Mitterrand Gets Taste of Own Medicine Over Arafat Visit

By Alfred M. Lilienthal

Few recent events have stirred "au fond," the Jewish community in France, as the two-day visit of Yasser Arafat to Paris. Just as in the United States, the voices of organized Jewry, rather than of individual Jews, were heard most dearly objecting to the reception by President Francois Mitterrand of the Palestinian president.

While a minority of France's 650,000 Jews, the largest Jewish community in Europe after the Soviet Union, followed the advice of the widow of former French Prime Minister Pierre Mendes-France, and of former President of the European Parliament Simone Veil, that one must "negotiate with one's enemies," many more vociferously objected to this new recognition afforded the PLO. For days before the visit on radio talk shows, television news programs, and in the print media, the government was attacked for its decision to receive Arafat.

The Council of French Jewish Institutions, which has maintained dose ties to successive Israeli governments, in an angry letter questioned Mitterrand's wisdom in inviting Arafat and expressed the hope that France "does not lose its soul in media events which have no morrow." Apparently forgotten was the fact that Mitterrand was the first French president ever to visit Israel and bad sided with the Jewish community in its 1967 battle with then-President Charles de Gaulle. In the council letter to Mitterrand, Chief Rabbi David de Rothschild and Council President Theo Klein described Arafat as "a terrorist leader who has spilled French blood."

Not all Jewish opinion was so shrill, however. Another member of the executive committee of the Council of French Jewish Institutions declared that, "it might be necessary for Israel to see the emergence of the Palestinian state if it wished to remain a Jewish state."

French diplomats said Mitterrand's meeting with Arafat was designed "to dramatize the fleeting opportunity for a diplomatic breakthrough and acceptance of resolution 242." One French official said, "It's the last chance for Israel to have a credible Palestinian interlocutor." (This is an opinion which the writer has voiced many times in print and during talks in Europe and the Middle East.)

To Listen Is Not To Approve

In response to the Jewish Council letter, Mitterrand said his meeting did not imply support for Arafat: "To listen is not to approve."

Since one of the principal Jewish objections to the Paris meeting had been that it coincided with the annual Day of Remembrance for Jewish victims of the Nazi holocaust, commemorated particularly in Israel, Arafat took the occasion of his Paris press conference to make his own statement regarding Hitler's deeds: "I am against all these crimes, but I recall that the holocaust was not our doing. There is a daily holocaust against our women and our children in Gaza, the West Bank, and in Jerusalem."

Nevertheless, for four straight nights Jewish demonstrators held vigils in Paris and other French cities. In the French capital an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 protesters waved Israeli flags and shouted: "Arafat, murderer!" and "Mitterrand, accomplice! " outside the Right Bank synagogue where four people were killed and dozens injured in a bombing by a Palestinian splinter group in 1980. Elsewhere, 10,000 supporters of Israel marched peacefully to the Arab World Institute where Arafat was host to several hundred guests, including French Jewish personalities, for iftar, a traditional meal marking the end of a fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

At the press conference marking the end of his Paris visit, Arafat, as at Geneva, was called upon to voice his response to repeated charges by Israeli spokesmen that language in the Palestine National Charter calling for elimination of the Zionist entity is not consistent with the PLO's recognition last December of Israel's right to exist. Arafat, after consulting an aide, responded, "I believe there is an expression in French, Vest caduque.’"'

Although the term means "It is null and void," a spokesman in Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's office dismissed the PLO leader's statement saying, "This declaration is not serious' " Arafat's radical rivals for Palestinian leadership dearly thought otherwise and sought to use the Arafat statement to embarrass him. Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine's George Habash and other hard-line leaders who had opposed the Arafat concessions adopted by majority vote at Algiers, now openly attacked him for exceeding his powers in Paris by declaring the abrogation of the charter.

This Paris visit provided an opportunity for Arafat to discuss with Western 'journalists Israeli Prime Minister Shamir's still vague proposals in the occupied territories.

"Is it possible to have elections under the supervision of an occupying army?" he asked rhetorically "If the election were part of the process from A to Z, we could discuss it. But if it is simply a device to give Shamir more time to commit more crimes against our people, then I leave the world to judge."

Shades of de Gaulle

The criticism leveled by French Jewish organizations against Mitterrand recalled the uproar against French President Charles de Gaulle when he withdrew military support from Israel after the Six-Day War of June 1967.

Then de Gaulle was depicted as an anti-Semitic persecutor of "little Israel" in order to build sentiment intheUnited States forthe supply of American military aircraft to Israel. De Gaulle defended his decision to withdraw France from the role of principal military supplier to Israel by pointing out that the Igraeli government was ignoring warnings by France and other Western powers by taking possession of "Jerusalem and of many Jordanian, Egyptian and Syrian territories by force of arms" and "by exerting repression and expulsion there—which are the unavoidable consequences of an occupation which has all the aspects of annexation."

Now it is Mitterrand, like de Gaulle before him, who is facing fierce criticism from French Jewish organizations through no fault of his own, but only because Israel still is overstepping the bounds of “necessary moderation.”

How clairvoyant the general proved to be is demonstrated by his statement, ''By affirming to the world that a settlement of the conflict can only be achieved on the basis of the conquests made and not on the condition that these be evacuated, Israel is overstepping the bounds of necessary moderation."

Ironically, Mitterrand, who was one of the most vociferous critics of De Gaulle at the time, now finds himself cast by Israel's French supporters in the same role. Now it is Mitterrand, like de Gaulle before him, who is facing fierce criticism from French Jewish organizations through no fault of his own, but only because Israel still is "overstepping the bounds of necessary moderation. "

Dr Alfred M. Lilienthal served in the Middle East in World War II and has spent a lifetime since educating Americans on Middle East realities. He is the author of What Price Israel?, There Goes the Middle East, The Other Side of the Coin, and his monumental The Zionist Connection.