arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

PARIS - On Sunday of this week, Brigadier General Yehiel Gozal, Israel's military attache in Paris, sat in the row of dignitaries on the dais of the Bastille Day parade, waiting with other invited guests for the light armored vehicle that would bring French President Jacques Chirac and the chief of staff, General Jean-Pierre Kelche. The two arrived and joined the guests, without showing any sign that as they drove along the Champs-Elysees, the front of their vehicle on the tail of the horses that occasionally soiled the boulevard, a deranged racist in the crowd - it was unclear whether he was an assassin or a demonstrator - pulled out a rifle and fired.

The security around Chirac was not reinforced. The interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, the grandson of a Hungarian Jew - who three days earlier had received an intelligence briefing from the chief of the Shin Bet security service, Avi Dichter - sent the rifleman for psychiatric observation. It was only in the wake of a chance phone call home from the parade that it became clear that the world media was reporting the near-assassination of Chirac.

The episode evoked an old thriller about a plot to assassinate Charles de Gaulle that was hatched by opponents of France's withdrawal from Algeria (a plot whose details were made known first to the IDF attache's unit and from there were conveyed to the deputy defense minister at the time, Shimon Peres).

Gozal will return home next month after completing a two-year stint. The IDF usually posts officers to attache units without giving the matter much thought - the position of military attache is not a professional track along which an officer develops, but is arrived at directly from the field - and in the tradition of the "fire and forget" system, which is convenient for all involved, so that the attache enjoys a lengthy vacation abroad and only causes trouble if he declines to be forgotten.

The choice might be between a brigadier general or a colonel who has honestly earned a little R&R for himself and his family after years of hard work in the Paratroops, say, like Gozal, who was a battalion commander under brigade commander Shaul Mofaz - who led the armored brigade that entered Nablus following the incident at Joseph's Tomb in the Western Wall tunnel riots of September 1996 - and later chief of staff of Southern Command; or the choice might fall on someone from the air force, as did Gozal's successor, Eyal Bavli, the commander of the Sde Dov airfield.

The hope is that the attache's personal qualifications, the fact that he is the representative of an esteemed army and his wealth of combat experience will impress his hosts and open doors for him. It is also expected that he will not take his mission too seriously and not bother Tel Aviv with situation appraisals and recommendations of various kinds. The attache is stunned twice: first, when it turns out that he is at the center of the world, and second, when it emerges that the General Staff is busy with events in Ramallah or on the northern border and reacts with impatience tinged with envy to cables from Paris or Washington.

Scientific proof of this was furnished in the "Yalo experiment," which was devised and carried out by Brigadier General (now retired) Aharon "Yalo" Shavit, when he was the air force attache in Washington. Shavit had suspected for some time that his reports on what he believed were critical developments were encountering a certain indifference back home. To test his assumption, he sent via diplomatic post an empty envelope labeled with a series of "urgent" stickers. Shavit wondered when the recipients of the missile would notice, and then inform him in a state of panic, that the vital security material that was supposed to be in the envelope had disappeared mysteriously. No one got back to him on the subject and Shavit drew the unavoidable conclusions, though perhaps a bit too rashly: The experiment was conducted in 1976, and it's possible that a request to clarify what was in the empty envelope will yet be forthcoming.

Improving relations

Gozal, who did not know about the exploits of the previous attaches, refused to accept their fate and bombarded the IDF with his discovery: the behind-the-scenes, security-oriented France, was fundamentally different from the familiar exterior trappings of remoteness and hauteur. Last summer, under his prodding, a first discussion of its kind was held by the strategic division of the General Staff's Planning Branch in an attempt to map the military relations between the two countries and formulate plans to improve them. It is there that policy is articulated; the external relations division of the Operations Branch is the mother ship of the attaches.

This divided structure is a hindrance to activity and usually causes it to fail. The only point in its favor is that it removes the liaison with the military attaches from the hands of the Intelligence Branch. The attaches' affiliation with the operations channel spares them the stereotypical and problematic label of having been sent to engage in espionage from their foreign base and, heaven forbid, also against their hosts.

The IDF is only one of four or five components of the state system that operate in countries that are important to Israel - along with the Foreign Ministry, the intelligence community, the Defense Ministry and the military industries. In the past year, the faulty coordination among these bodies reached a new low, with Ariel Sharon as prime minister, Shaul Mofaz as chief of staff, Shimon Peres as foreign minister and Yasser Arafat as head of the Palestinian Authority. The first two pulled in one direction, and with them their representatives in foreign capitals - the chiefs of the Mossad espionage agency branches and the military attaches; the second two pulled in the opposite direction, along with Israel's ambassadors abroad.

The result, in France, was a melange of policy, both implicit and explicit, weakness in public debates with spokesmen of the Palestinians and a cool wrapping for a warm package. The split personality between Chirac's right-wing presidency and the leftist premier Lionel Jospin threw into even bolder relief the disparity between the convenient, businesslike reality and the hostile image that was attached to Israel: The two branches of the government seemed to be in competition over which could display a tougher attitude toward Israel and a softer approach toward its adversaries, both externally (Chirac) and domestically (Jospin).

