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Israeli leaders offer home to French Jews who fear for their safety
In wake oflast week's attacks, Netanyahu says he will convene a committee to encourage immigration amid 'terrible anti-Semitism'
PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 13 January, 2015, 1:04am
UPDATED : Tuesday, 13 January, 2015, 1:05am
The Washington Post in Jerusalem
Benjamin Netanyahu (right) talks with French Jewish leader Joel Mergui.Photo: AFP
Israeli leaders said they would welcome with open arms French Jews who fear for their safety in the wake of attacks by Islamist extremists against the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and shoppers at a kosher supermarket in Paris last week.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of his cabinet linked arms with French politicians on Sunday during a march in Paris to commemorate the 17 people killed in three days of bloodshed in France. Netanyahu said: "I wish to tell to all French and European Jews - Israel is your home."
His office said the families of the four French Jews slain in the hostage standoff at the kosher grocery in Paris on Friday asked that their bodies be flown to Israel for burial. The funerals have been tentatively scheduled for today. Netanyahu said he would convene a special committee to encourage Jewish immigration "from France and other countries in Europe that are suffering from terrible anti-Semitism".
Israeli leaders pressed their case that Europe has allowed a dangerous rise of anti-Semitism and that Jews, even in the most developed countries on the continent, face not only hostility but also outright attack. Israel routinely makes the case for Jewish immigration - providing a haven for Jews in distress is, after all, one of its founding principles. But in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, the pitch is being made in the blunt terms of survival.
Yair Lapid, Netanyahu's former finance minister and the head of a centrist party, said at a gathering in Israel: "Jews are being murdered because they're Jews, and intellectuals are being murdered because they're intellectuals. The Europeans are starting to understand that there can be no compromise with terror, racism and anti-Semitism."
Lapid said: "European Jewry must understand that there is just one place for Jews, and that is the state of Israel."
Naftali Bennett, Israel's economy minister and a hard-right politician, who marched in Paris on Sunday, wrote on his Facebook page that he heard repeatedly from Jews that "there's nothing left for us in France".
French leaders, however, responded that they do not want to see the Jews leave.
"If 100,000 French people of Spanish origin were to leave, I would never say that France is not France anymore. But if 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure," the country's prime minister, Manuel Valls, said.
The attacks in Paris came as Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians began their campaigns for national elections on March 17.
Some Israelis saw political motivations at play.
"For Netanyahu and the other politicians, this is a double opportunity. It allows them to say to Europe, 'You see? This is what we're up against, so you shouldn't be so hard on Israel.' It also supports the Netanyahu narrative, casting himself as the defender of Jews, that he alone is the strong leader to face a dangerous world," said Anshel Pfeffer, who is a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
About 500,000 Jews are citizens of France, the second-largest population of the community outside Israel and the United States. In the past three years, Jewish immigration from France to Israel has tripled, to almost 7,000 last year.
Natan Sharansky, chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, a quasi-governmental body that facilitates Jewish immigration, and absorption, predicted that more than 10,000 French Jews would come to Israel this year. He blamed the hostile atmosphere for Jews in part on France's lack of insistence that its Muslim immigrants support liberal democratic traditions.
