Sins on the Seine

Reviewed by Noah Pollak

Betrayal: France, the Arabs, and the Jews
by David Pryce-Jones
Encounter Books, 2006, 171 pages

 

After the war, says Pryce-Jones, “the institutional mindset of the Quai d’Orsay survived intact,” and the ministry resuscitated its campaign to undermine Zionism, viewed in the postwar era as “more of a danger than ever to what French diplomats believed would otherwise have been a smooth and advantageous relationship with Arab countries.” Seeking to foster good relations with the Arabs, from behind the scenes France aggressively sought to derail the UN vote to partition Mandatory Palestine, and in 1949 France’s ambassador to Israel informed the French foreign minister that “The manner in which Israeli leaders have proceeded recalls Hitler’s Reich.”

In this long and appalling history, there was one fateful period of good relations. Pierre-Etienne Gilbert was the French ambassador to Israel from 1953 to 1959, and was “the first French diplomat openly to admire Israel.” During his time in Israel, Gilbert learned Hebrew, lobbied vigorously for a genuine collaboration between the two nations, and suppressed the Quai d’Orsay’s role whenever possible. In 1956, Israel secretly allied with France and Britain to break the Egyptian blockade of the Suez Canal, and while much of France’s willingness to partner with Israel was located in its desire to make Gamal Abd el-Nasser suffer for his incitement of Algerian insurgents, Israel’s success in the Suez War solidified its gains in the 1948 War of Independence and, at a particularly perilous time in its history, pacified the Egyptian threat for the ensuing decade. After the Suez War, Gilbert, allied with the French defense establishment and openly antagonistic to the diplomatic elite, helped marginalize the Quai and pushed through the nuclear deal that supplied Israel with its reactor in Dimona. When De Gaulle came out of retirement in 1958, the Quai d’Orsay was emboldened and the disengagement from friendly relations with Israel commenced. An official report to De Gaulle in 1963 stated that good relations between France and Israel “in no way give France any credit in Arabia,” and indeed that sentiment has been the driving force behind French policy toward Israel ever since: In the run-up to the Six Day War France embargoed arms shipments to Israel, and during the war De Gaulle told British Prime Minister Harold Wilson that “some day the West would thank him, as from then on France would ‘be the only Western power to have any influence with the Arab governments.’”

De Gaulle’s successors continued the tradition of open hostility to Israel in ways significant and petty. In 1969, President Georges Pompidou, during a visit to the United States, declared in a speech that Israel must stop being “a racial and religious state” and demanded that Israel cease asking for support from diaspora Jews. When Syria and Egypt invaded Israel in 1973, France’s foreign minister wondered aloud, “Is it unexpected aggression to try and set foot in your own house?” With the emergence of terrorism as a regular feature of the Arab-Israeli conflict, France easily sided with the Arabs: In 1977 it supplied one of the leaders of Black September with a visa so he could escape from Beirut to Paris, and in response to furious international criticism President Valery Giscard d’Estaing defended rescuing the murderer by simply saying, “France and its people have no lessons to learn from anyone.” Meanwhile, Giscard d’Estaing approved contracts (negotiated by then-Prime Minister Jacques Chirac) to build two nuclear power plants for Iraq. Francois Mitterand, himself a former Vichy official, commenced his presidency by announcing an attempt to rehabilitate France’s image as implacably hostile to Israel, but his foreign minister for the first three years of his presidency had close friendships with members of the Palestine Liberation Organization and once declared, “My condemnation of Zionism is absolute.”

France’s ambitions in the Muslim world also took form in the symbiotic relationships it nurtured with three of the most consequential Muslim political figures of the past several decades. Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, and Yasser Arafat indulged France’s self-important desire to ingratiate itself with Muslim leaders, while France attempted to use its influence with them, greased with lavish patronage, to advance its own objectives in the region. When the Palestine Liberation Organization broke onto the Middle East scene, France quickly endeavored to help it gain representation in the United Nations, and when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Pryce-Jones recounts, “France sent ships to Beirut to evacuate thousands of PLO gunmen to Tunis, and Paul-Marc Henry, the French ambassador to Lebanon, placed Arafat under the cover of his own diplomatic immunity.” The Fatah organization was invited to establish itself in Paris as the political arm of the PLO, bringing Middle Eastern-style bombings and shootings to France. To the end, France helped inflate and mythologize Arafat, even to obsessive degrees of pettiness. Jacques Chirac made a much publicized visit to Arafat on his Paris deathbed, and as Pryce-Jones recounts:

When Arafat then died, Chirac arranged ceremonies suitable for a head of state, with a guard of honor of French soldiers to carry the coffin to the aircraft transporting it back to Ramallah. At this event, his eyes watering, he declared, “With him disappears a man of courage and conviction.”

 

With Arafat also disappeared an important detail of his life: His truthful place of birth. French officials altered his medical file to indicate Arafat’s birthplace as Jerusalem, not Cairo.