Double-edged sword

The elections of the president and the National Assembly in France dispersed the fog. Even Israel's outgoing ambassador to Paris, Eli Barnavi, an unabashed friend of Jospin and his party, believes today that the French left - on the neck of which the communists and the Greens hung like a millstone - was not firm enough in the face of manifestations of hostility toward Israel and Jews. The evaluation of the foreign minister, which does not make a habit of praising political appointments to the diplomatic service, is that Barnavi, who was appointed by Shlomo Ben-Ami, the foreign minister in the government of Ehud Barak, was an excellent ambassador.

Even the Foreign Ministry is finding it difficult to understand why Peres insisted on recalling Barnavi and appointing Nissim Zvilli, the former secretary-general of the Labor Party, in his place. True, Zvilli's background will enable him to forge ties in Paris, but he will be Peres' personal emissary - that is, not a trustee of Ariel Sharon - to a totally Chiracist government, which is now devoid of the friends of the Israeli foreign minister and his embassy, and which is also a disillusioned government, whose frequent calls for EU guidance had the effect of a double-edged sword: The French government's allies in the U.S. administration, Secretary of State Colin Powell and the senior officials of the State Department, were routed. And if the French want to remain in the game, they will have to coordinate with the Americans, not vice versa, and toe the line of President George Bush's Middle East policy speech - including the anti-Arafat line.

France's declared policy continues to cling to Arafat ("he was elected," "he is a symbol," "he is the only one whose signature on an agreement will be binding for his successors"). But five minutes after doing their duty by mouthing these slogans, senior officials in Paris are changing their tune and saying that Arafat has to go, because his time is over. "It would not be fair," a high-ranking official in the French foreign ministry said last week, "that after Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated and the Oslo process died, for Arafat to remain in place."

Last hope for Arafat

Chirac is the last great bastion that Arafat has; if Chirac is conquered, Arafat's final line of defense in the West will collapse. The two great missed opportunities in the battle over Arafat in 2000 belong to president Bill Clinton at Camp David, when he failed to ensure the prior support of Egypt and Saudi Arabia to unthaw Arafat's recalcitrance - and to Chirac in his fiasco of a meeting with Arafat, then secretary of state Madeleine Albright and prime minister Barak (who was accompanied by the present chief of staff, Moshe Ya'alon, as the General Staff's representative) on October 4. If Chirac had called Arafat to order in the first week of the confrontation, it is possible that it would not now be about to enter its third year.

In a later meeting held by the foreign ministers at that time, French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine complained to Madeleine Albright that "Arafat claims that Barak despises him." True, she replied, "but then again, that is how he feels toward all of us." Half a year earlier, Chirac chose to reward Barak for withdrawing the IDF from Lebanon by improving relations in one channel: At the urging of the defense minister, Alain Richard, who was friendly to Israel, the security channel was given priority.

The word in Tel Aviv is that Lebanon's tycoon prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, was a donor to Chirac's election campaign. Hearing this contention in Paris, a senior official smiles, places a finger to his sealed lips like an exclamation mark, nods his head and hints that the walls have ears. Irrespective of the background to the decision, it was the continuation of a trend that began, almost clandestinely, during the period of the Rabin government, under the leadership of Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI). Richard, who was the guest of defense [and prime] minister Ehud Barak in May 2000, adopted the new guideline enthusiastically and prodded the French military and the country's military industries to respond favorably to it.

A new Napoleon

In the centralist system of the French government, policy flows from the top down. From the top - meaning from the cabinet ministers to the officials and the officers, and in the case of a dispute between the foreign and defense ministries, there is mediation by the prime minister, and if the prime minister happens to be the political rival of the president, the president, who is the supreme commander of the armed forces and the manager of foreign policy, is the one who makes the final decision. Chirac exploited the humiliation inflicted on Jospin, who was stoned by Palestinian demonstrators during a visit to Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, to belittle him as a statesman of world stature.

As sole ruler, Chirac now has exclusive say, like Napoleon, as in the case - notes a strategic planner in the French government - of the ruling dynasties 1,000 years earlier, "because whereas in other countries nations have created states, in France the state created the nation out of separate ethnic groups, and it does not intend to allow them to affect policy."

Officials in the foreign and defense ministries here cite this fact as an explanation of why France has not imposed an embargo on the sale of arms to Israel, whereas other countries in Europe, such as Germany and Britain, alternately open and close - actually, far from the evil eye, they do a lot more opening than closing - the gates of defense supplies. Israel, the officials say, is trying and succeeding in recruiting the prime ministers of those two countries, Gerhard Schroeder and Tony Blair, to its cause so they will order the bureaucracy not to place too severe an interpretation on the spirit of the policy guideline - it is not a binding decision - not to supply arms to Israel. But the British and German bureaucracies are able to outwit the leadership and delay shipments by exploiting the tug-of-war between the various authorities, ministries and departments.

