As a Zionist who believes in and supports Jewish self-determination in the Jewish homeland, without undue pressures from outside influences, I don’t comment on internal Israeli politics very often. Sometimes, however, it seems necessary to point out that Haaretz will really go to any lengths to slander the country’s current Prime Minister, without regard to facts and without regard to the effect that its words have. A headline in Thursday’s “newspaper” described Netanyahu’s invitation to French Jews as “so offensive,” for the patently false reason that France “is protecting Jews.”
The assertion that France is adequately protecting the Jewish community would be laughable if the consequences of the lack of such protection were not so tragic. Just last week, Tablet catalogued the past year’s anti-semitic incidents in that country. January of 2014 began with protesters yelling “Jew, France is not yours.” This was followed by no less than eight physical assaults on Jews because they were Jews, an arson, and a bomb plot. December of 2014 saw the brutal rape of a 19-year old woman who was told that it was because she was Jewish. All of this culminated, obviously, in the horrific murders at the Hyper Casher kosher supermarket. Of course, all of this year’s events were presaged by the equally appalling 2012 attack in Toulouse that killed three children and a rabbi.
It’s true, as Haaretz noted, that the French Prime Minister Manuel Valls gave an impassioned speech denouncing the increase in antisemitism in France, but the speech appears to have gotten a chilly reception. Meanwhile, the Jewish Agency tells a story of a woman who is asked to remove the mezuzah from her door so not to “endanger everyone” in her building.
It’s not clear whether the French are unable or unwilling to protect French Jews, but intent is beside the point. No reasonable observer could possibly think that France has fulfilled its obligation to its Jewish community, and the only possible reason to say otherwise is for the express purpose of maligning Netanyahu for his recent statements. Haaretz has made its partisan agenda known, and, increasingly, its readers are not members of the Israeli public but Israel’s international detractors. Disparaging the Prime Minister — in English — to a hostile international audience serves no one other than the Haaretz staff.
