When the Algerian War of Independence broke out (in 1954), the Jews, being proud French citizens, sided with the oppressor against the oppressed.
More than that. When the French army showed signs of wanting to leave, the settlers set up an underground military organization, the OAS, to terrorize the Muslims. The local Jews were involved. Gradually, the French settlers started to return to France, and the Jews remained, the OAS then becoming almost a Jewish organization.
I was somehow involved. The Algerian liberation organization, the FLN, feeling that victory was near, was very concerned that the Jews would leave Algeria. Since the Jews played a large role in Algerian economic and intellectual life, the FLN leaders feared that such an exodus would be a great loss to the emerging state.
They approached me with the request to set up an organization in Israel to support Algerian independence. When I set up the Israeli Council for Algerian Independence, they asked us to publish material in Hebrew, which they translated into French and distributed among the Jews.
To no avail. In the end, Charles de Gaulle set a date for the French army's withdrawal, more than a million French settlers fled almost overnight to France, and with them practically all the Jews.
Algerian Jews did not come to Israel. They were too well integrated in French culture. Moroccan and Tunisian Jews split: the educated went to France, all the others came here.
What is happening now is the continuation of that Algerian conflict on French soil. The hatred that once ruled the streets of Algiers and Oran is being fought out in the streets of Paris and Marseilles.
Tragic? Indeed. Sad? Certainly. Anti-Semitism -- not at all. It has nothing to do with this old European scourge.
TO GET a real picture one has to compare the number of Muslim acts of violence against Jews in France with the number of Christian French acts of violence against Muslims.
I have seen no such statistics, probably because France insists that there is no difference between Frenchmen and women of all colors, creeds and races.
However, I would confidently bet that incidents against Muslims vastly outnumber incidents against Jews.
French neo-Fascism, led by the very able Marine Le Pen, is entirely centered on hatred of the Muslims, while doing everything possible to flatter the Jews. Some Jews are even active in her party. She admires us, she loves us, she even threw her own father out because he could not restrain himself from uttering phrases that reflected some residual anti-Semitism.
SO WHERE is the present scare of French anti-Semitism coming from?
Ah, there are several good reasons.
Basically, Zionism and anti-Semitism are twins. It is modern European anti-Semitism that created modern Zionism. As mentioned, Herzl turned into a Zionist when he saw the (French) anti-Semites. My family came to Palestine because of (German) anti-Semitism. So, more or less, did all the Israeli Jews.
One could say that if anti-Semitism did not exist, the Zionists would have had to invent it.
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