According to the newspapers, the diplomatic tension that was
generated between Israel and France by Prime Minister
Sharon's call to French Jews to come to Israel has been
relieved. However the obtuseness and absurdity -- not to
mention the detachment from reality -- that were obviously
behind the prime minister's public pronouncement will
unfortunately not go away so quickly.
"I have some advice for our Jewish brethren who live in
France," declared the Israeli prime minister after a recent
widely-publicized antisemitic incident in France. "Move to
Israel as fast as you can. Here is where you should find your
home. We see how antisemitism in France is spreading
wildly."
Though the prime minister was only sounding one of the themes
that he has been playing for the past three years, and the
whole Zionist movement has been declaiming like thoughtless
parrots for more than 50 years, France -- both Jewish and non-
Jewish -- was outraged. At a time when the French
governmental leaders have been making very public efforts to
do something against antisemitism, and the Jewish community
has been at pains to emphasize its rights as French citizens
so that the national government will in fact fight
antisemitism effectively and not dismiss it as a lamentable --
but inevitable -- consequence of the actions of the State of
Israel, Sharon's Israel-centered call was felt as a deep
embarrassment by the French Jewish establishment and as
nothing less than a slap in the face of the French
government. The French government will not or cannot protect
its Jews, said Sharon. They should therefore move to
Israel.
Aside from their gross insensitivity to the situation of
their intended audience and their consequences in that
context, the content of Sharon's remarks seem totally out of
touch with reality.
Does it make sense to tell a Jew in France to move to Israel
because of the antisemitism in his home country, which has so
far resulted in hundreds of incidents but has been limited to
verbal assaults with a relatively small amount of personal
injury and property damage -- in order to come to Israel
where the same modern Moslem hatred of Jews has caused a
thousand deaths and tens of thousands of injuries in the past
few years alone? To be sure, standard Zionist theory for the
past hundred years preaches that the State of Israel will
solve the problem of antisemitism, but surely the painful
experience of more than half a century shows how false that
promise was.
Today, the State of Israel has become the focus and the
lightning-rod of all the antisemitism in the world, and its
citizens live under the greatest threat to Jews anywhere in
the world of being murdered simply because they are Jews,
Hashem yishmor.
The prime minister of a government whose senior partner is
the first party in Israeli history whose only agenda is to
fight against all aspects of the Jewish religion, and whose
negative achievements are the un-Judaizing of the public
spaces of the State of Israel, probably does not want to hear
about the most powerful elements that really bind French Jews
to Israel today.
This is undoubtedly the leadership of the gedolei
Torah and the spiritual revival among French Jewry. The
common heritage of Toras Yisroel, and the enhanced
appreciation of this that has become popular among many
French Jews, especially those of North African heritage, are
bonds that are much more powerful -- and positive -- than any
fear of antisemitism.
The agenda of the Torah community is not to tell people where
to live, but to help them make the right decisions as to how
to live. The number one priority of the Torah community is
that Jews should be loyal to Hashem and His Torah. Once that
is firmly settled, they will surely make the best decision --
for them -- as to where they can best fulfill their primary
mission in life, whether that is Paris or New York or Eretz
Yisroel.
As HaRav Aharon Leib Shteinman shlita said on his trip
to France two years ago, "You have the opportunity to instill
[your] children with yiras Shomayim and Torah, and
that is the ultimate and only purpose."