In 1977, upon being forced from his exile in Najaf, Iraq, by Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini was offered a compound in suburban Paris, complete with guards and international communications equipment, from which to foment the Iranian revolution. France correctly hedged that he would become the next Iranian strongman, and saw in him an opportunity for a prosperous relationship with the new Iran. Khomeini remarked that the French government was “kind to us and we could publicize our views extensively, much more so than we expected.” When the shah fled Iran in 1979, Khomeini arrived triumphantly in Tehran on a chartered Air France jet; to a notable degree, France had helped midwife the ascension of the world’s first Islamist government.

Jacques Chirac, as prime minister in the mid-1970s, formed an adulating friendship with Saddam Hussein, toasting the dictator extravagantly on his trips to France and taking him on personal tours of French arms factories and nuclear plants. Hussein purchased billions of dollars in French weaponry, and used it to attack Khomeini’s Iran in 1980. It is generally not a good state of affairs when two of your allies are fighting each other, but France made the best of a bad situation and sold weapons to both: Publicly to Iraq, and covertly to Iran.

 

David Pryce-Jones notes that France’s position over the last century and a half as a self-styled puissance Musulmane, a Muslim power, has been not just a strategic failure, but a betrayal of France’s national identity as a champion of democracy and human rights (although one must observe that France has always been notably absent among the nations who actually take French national values seriously). There has scarcely been a Middle Eastern thug, despot, or fanatic whom

France has not sought to befriend, and for all of the mythologizing of French sophistication in the diplomatic arts, there is little evidence demonstrating how, exactly, France has benefited from these often one-sided romances. Such evidence certainly is not located in France’s banlieus, which are aflame with righteous anti-French violence. It cannot be found in the failure to frustrate Zionism and thwart the creation of Israel; it is absent in France’s support for Nasser, as the Egyptian despot, perhaps having taken a lesson from the French school of foreign policy himself, covertly supplied arms and propaganda to the Algerian insurgents who bloodied and then expelled France from its last colonial holding. The half-century of aspersions intended to isolate and demoralize Israel never quite succeeded in either seriously wounding the Jewish state or winning the affection of the Muslims on behalf of whose delicate sense of honor France professed to endeavor. France’s promotion of Hussein and Khomeini did nothing but encourage the war, terrorism, and sectarian misery those despots unleashed on the Middle East, undermining any opportunity for the expansion of French power and influence. And what did championing the PLO achieve? Fatah’s failed nationalism is rapidly being eclipsed by Hamas’ Islamism. France’s devotion to its Middle East rogues’ gallery has accomplished little more for French interests than the provocation of American intervention in the very region that France wished to bring into its own sphere of influence.

Pryce-Jones continues that “much of what France now undertakes amounts to mere pinpricks in the international spectrum, but still of nuisance value to the parties at the receiving end, while precipitously degrading to France itself.” But France’s role in the post-cold war world is hardly so frivolous. French elites have always felt chagrined by the unipolar world and the global sweep of American military, diplomatic, cultural, and commercial power. In response to this challenge, France, seeking a role in the world worthy of itself, envisions itself as the organizer and leader of an alliance of European countries that would act as a counterweight to Anglo-Saxon dominance. In this pursuit France exerts power where and when it can, which usually means leveraging its seat on the United Nations Security Council to dilute American influence, to insert itself into world affairs and crises, and to empower alliances hostile to the United States.

The first success of this new diplomacy was in the run-up to the Iraq war. In 2002, the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441, which required Iraq to disarm itself of weapons of mass destruction, to allow the return of weapons inspectors, and to comply with all previous UN resolutions. The penalty for non-compliance would be “serious consequences”—the phrase is now famous—which was understood to mean military action. The United States believed that it had struck a compromise with France in which the United States would allow inspectors a final chance to verify Iraqi weapons, and France would support a military response in the case of Iraqi non-compliance. When Iraq continued to thwart the inspectors and the United States pursued a resolution authorizing force, France shocked the Bush administration by summarily dismissing any chance of supporting a new resolution, under any circumstances. The bait-and-switch worked: France’s position as the leader, at least temporarily, of a Russian-German-French counterweight to the Anglo-Saxon alliance was inaugurated, and America was handed a sensational and highly public defeat.

In the cases of both the Iraq and Hezbollah wars, France coaxed Anglo-Saxon engagement in the United Nations with an affectation of responsible statesmanship and guarantees of desirable compromises, and once its adversaries were fully committed to the labyrinthine requirements of the UN, the rug was pulled out—the very terms that solidified a consensus were cast aside. Such perfidious diplomacy accomplishes something much more valuable than simply the successful entanglement of an American-led resolution to a conflict: They ensure that no resolution whatsoever is accomplished. France today leads a group of nations that use diplomacy as a means of preventing, rather than coordinating, action. Diplomacy channeled through the UN does not serve as a deterrent to groups like Hezbollah and nations like Iran, it serves as a deterrent to the Anglosphere’s ability to do anything about Hezbollah and Iran. That is precisely the point, and it is a far more grave state of affairs—especially concerning nuclear weapons—than a pinprick.

 

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Noah Pollak is an Assistant Editor of AZURE.