The defensive and guarded Arab reaction to the self-pronounced and reported pro-Israel and pro-America statements of Nicolas Paul Stephane Sarkozy de Nagy-Bocsa, who was sworn in as the new President of France on May 16, as well as his Jewish connection and that of his foreign policy team, have alerted Arab capitals and public opinion to a possibly imminent break with his country’s more than a five-decade old balanced approach to Arab conflicts and the Arab – Israeli conflict in particular.
Acting on a campaign pledge to a clean break with France's political past, Sarkozy’s declared aim to change France could yet prove easier said than done, but nonetheless Sarkozy has grouped together a foreign policy team that could vindicate Arab fears; however Sarkozy’s pragmatism could not but take French huge interests in the Arab world into consideration, which might still prove his Arab critics wrong.
Next month marks the fortieth anniversary of the June 5, 1967 Arab – Israeli war, which changed the face of the Middle East. France’s Middle East policy made a sharp reversal soon thereafter. Franco-Israeli relations have seen their “Golden Age” in the 1950s, when France was Israel's main ally, weapons supplier and nuclear capability provider. The low point came after the 1967 war, during the presidency of Charles de Gaulle, when France imposed an almost complete arms embargo, left Israel to its strategic alliance with the United States and embarked since then on her balanced approach to the Arab – Israeli conflict. French – Arab relations were reinforced further after the Arab – Israeli war and the oil crisis of 1973.
Just three days after the shooting stopped, late President de Gaulle instructed his foreign minister to denounce Israel before the French National Assembly and the United Nations General Assembly. A month later, he said that, “we told the Israelis not to start a conflict. Now, France does not recognize her conquests.” In the following November he elaborated further: “Israel, having attacked, seized, in six days of combat, objectives that she wanted to attain. Now she is organizing, on the territories she has taken, an occupation that cannot but involve oppression, repression, expropriation, and there has appeared against her a resistance that she, in turn, describes as terrorism.”
Sarkozy is promising a 180 degree turnabout on de Gaulle’s legacy. His pro-Israeli views have prompted a flurry of contacts between Arab capitals and Paris, with Arabs seeking a reassurance of continuity. President Mubarak of Egypt was so worried about a French shift that he sought a meeting to ask Sarkozy about his “Israeli bias” during his recent visit to Paris to bid farewell to his predecessor Jacque Chirac.
Jewish Connection
The Arab defensive reaction to his presidency was alerted by several factors, but his Jewish connection in particular was interpreted as the reason behind his pro-Israel statements. Within this context, Sarkozy’s emerging team on foreign policy is being watched with concern by Arab capitals.
Sarkozy’s election was hailed by Israel and Jewish organizations worldwide, including Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the umbrella group of French Jewish communal organizations (CRIF), AIPAC in the United States, the Rabbinical Center of Europe, to name a few. They should, and they did, feel relieved with the new Sarkozy-led pro-Israel French administration with a strong Jewish and US connections. Sarko, as his supporters call him, has openly and repeatedly called himself a friend of Israel in good times and in bad, the Israeli French edition of the Jerusalem Post reported on May 3, quoting him as saying that “makes me an ‘Atlantist,’ pro-Israeli and pro-American.” They hope that Sarkozy will adopt a policy more in coordination with the US and in line with that of Britain and Germany than with what they see as a traditional “politique arabe de la France” of recent decades.
In 2002, the then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon urged French Jews to immigrate en masse to Israel after a spate of anti-Jews attacks. Sarkozy, as interior minister, responded: “France is not a racist country. France is not an anti-Semitic country.” Israelis and Jews also could still remember the reference a few years ago by French ambassador to England, Daniel Bernard, to Israel as a “shitty little country.”
Now, Sarkozy is undoubtedly the most Israel-friendly president since the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958, The Jewish News Weekly of Northern California, reported on May 11. He is an admirer of the Jewish state and has warm ties with the French Jewish community. His maternal grandfather, Aron Mallah, nicknamed Benkio, was a Greek Jew from Salonika who migrated to France before the Second World War and converted to Catholicism but nevertheless had to hide during World War II because of his Jewish roots. In total, 57 of Sarkozy’s family members were murdered by the Nazis. His wife Cecilia is also of Jewish ancestry. He is a 2003 laureate of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre Humanitarian Award.
However neither his Jewish family background nor his fervent opposition to anti-Semitism would alienate Arabs, but the family’s active role in the Zionist movement certainly would alert them to a potential effect on his politics as much as would his personal Israeli friends like former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Beniko’s uncle Moshe was a devoted Zionist who, in 1898 published and edited El Avenir, the leading paper of the Zionist movement in Greece at the time. His cousin, Asher, in 1912 helped guarantee the establishment of the Jewish Technion in Haifa, Palestine and in 1919 he was elected as the first President of the Zionist Federation of Greece and he headed the Zionist Council for several years; in the 1930s Asher helped Jewish immigration to and colonization of Palestine, to which he himself immigrated in 1934. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 another of Beniko’s cousins, Peppo Mallah, became the country’s first diplomatic envoy to Greece. Sarkozy says he admired his grandfather, who bequeathed to Nicolas his political convictions.
His pro –US and pro Israel sympathies and his Jewish connection are reinforced by similar sympathies of his governing team. His close confident and Prime Minister, François Fillon’s Anglo-Saxon connection is customized by his British-born wife, the first of a French head of government. His foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who made several visits to Israel and received an honorary degree from Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba at the height of the second Palestinian Intifada (uprising) was born to a Jewish father and a Protestant mother; in a January 2004 interview, Kouchner lamented that the French had become “America-haters.” Kouchner is also close to UMP MP and France’s ambassador in Washington, Pierre Lellouche, who is Sarkozy’s advisor on international issues. Levitte will head a diplomatic team in the presidential administration modelled on the US National Security Council; he is another Jewish figure in Sarkozy’s foreign policy team. The New culture minister, Christine Albanel, 51, is a former member of the board of the Foundation for the Memory of the Holocaust.
In an interview Sarkozy gave in 2004, The Jewish Journal online on May 11 quoted him as saying: “Should I remind you the visceral attachment of every Jew to Israel, as a second mother homeland? There is nothing outrageous about it. Every Jew carries within him a fear passed down through generations, and he knows that if one day he will not feel safe in his country, there will always be a place that would welcome him. And this is Israel.”
How could Arabs interpret this other than being a direct encouragement of a dual loyalty and an indirect call for immigration to Israel in contradiction with his insistence on loyalty by the mostly Arab and Muslim French immigrant citizens to “French identity,” for which he created the new ministry of immigration and national identity?
Sarkozy visited Israel several times, but never the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. He has repeatedly said that he would not legitimize Hamas or Hizbullah by entering into dialogue with them, a statement that would politically translate into exacerbation of the Palestinian and Lebanese national divides by not recognizing the democratically elected Hamas-led national unity government, thus perpetuating the siege on the Palestinians, and by blocking Hizbullah’s partnership in Lebanon’s decision-making.
Coordination with US
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