Israel goes to the polls on March 2, the third time in a year. Many countries have tracked Israel’s lengthy political crisis, but it has particular resonance in France, home to the largest Jewish community in Europe, Don Murray writes.
It’s a small country, but it is watched by the world.
Israel goes to the polls on March 2, the third time in a year. Many countries have tracked Israel’s lengthy political crisis, but it has particular resonance in France.
It has the largest Jewish community in Europe and, in recent years, has been the largest European source of immigration to Israel. Immigration driven in part by fear.
The last decade has burdened France with a number of shocking and bloody memories, but one aggression, one victim, remains locked in the public’s mind.
She was Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old Jewish retired kindergarten teacher living in a high-rise in Paris. Among her neighbours was Kobili Troaré, a 27-year-old man she knew and chatted with from time to time.
On April 3, 2015, shouting “Allahu Akbar,” he burst into her apartment and threw her from her third-floor balcony, killing her.
The murderous attack had consequences that have rippled through France and Israel and reached the top of the political pyramid to this day.
But it wasn’t the first, or last, onslaught to frighten French Jews, who number somewhere between 450,000 and 600,000. (The French census is forbidden from asking questions about ethnic or religious origin.)
In 2012, a terror attack against a Jewish school in Toulouse left three schoolchildren dead. In January 2015, there was a series of bloody events, beginning with an attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which killed 12 people.
Two days later, a five-hour siege in a kosher supermarket in Paris left four Jewish victims dead. Then, in November 2015, 130 people of different faiths were killed in co-ordinated attacks on cafés and a theatre in Paris.
All these were the work of Islamic extremists.
A small stream of French emigration to Israel swelled to a river, creating new political realities in both countries.
Many live in fear
In 2014, 7,238 Jews left for Israel. In 2015, the number was 7,835. Since the turn of the century, emigration has totalled almost 60,000, according to figures compiled by Marc Knobel, a historian with CRIF (the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France).
That’s 10 per cent of the Jewish population of France, and that scares the French government. A few years ago, then-prime minister Manuel Valls spoke of the outflow almost like a wound. On Jan. 9, 2016, the