Playing intifada the new anti-semitism in France.

An explosive device was discovered by garbage collectors just outside the Jewish-run cultural center in Avignon in April. This is a building that also houses a theater called the Big Bang, just a three-minute walk from where I live. France has been living through a long series of anti-Semitic acts of varying nature for over a year now.

But so far, Avignon, a southern town of about 100,000 inhabitants, has been spared. I've noticed only one incident of graffiti on the walls of the local synagogue. There is no Lubavitcher community in town, and the few Orthodox Jews who live here do so with a certain integrated discretion. In short, there is virtually no Jewish "visibility" here. An anti-Semite would really have to do his homework in order to know where or even whom to strike. Talking to Claude Nahoum, head of the cultural center, I discover that the unexploded device was, in fact, a "plaster grenade," most likely French army equipment, and not made for wounding people. It was found across the street from the building, and was not accompanied by either a handwritten or telephone message. No one has ever claimed the action. In short, a dud. No big bang.

But such is the justifiable fear that many French Jews have been experiencing since the autumn of 2000 that a minor event of this nature takes on alarming proportions. The facts seem clear enough. In the last eighteen months, more than 400 individual acts of an "anti-Semitic character" have been recorded in France. A recent book published by the Union of Jewish Students in France and the organization SOS Racisme lists them all in chronological order. These attacks range from simple graffiti and verbal insults to burning synagogues and attacks on buses carrying Jewish schoolchildren. Many of these actions have been extremely violent but, as yet, there have been no deaths resulting from them.

The outbreak coincides with the onset of the second intifada in Palestine. They involve young kids of North African descent living in the notorious French cites--faceless, low income housing projects. Generally speaking, the more bourgeois areas inhabited by French Jews have not been targeted. "The violence has not been committed by the far right, or by organized Muslim fundamentalists," according to Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on extremist groups. "For the most part, the perpetrators are unpolitical and non-Islamist youth who are expressing a feeling of identification with the intifada."

"Playing intifada" is an explanation that reverberates among the Jewish intelligentsia here. The Arab kids, chiefly marginalized from French society and largely unemployed, identify with the Palestinians and carry the uprising into the streets of Paris or Marseille. They imagine themselves as Hamas or Jihad fighters. And when they can't find any Israelis in the cites, local Jews will have to substitute in the role of enemy. This is, in any case, the accepted scenario. I try it out on Ichem, nineteen, a friend of my son's, French born, but of Algerian parents. "Sounds like cowboys and Indians to me," he says, as if he's never heard anything more unlikely. Ichem lives in a cite on the outskirts of town. I know he believes that Osama bin Laden is on the wanted list simply because he is a Muslim, and he can't understand why Sharon isn't tracked down and brought to justice in the same manner.

When I explain that these actions have really occurred, his immediate reaction is that the whole thing is a media invention. And yet, he is genuinely horrified to hear that the synagogue in nearby Marseille has been firebombed to the ground because all holy places are sacred to his way of thinking. Talking to other young French Arabs (known here as "Beurs"), I hear them shrink from the thought that they would attack Jews. At the same time, a common complaint among them is that Jews get preferential treatment in French society, that Jews "are always the victims, while, in reality, it is always the Arabs who get pushed around." This is an age-old refrain (the Jews have it better than us) and is common to many strains of anti-Jewish sentiment. Such statements tag the Jews who support the actions of the Sharon government, as well as the Jews, like myself, who oppose it. In the current wave of attacks, both are identified with Israel.

Anti-Semitism in France has a long and infamous pedigree, marked in the last 125 years by the Dreyfus Affair, the public insults in parliament against the Jewish Popular Front Prime Minister, Leon Blum, and the anti-Jewish laws of the Vichy regime, which allowed French police to round up tens of thousands of Jews and put them on the administrative road to oblivion. France has never fully come to grips with its role in the Holocaust. When I first moved here more than twenty years ago, the resistance myth was still more or less intact. This held essentially that France had been occupied by the Germans during the war and thus had no choice but to comply with Nazi protocol; at the same time, a large "heroic" part of the population "resisted," many Jews were saved, etc.

Since the late 1970s, this myth has been harder to sustain. In the 1980s, the French discovered that President Francois Mitterrand had been a Vichy official before turning his coat when the going got rough, French churches harbored war criminals long after the war, and a Vichy functionary, Maurice Papon, who later served under French administrations into the 1960s, had directly delivered Jews to the Nazis. Many French citizens still claim, for instance, that rounded-up Jews were sent "only" to Drancy, a way-station camp near Paris, and that the transport in Nazi cattle-cars to Auschwitz was a "German" affair.

In the 1970s, a number of ex-Gestapo agents and Vichy officials went on to be founding members of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front, the pillar of the extreme right in France. Le Pen himself had a record company that produced remastered versions of Nazi hymns like the Horst Wessel Lied, as well as what might be called the Wehrmacht's greatest hits. Today, Le Pen will deny he is an anti-Semite but he has notoriously referred to the death camps as a "detail" of history and uses the coded euphemism "cosmopolitan" when referring to Jews, thereby escaping prosecution from anti-defamation laws.

Le Pen's surprise showing in the presidential election this spring reinforced the view that French anti-Semitism is on the rise, though his main message was anti-Arab.

France is also the spiritual home of Negationism, a kind of anti-Semitism with footnotes, which denies that Jews were ever exterminated in the camps. At the University of Lyon III, part of the national education system, an important segment of the history department is made up of these Holocaust deniers.

