The safest place for French Jews

In light of the recent multiple stabbing on an Israeli bus, and the missile strike on the Golan that killed two Israeli soldiers and wounded seven – an apparent Hezbollah retaliation for an Israeli strike that killed a senior Hezbollah commander and an Iranian General – I found myself thinking in a broader context about the current controversy of Jewish life in France, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s aggressive exhortation to French Jews to emigrate to Israel (an idea that picked up a lot of media steam for a while), and whether or not leaving for Israel would indeed be an emigration to greater safety.

According to JewishVirtualLibrary.org, the number of people killed in Israel by terror attacks since 2005 is 118.  Once could no doubt quibble with the number plus or minus a handful, but this is a significant multiple of the number killed in France by terrorism over the same period.  According to Wikipedia, military deaths, beginning with a the Hezbollah War of 2006, and including the two soldiers killed on the Golan come to 229, with civilian deaths during military operations at 105.  The military and civilian wounded add up to more than 3,000.

Clearly these numbers dwarf any parallel statistics in France, which I visited twice this year.  On both visits, I saw Jews in the airport, the Metro, the buses, on the streets, and in shops wearing kepahs.  While I don’t doubt that post the January attack at the Kosher Market, there is increased trepidation on the streets of Paris amongst Jews who have lived there for generations, but would they actually be buying into a safer situation in Israel, where lone-wolf attacks exceed those of France – killing at least a dozen over the last few months – and where Jews are much easier to find.

Obviously, when Prime Minister Netanyahu encourages French Jews to move to Israel, he’s thinking more than statistics.  Beside the politics, there is the legitimate question of living more openly as Jews, a practice that may be experiencing some increased inhibition in France.  But this is also a man (along with certain ministers) whose pugnacious promulgation of a very aggressive policy on nearly every front, as much as insures a continued, if not heightened, air of conflict in Israel for the foreseeable future.

Chairman of the Labor Party, Yitzhak Herzog, who has recently blamed Netanyahu for a “strong lack of personal security” among Israelis.

“The reality is very clear. There is no sense of personal security. Not in Tel Aviv, not in Jerusalem which is divided by concrete barricades and not (in the communities) near Gaza. This is a real problem and the citizens of Israel will need to make a decision,” he recently told Israel Radio.

Can it be that Netanyahu is more than a little responsible for this lack of security for Jews in and out of Israel.  He was an early persuasive contributor to the American Neo-con dream of ousting Saddam Hussein.  Now the Iraq War has spawned ISIS, which has brought Hezbollah into Syria.  How’s that working out for Jewish security?

In a recent commentary that found favor on the Jewish Right, Thomas Friedman, in a New York Times editorial stated, “…it is not good for us or the Muslim world to pretend that this spreading jihadist violence isn’t coming out of their faith community. It is coming mostly, but not exclusively, from angry young men and preachers on the fringe of the Sunni Arab and Pakistani communities in the Middle East and Europe.  If Western interventions help foster violent Islamic reactions, we should reduce them.”

If that’s true for “Western interventions,” perhaps it’s also true for certain Israeli policies and practices.  Israel has referred roughly 100 incidents of the most recent Gaza war for legal investigation.  Perhaps it’s time for Jews to stop putting their heads in the sand about the fact that Israeli actions and policies probably do have some inciting relationship to attacks on Jews outside Israel.  The simplest tracking of anti-Semitic incidents in France, for example, shows that the number of such incidents spikes significantly during Gaza wars.  Fifty years of occupation is going to inject not just a philosophical, but an emotional component into some people’s attitudes, motivations, and actions.

Right now safety for Jews in many places seems to be at a low point.  To ascribe all of the threat as stemming from innate anti-Semitism, to take no responsibility whatsoever for actions or policies that are clearly contributing to that lack of security, only ensures that risk will increase, not be mitigated.  If Israel wants to truly encourage emigration, it should worry more about putting its own house in order and becoming a magnet for Jews who seek a bit of calm from the worldwide storm.

Mitch Paradise is a writer and producer living in Los Angeles and teaches in the Los Angeles Unified School District.