israeli government, the Jewish community could also be the loser in the medium term. The Arab/Muslim community is certainly less organized, but it will be a counterweight, and it will soon be numerically preponderant, if it is not already."
"I gave my advice not because of the weight of the community but on principle," Boniface said in an interview. The votes of the two communities are about even. Muslims may number as many as 8 million, but only half are citizens. Of the remaining 4 million, 2.5 million are not yet old enough to vote, and of the 1.5 million that remain after they're taken out, over half won't vote. But at a time when Jews were being threatened in the streets of France, it seemed that Jews were not being lectured on electoral clout but outright intimidated: Break your solidarity with Israel, the deal was, and we'll leave you in peace; otherwise, you'll be lopped out of the national community. Boniface is not alone in his opinions; the Coordinated Appeal for a Just Peace in the Middle East (CAPJPO) has asked French Jews to make a "critique of Israeli policy." As Alain Finkielkraut noted, CAPJPO has never asked Muslims to pressure Palestinians to stop their suicide attacks. Boniface was soon being accused of the same thing: making Jews'--but no one else's--membership in the national community contingent on the acceptable behavior of a foreign country. This attitude was given a witty shorthand--bonifacisme--in the Jewish press, which condemned it as a form of anti-Semitism.
"I defy anyone to find a single line in any of my work that is anti-Semitic," said Boniface in an interview. He noted that his opinions were fairly generally held. "My students have changed their opinion, too," he said. "Twenty years ago when Israel invaded Lebanon they were evenly divided. Now they are overwhelmingly pro-Palestine." Lionel Jospin followed Boniface's line throughout his campaign, condemning "communitarianism" and insisting to Jewish, though not to Arab, groups that "we must not import into France the problems of the Middle East." But the "evenhandedness" of Jacques Chirac on communitarian matters was almost worse. During a visit to Paris's grand mosque the week before the vote, Chirac firmly condemned the burning of (many) synagogues (in his own country), but assured the gathered dignitaries that if anyone were to harm a mosque (which no one has done) or a church (like the Church of the Nativity, in another country, where Israeli troops had surrounded Palestinian terrorists holding hostages), it would be equally bad.
And yet "the problems of the Middle East," as Jospin calls them, are all that France wants to think about. It has long alarmed Jews that non-Jews are showing up less and less at their marches. Since October 2000, they have wondered why their fellow citizens were not marching against really existing anti-Semitism in France, the way they used to march against the safely-part-of-history version. ("A demonstration on 13 January 2002 of Jewish leadership assembled in the Creteil synagogue--the latest victim of violence--was marked by the sparseness of non-Jewish sympathizers," noted Shimon Samuels of the Wiesenthal Center. "Indeed, the town's deputy mayor used the occasion to publicly revile the Sharon government and was met by jeers from the audience.")
On April 6, pro-Palestinian marches were held across the country. On April 7, the CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish organizations, held a march for Israel. They decided also to march against the anti-Semitic attacks of the preceding days. Three of the 21 members of the CRIF board decided to make only the second part of the march. One of those, Olivier Guland of the Jewish Tribune, complained, "It's the first time Jewish institutions in France have given the impression that the defense of their own interests is not the same as the defense of the Republic's values." The most commonly held sign--"Synagogues br les, republique en danger"--gave the message that the interests of France and its Jewish community were pretty much identical. But whether that's the message France will get is anybody's guess.