France's most popular public figure, the Abbe Pierre, known for his good works for the poor, has publicly talked of the "international Zionist lobby" run from the United States, with its secret agents in France and elsewhere, working to oppress the Palestinians and create the "Empire" which God promised Abraham in the Old Testament.

There is also at work in France a subtle, "subconscious" anti-Semitism that operates in the language itself. "Faire le Juif" (to act like a Jew) is a synonym for being selfish. My son tells me he hears this all the time. For example, when you eat something in secret because you don't want to share it with your friends, you get told off with "Fais pas ton Juif."

In 1995, the prestigious Robert Dictionary of Synonyms and Opposites was taken out of the bookshops for giving as synonyms for "Jew" such words as "greed," "greedy," and "kike."

About 40 percent of the some 600,000 French Jews are Ashkenazys, implanted for centuries in such locations as Strasbourg, Marseille, Paris. But the decolonization of North Africa in the early 1960s forced thousands of Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian Jews to leave the land where their families had settled hundreds of years before. Since most of these immigrants had French nationality, they were among the million or so pieds-noirs repatriated to France at the time of the Algerian war. These Sephardic Jews are well integrated in French society and share a similar culinary and musical culture with North African Arabs in France. These are the Jews I see around me in Avignon, when I see them at all.

Many settled here in the south because the climate is similar to that of the Maghreb. And, traditionally, they get along with French Arabs, as they did for the most part, historically speaking, in Algeria. But the Middle East situation has changed all that. In a recent French survey, many young Maghrebis compared Palestine with Algeria at the time of the anti-colonial uprising. For them, these are both David-Goliath stories.

Since the second intifada, there have been two pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the streets of Avignon: one relatively mild and the other highly charged with slogans against Jews. The government does not appear to react to such provocation. (It took the burning of the Marseille synagogue, more than a year after the beginning of the attacks, for the Jospin government to protect Jewish places of worship with machine-gun-toting cops.) Indeed, the cynical argument goes: There are five million Muslim votes in France against only 600,000 Jewish ones. French governments, right or left, are accused of supporting the Palestinians and being openly hostile to Israel. This was not helped by the French ambassador to England recently referring to Israel as a "shitty little country" (he was not replaced). The French media is also attacked for supposedly systematically showing oppressive Israeli operations, and presenting the Palestinians as victims (which must pose a curious dilemma for those anti-Semites who persistently accuse the French media of being "run by Jews").

It may be that the "new" anti-Semitism in France has simply stirred up the old. Young Beurs, who scarcely know what Auschwitz means, are capable of painting swastikas and using traditional anti-Jewish jargon. In one Paris lycee recently, they protested against reading a book by Primo Levi, which was part of the curriculum.

I call my friend Talila, a performer of Yiddish music in France, who tells me that her gigs have fallen off to nearly zero since the onset of the attacks. It just isn't a la mode to program Jewish culture at the moment. A friend from Hamburg who has a Klezmer band is forbidden to play her music in the streets at this year's Avignon Festival because the organizers and the city administration fear they would be attacked. "This is not anti-Semitic violence, it's the Middle East conflict that's playing out here," says Charles Haddad, a Marseille lawyer and longtime president of the region's Jewish Council.

While some minimize the anti-Semitism, others dramatize it. The Central Jewish Consistory in Paris, in a statement sent to Agence France-Presse, called the attacks "the beginnings of a new Kristallnacht, with the government totally passive." (Kristallnacht is the name for the series of attacks on Jews, Jewish shops, and synagogues by Nazi Storm Troopers in 1938.) The American Jewish Congress compared the current situation in France to that of 1942 under the Vichy government.

Former New York Mayor Ed Koch wrote a highly charged piece for Newsday in which he said "all supporters of Israel should boycott French wine, cheese, perfume, and clothing, as well as refuse to visit France as tourists." The American Jewish Congress has a special Web site called www.boycottfrance.com, in which it tells American Jews not to come to France until this country is made "safe for Jews." It even called for American filmmakers to boycott the Cannes Film Festival.

The background to this American reaction, it seems to me, is France's seemingly "ambivalent" position vis-a-vis Israel. As Claude Nahoum points out to me: "Since the time of de Gaulle, France's foreign policy has been to support developing or Third World countries." If the American Jewish Congress finds the French government too pro-Palestinian, many people in France and throughout Europe, myself included, are appalled by the unconditional and uncritical American support of the Israeli government.

It is this support that agitates many of the Beurs who live in the cites, ear-marked from birth for exclusion and social failure. Their point of emotional reference remains the Arab world.

At the time of the Gulf War, I was teaching English to a special group of Arab business students at the university here, all of whom identified with Saddam Hussein, without any nuances. All of these students were French born, relatively well off, none of them could speak more than a few words of Arabic or had any direct ties to the Arab world, and none of them ever showed any sign of Islamic militancy. But there was not the slightest doubt in their minds who the "victims" were and who the "enemy" was. This may be a regrettable blindness on their part, but it also goes some way to explaining the background to the recent violence in France.

The current situation in France is nothing like Kristallnacht, but it is much more alarming than Ichem's "cowboys and Indians."

Some months ago a Jewish school was burned down in Marseille with nails surreptitiously placed in the courtyard so children could injure themselves. On the walls of the school were written the words Mort aux Juifs! At the time I thought "Death to the Jews" can never again be considered a mere slogan, but rather part of a sinister users' manual. If these are merely kids "playing intifada," then the game can have deadly consequences.

David Zane Mairowitz is a freelance writer and radio producer living in France.