by brett kline
jta
When 23-year-old Ilan Halimi was kidnapped and tortured to death by an anti-Semitic gang outside Paris in February 2006, Nicolas Sarkozy — then France’s interior minister — was among those who turned out to protest the grisly murder.
The minister said he took personally the failure by police to find Halimi before he died, and said as much to Halimi’s mother.
When Sarkozy — now France’s president — announced recently that he was severing diplomatic contacts with Syria because of its nefarious role in Lebanese politics, it was just the latest example of the sort of behavior that has endeared him to French Jewry.
“The community here is thrilled, and so am I,” said Nicole Guedj, a Jew who is a former minister and member of France’s highest legal body, the Conseil d’Etat. “Nicolas Sarkozy really understands as president of France what the word security means to the state of Israel, and says it publicly.”
Since Sarkozy assumed the presidency half a year ago, he has shifted France away from the anti-American sentiment that marked the last few years under Jacques Chirac, hardened the country’s line toward Iran and promised to uphold Israel’s security in pushing for peace in the Middle East while maintaining France’s strong ties to the Arab world.
After years of stepped-up anti-Semitism and questions about the safety and future of Jews in France, most Jews here have welcomed Sarkozy’s ascendancy.
“We have rarely heard such words of support for Israeli security from a French president,” said Meyer Habib, the vice president of the CRIF umbrella organization of French Jewry.
“When the United States issued its report that Iran had stopped working on nuclear missile heads in 2003, the French president immediately said that this does not change a thing,” noted Habib, referring to the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate.
Sarkozy, Habib said, “is maintaining a tough stance against any nuclear work in Iran, much more so than Chirac would have done, and he has full support on that from the Jews here, who believe that any nuclear warheads would be aimed at Israel.”
Others expressed more ambivalence about Sarkozy, particularly about his invitation to Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who spent five days visiting France in December.
“[That] bothered many French Jews,” French Jewish fundraiser Gil Taieb said at a recent charity dinner of the French United Jewish Appeal. Sarkozy “wants to sell nuclear power stations to Gaddafi, who is nuts and dangerous,” he added.
Sarkozy is the Catholic son of a Hungarian aristocrat father and French mother whose father was a Sephardic Jew from Thessaloniki, Greece.
Habib, who met often with Sarkozy during his years as interior minister, said Sarkozy has received anti-Semitic hate mail from French right-wing extremists throughout his political career, starting from when he was mayor of Neuilly, a Paris suburb with a sizable Jewish population.
The head of the United French Jewish Social Fund, Pierre Besnainou, who is the former president of the European Jewish Congress, says French Jews also like Sarkozy for his pro-business policies. Among other things, Sarkozy has pushed to do away with France’s mandatory 35-hour workweek.
“President Sarkozy is sending out two strong messages to the French: that America is our friend and there is nothing wrong with making money,” said Besnainou, a self-made millionaire.
Though France has Europe’s largest Jewish community, with some 600,000 people in a total population of approximately 60 million, France has lagged behind Germany, Britain and even Belgium in trade ties with Israel.
At a recent gala held by the France-Israel Chamber of Commerce, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Haim Ramon said he wants that to change under Sarkozy.
“Given the new environment and ongoing contact, we want to see France-Israel trade relations double in the next five years,” Ramon said.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California