The Quai d’Orsay View
The great writer Mark Steyn reviews a book by David Pryce-Jones on French policy toward the Arabs and Jews and finds a disturbing degree of antisemitism at the heart of the French foreign policy establishment:
If you had vaguely assumed that the now routine comparisons of Israelis to Nazis derived from an antipathy to Ariel Sharon or the post-1967 transformation of the Zionist Entity from plucky embattled underdog to all-conquering military behemoth, it’s sobering to be reminded that the French were doing the Israelis-are-the-new-Nazis shtick within 10 minutes of the end of the Second World War. Jews, wrote the consul general René Neuville in a lengthy cable from Jerusalem in 1947, are “racist through and through . . . quite as much as their German persecutors.” The dispatches of Pierre Landy, French consul in Haifa, rely heavily on “the Israeli Gestapo” and similar formulations. In public, the political class was usually more circumspect, though not always. President de Gaulle famously raged at a press conference that the Jews were “an elite people, self-assured and domineering” with “a burning ambition for conquest.” In the ensuing controversy, M. le Président assured the Chief Rabbi that he’d meant it as a compliment.