In France, the diplomats ridicule both the generals, who are looking for excuses not to send the army into action (it is too expensive and too dangerous), and the "Corsican mafia" in the intelligence community - typical of individuals whose fathers were master sergeants and junior administrators in the former colonies ("and it's a good thing they were lost," one diplomat says); but the ridicule does not affect the execution of policy: everyone is aligning to the right.

In the famous embargo of the 1967 Six-Day War, France effectively punished itself - and not just the minor punishment of liberating the IDF from French materiel and bringing about its overall reliance on American weaponry - but in the loss of its regional, and perhaps also its global, influence. This far-reaching conclusion was reached in a conversation by an Israeli official and his French host.

No country can be a world power today without being influentially involved in the Middle East today, they agreed, and there can be no involvement in the region without a way to exert influence on all the parties to the conflict - Israel and the Arab states, Iran and Iraq - and there can be no such influence without military relations and the ability to pressure both factors in any equation. The French vowed not to repeat the mistake made by de Gaulle in his old age.

City of combat

Even if their diplomats cluck their tongues in every salon in Europe against the settlements and for a Palestinian state, France will buy from Israel advanced weapons systems (RPVs - remotely piloted vehicles, meaning unmanned planes - manufactured by IAI, in cooperation with a French company, in a deal worth tens of millions of dollars), as well as more simple materiel (all the light ammunition for the French army).

In one sphere, the French embargo of the late 1960s and early `70s brought about an increase in exports to Israel: A group of scientists, engineers and technicians who worked in the French aviation, space and security industry in France immigrated to Israel. Its members were integrated into IAI, in the development of the Kfir jet fighter (based on the French Mirage warplane), among other projects. One of the leading members of the group, Dr. David Harari, today a senior executive in IAI, is a key liaison to the French military industries; it doesn't hurt, for example, when he has to deal with the head of the French Space Agency, Alain Bensoussan - not to say Ben Sasson.

The circle has also been closed in another realm: Algeria (as well as Morocco and Tunisia). The Arabists of the French Foreign Ministry - whose critics in the ministry, the officials of the strategic planning and political research sections, say there are almost no Hebrew speakers there - view Israel through the prism of "North Africa and the Middle East," meaning a tremendous Arab majority and five military bases in Africa, of which the most important is at Djibouti.

The strategic planners view Israel as a world power, with close American ties and relations with an extensive Diaspora. The strategic planners also identify a renewed partnership with Israel in the growing danger of the destabilization of France's former colonies, which France had imagined it was leaving but which have pursued it to the staircase and will soon be in the kitchen. A million Algerian citizens - in addition to millions of citizens of North African origin - live in France, and they are "riddled like a sieve by the Algerian secret service," according to a strategic planner in the French government - a service "that was apparently responsible for the terrorist attack a few years ago at the Saint Michel metro station in Paris, as a warning to us not to intervene in the military regime in Algeria and its war against fanatic Islam there."

A closed door

When a false rumor was disseminated in Algeria to the effect that every Algerian who had resided in that country before the French withdrawal in 1962 was entitled to French citizenship, the French consulates were inundated with millions - no less - of requests for entry permits. Departments in charge of emergency planning deployed for the sudden arrival of tens of thousands of would-be immigrants on France's shores, whether for political or economic reasons, but who would find themselves knocking on a closed door.

That door will not be opened to them. "It would be a problem of all of Europe, of the world, not just of ours," say French officials as they pass the nightmare scenario on. "We are absorbing people, as we have already done, but mainly those in the liberal professions." In another part of the world, this approach was once labeled "selective immigration," but the French did not volunteer to apply to the refugees of Algeria and Morocco the compassion that they have showed in abundance toward the Palestinians. Don't forget, an official of the Quai d'Orsay said this week, that we were the ones who created the Statue of Liberty, which embodies freedom and the call to all the hungry and oppressed of the world - and we installed it in America, not here.

Désolé mais Nicolas Sarkozy est français comme toute personne naissant sur le sol français. Même si la République démocratique française n'est pas parfaite, elle contient les idéaux de liberté, d'égalité, de fraternité et de laïcité. Je trouve nauséabonde la phrase " The interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, the grandson of a Hungarian Jew". Ce genre d'information rappelle certains critères de sélection appliqués pour envoyer des gens en camps d'extermination au nom de leurs ascendances. Cela rappelle surtout l'affaire Dreyfus où un militaire français, Dreyfus, a été au nom de ses origines juives jugé coupable d'intelligence avec l'ennemi, dégradé de toute nationalité française. À l'époque Zola, un homme de gauche avait pris permis que la culpabilité de l'État français dans cette affaire soit reconnue. Aujourd'hui, en 2002, est-ce sur Indy qu'on va refaire l'affaire Dreyfus? Avec dans le rôle du traitre Sarkozy, un homme de droite, la société accusatrice, les anti-mondialistes. Manque Zola mais il n'y en a pas quand on voit le peu de solidarité des antimondialistes avec leurs prisonniers (Bové, Gothenburg, les Sans Paiers de Séville...) Tous soutenus quand ils prennent des risques, Tous laissés tomber quand ils sont en prison. Bravo!

Certes il y eut Zola. Mais avant lui, il y eut Bernard Lazare, avant lui puis avec lui.