On Sept 5-6, 1972, over the course of 20 hours during the Munich Olympic Games, 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were tortured and murdered by the terrorist group, Black September, an affiliate of the Palestine Liberation Organization. For 49 years, this darkest of episodes received no official Olympic commemoration. The victims were eventually honoured for the first time at the opening ceremonies of the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.
A public memorial service for the massacre victims had been scheduled to take place at the Paris City Hall July 24. But it was cancelled; instead, a quiet ceremony will be held at some point during the Games at a “secret location,” attended by a small delegation of Israelis, French Jewish community leaders and a handful of politicians.
A “secret location.” Chalk up another victory for the enemies of the West, and one more ironic chapter in France’s fraught relationship with its Jewish citizens.
In 1791 France was the first nation to offer Jews citizenship and full civil rights. It was broadly assumed that if Jews reserved identifying expressions of Judaism for private life, and fully embraced a secular French identity publicly, antisemitism would disappear.
For nearly a century, the theory seemed borne out in practice. By 1894, nearly 10 per cent of the French army’s generals were Jewish. But that was also the year when the illusion of Jewish inclusion was dispelled. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer, was falsely accused of treason for passing French military secrets to the German embassy in Paris. The one scrap of evidence against him, a “bordereau,” was an incriminating, but unsigned note, whose handwriting bore no resemblance to Dreyfus’s, fished from a German military attaché’s wastebasket. Purposefully scapegoated because he was a Jew, he was convicted and spent five hellish years as the sole prisoner on Devil’s Island in French Guiana.
The trial unleashed what Tablet writer David Mikics calls “the first culture war”: between the Dreyfusards — those intellectuals who were skeptical of the flimsy evidence against him — and the anti-Dreyfusards, who refused to believe that the French army would be so duplicitous as to conspire against one of their own. The clash opened a portal into a long-running sewer of antisemitism, whose stench could no longer be ignored.
In 1886, virulent antisemite Édouard Drumont had published a screed, “La France Juive,” consisting of rancid old conspiracy-theory wine decanted into a 19th century French bottle. “The Jew alone,” Drumont wrote, “profited from the French Revolution.” He predicted, in a newspaper he launched, La Libre Parole, that the Jews would “soon be the definitive masters of France when they command the army.”
His words were a match to dry tinder. Many of the anti-Dreyfusards already hated Jews. They were impervious to subsequent proofs of Dreyfus’s innocence. In his newspaper, Drumont published several proffered solutions to the “Jewish question” that reveal just how thin the veneer of civilization is when passions rather than reason rule the mind: Jews should be “torn to pieces like Marsyas in the Greek myth”; “Reinach (a prominent Jewish Dreyfusard) ought to be boiled alive”; “Jews should be stewed in oil or pierced to death with needles”; “(Jews) should be circumcised up to the neck.” A cook expressed a desire to bake Jews in his oven.
Dreyfus was only officially exonerated in 1906. He was re-admitted into the army, for whom he bore no ill will. He served in First World War, as did his son. Mercifully, he died in 1935, so never knew the fate of French Jews under the Vichy regime, which cooperated with the Nazis in rounding up more than 75,000 Jewish citizens for transfer to the death camps. Amongst them was Dreyfus’s favourite granddaughter, Madeline, deported by French gendarmes to Auschwitz.
The Dreyfus affair shook the Jewish world to its core. If complete integration, allegedly equal rights, French acculturation, and loyal service to the Republic were not the answer for Jews, then what was?
Journalist Theodore Herzl, father of the modern Zionist movement, was present at the scene of Dreyfus’s public humiliation, and took inspiration for his vision of a Jewish state from it. He deduced, rationally, that if assimilation was no defence against antisemitism, and if exclusion from France and other nations, like Austria and Germany, they so desperately yearned to prove their allegiance to with was to be Jews’ portion, then self-determination in a Jewish state, a normal one “like the others,” would solve the problem.
Instead, the Jewish state was to become a collective Dreyfus in a global village, typified by the Israel-obsessed United Nations, a village dominated by ideology, scapegoatism and triumphalism, rather than the expectations of reason, evidence-based judgment and political reciprocity long cultivated as norms in the West.
Today, diaspora Jews, shaken by the forest fire of antisemitism sweeping through western nations in response to the Oct. 7 pogrom, are pondering a familiar, but amplified conundrum. If neither self-determination and democratic statehood in our ancient homeland, nor integration and patriotism in a diaspora allegedly chastened and enlightened by the Holocaust, is protection against murderous antisemitism from both progressivism and the Islamist right, what is?
Days ago, a Hamas avatar predicted on a video gone viral that “rivers of blood” would flow on Israel’s account during the Olympics. Dreyfus, Vichy, countless acts of terrorism and gruesome individual murders over the last three decades in French cities, motivated by hysterical Islamist antisemitism: Is it any wonder that for many French Jews, watching the beefed-up security motorcade assigned to the 88-member Israeli delegation, and praying for their safety, these Olympics, far from being an impetus to national pride, will be freighted with tension, anxiety and anguished self-interrogation regarding their children’s future in France?
National Post
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