The mark of a good diplomat is he or she can tell you you’re 100 percent, 180 degrees dead wrong and have you gleefully nodding in agreement.
Jean-David Levitte is a good diplomat. In an early morning speech before the American Jewish Committee, France’s ambassador to the United States responded ever-so-diplomatically to an introduction which cited L’Affaire Dreyfus and the Vichy regime as two of the more troubled moments of French-Jewish relations.
“For we French, Dreyfus was not proof the French were anti-Semitic but that they were not. Captain Dreyfus was an officer who was condemned not because he did something wrong, but because he was a Jew. But a French writer, Emile Zola, took the lead, launching a huge campaign all over France. And he won. Dreyfus got back his insignia, was rehabilitated and today there is a statue of him right in the middle of Paris. He is a national hero, and that is Dreyfus for us,” said the ambassador, himself a Jew, at the Friday, Oct. 28 meeting.
As for Vichy, Levitte’s own grandparents were sent to Auschwitz. But his father and uncle joined the resistance and 75 percent of the nation’s Jews were saved.
The above statistic is worse than you’d hope for, but probably better than you thought. And that’s the way Levitte sees the much-ballyhooed outbreak of anti-Semitism in France, which was portrayed in the American Jewish press as the worst conditions for Europe’s Jews since Hitler and Stalin transformed the continent into an abattoir.
In the first six months of 2005, there were 48 percent fewer acts of anti-Semitism in France than during the same period in 2004, to which the ambassador ascribes tougher legislation and harsher penalties. He also passed out copies of a study undertaken by the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv in more than a dozen nations polling citizens on their feelings about Jews.
And, guess what? France wins the silver. A full 82 percent of French citizens have “positive feelings” about Jews (the Dutch top this poll at 85 percent). The United States is fifth at 77 percent, trailing Great Britain and Canada. Jordan and Lebanon tally at zero percent, incidentally.
“I am glad this was printed in Ma’ariv, because if it came from the French government it would look suspicious,” he said with a laugh in his melodious Parisian accent.
But France’s concern with anti-Semitism goes beyond angry Algerian teens defacing Jewish cemeteries. The nation has taken a leading role in upbraiding Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad following his “wipe Israel off the map” outburst, and has long been a major player in the negotiations to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
In a brief aside in which he explained the ins and outs of enriching uranium Levitte reminded the crowd that France, Britain and Germany had for years been in negotiations with Iran to ensure any nuclear capabilities are utilized solely for electric power, but had broken those negotiations off abruptly when the Islamic republic began straying from the deal.
A man of measure and subtlety, Levitte described Ahmadinejad utilizing neither.
“The new administration is hard-line and incompetent. Ahmadinejad is coming from nowhere. He is an engineer who was elected mayor of Tehran, he has never visited foreign countries and knows not much about nuclear engineering and we are seeing the results,” he said.
And if the Iranians think they have the upper hand in this game of nuclear chicken, they’re deluding themselves, he continued. After the three European nations broke negotiations, Iran’s stock market crashed by 30 percent. And when Iran subsequently threatened to curtail oil exportation, Levitte slyly noted that they could go ahead and do that. But Iran possesses few refineries and must import 40 percent of its gasoline, and perhaps that flow might dry a bit.
When asked what could be done about Syria devolving into a breeding ground for terrorism, Levitte elicited laughter by curtly saying “The fact that Syria is an awful country is not new.”
He recalled that, three years ago, French officials told President Bush that they key to unhorsing the corrupt Assad regime in Damascus was to concentrate on cleaning up Syrian-occupied Lebanon — “unfortunately, nobody listened to us during that period.”
However, Levitte says France now has the president’s ear. He says the inquiry into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri reads “better than ‘The Da Vinci Code.'” Levitte feels Syrian leader Bashir Assad must either cooperate with the investigation and reveal his almost certain complicity or refuse to do so and, in essence, do the same.
“This government in Damascus is not only weak and destabilized, but cornered.”
Finally, when asked what it was like to be a Jew working in the French government, he could only smile.
The hoopla surrounding Sen. Joe Lieberman’s vice-presidential candidacy in 2000 amused him, but he noted that in 1936 France elected Leon Blum prime minister.
What France’s neighbors were doing at that time was left unsaid..