An interesting backstory to Benjamin Netanyahu’s very prominent presence at the solidarity rally in Paris over the weekend. It turns out that President Hollande initially sent a back channel message asking Netanyahu not to attend. And, to my surprise, Netanyahu complied. The Shin Bet wasn’t crazy, it seems, about the security challenges in any case. So Netanyahu agreed. At least at first.
Why would Hollande want Netanyahu not to attend? It’s a request that’s easy to demagogue. But it is neither surprising nor unreasonable. The French government is trying to keep the Middle East conflict off the streets of France. And Netanyahu’s presence visibly reinjects it into the mix. Netanyahu is also in the midst of an election battle for his political life. So whether he wants to or not, everything he does tied to the kosher grocery massacre is inherently political, inherently part of his campaign. It’s unavoidable.
More complex is Netanyahu’s and the Israeli government’s relationship to French Jewry – a topic I discussed on Friday.
The Israeli government is ideologically, politically and financially invested in getting French Jews to immigrate to Israel. Israel and the Jewish Agency take this stance with all Jews worldwide. But France is a special case. There are a lot of Jews in France – over half a million, the third largest Jewish population in the world after Israel and the United States. And French Jews are under a particular threat. That threat invokes both Israel’s self-appointed role of protector and refuge for diaspora Jews – something elemental to Zionism. But it’s also an opportunity – to put it frankly. A population under threat is more easily encouraged to emigrate than one that is secure.
But part of what is happening in France – and to a lesser extent in other European countries – is that Jews are being targeted as de facto Israelis. This may sound like I’m saying these attacks are rooted in hostility to Israel, not anti-Semitism. I’m not. In this setting, in practice, they’re the same. But the French government is trying to press the point that French Jews are French, as French as anyone else. So the different interests, different ideologies, different essential beliefs are in a real tension. Hollande wanted a demonstration of unity, not one that polarized again around Israel.
But as I said, Netanyahu actually acceded to the request, according to Haaretz. As did Mahmoud Abbas.
So what happened?
But then Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennet – two erstwhile Netanyahu allies of the right, who each lead their own parties going into the hotly contested March 2015 election.Their interest in appearing is straightforward and straightforwardly political. Once it was announced that they were going, Netanyahu decided he was too. Then Abbas also announced he was coming.
