McCarthyism for Jews
By Amiram Barkat
Prof. Daniel Dayan uses personal anecdote to buttress his theory about
the exclusion of Jews in French society. They have, he says, been pushed
outside the boundaries of the French "public." This sense
of being ejected from the bosom of media consensus - which Dayan himself
says he has experienced - may also be seen as a window on the hidden
motives of the man, who does confess that he isn't objective and admits
that he is "making a case."
"About two years ago, I was interviewed by the popular weekly
Telerama," says Dayan. "The reporter approached me as an expert
on the media - I had been interviewed as such on other occasions - and
asked me general questions. I don't remember exactly how the subject
arose, but during the interview I observed that if the public discourse
in France on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is so slanted in Israel's
favor, how can we explain France's use of the term intifada without
mentioning the parallel Israeli term, which certainly exists, to describe
the conflict? The reporter smiled in embarrassment and said: `Well,
we won't be able to publish something like that.' I insisted. The reporter
talked with her editor and finally they decided my quote would be published,
but in the headline over the interview it said `Jewish expert.'"
Dayan as a young man specialized in semiotics and did his doctorate
at the Academy of Social Sciences in Paris, with the philosopher Roland
Barthes, one of the most important scholars of language and society
in 20th-century France.
He became familiar with the media world in California, studying film
at Stanford University. There, Dayan met historian Shaul Friedlander
and, through him, Prof. Elihu Katz, considered an expert on the relationship
between the media and society. Thus began a long-term academic partnership,
and the pair went on to co-author many articles.
Dayan, who studied at Hebrew University in the 1970s, now works as
a senior researcher at the renowned National Center for Science Research
(CNRS) and as a lecturer at universities in Oslo and Geneva.
He says he first began looking at how the media in France view Israel
after Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in September 2001, when
he had the impression that "the French media had already crowned
Ariel Sharon as prime minister of Israel" at the time.
In the context of the wave of attacks on French Jews that began after
the outbreak of the Al Aqsa intifada, Dayan came together with French
intellectuals, most of them Jews of North African origin like sociologist
Shmuel Trigano and film director Jacques Tarnero.
Shared outrage
Their shared outrage forged an ad hoc group that undertook a media
campaign to expose tendentiousness in the French media. Important milestones
in that effort were the publication in October 2002, of "The French:
Are they objective?" - an anthology of articles by members of the
group - and the film Decryptage (Decryption) currently being shown in
Paris.
Last week, Dayan lectured at a conference on "anti-Semitism and
prejudice in the contemporary media" organized by Prof. Robert
Wistrich, director of the Vidal Sassoon Center for Research on Anti-Semitism
at the Hebrew University. He spoke about the analysis of "how prejudice
is constructed" in the higher echelons of the French media in terms
of its attitudes to Israel over the last two years.
Dayan takes aim first and foremost at Le Monde, the newspaper he says
is "not only the central platform for public discourse in France,
but also the heart of a galaxy of media outlets that it has purchased
in recent years, that articulates and disseminates its content."
Not random acts
For the last two years, Dayan and his partners have been trying to
prove what the French press is trying to hide - that the wave of incidents
directed at Jewish targets in France is not a random collection of isolated
and disturbed acts, but anti-Semitism.
Dayan argues that public opinion, in the academic sense of the term,
doesn't exist today in France. He says the prerequisite for the existence
of real public opinion is a supply of objective information via the
media. "Public opinion in France concerning the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict collapsed because the French media supplied the public with
non-information."
By non-information, Dayan means journalists who articulate the thoughts
of one of the sides, "the Palestinian of course," as if they
were their own, or who write about the conflict sitting in Paris and
speak in the name of that side - "what I call `karaoke.'"
The reasons for this are to be found in the sources of French anti-Israeli
sentiment, according to Dayan. He says the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
is perfect for France's double guilt complex, the one from Algeria and
the other from Vichy. "The Israeli-Palestinian conflict serves
the French guilt complex twice - first via the argument that the people
of the Holocaust is itself perpetrating a holocaust on another people.
And second, by arguing that the Israelis are colonialists, and therefore
hating them is permissible and desirable, and can't be considered racism."
The hatred for Israel generalizes well to the attitude toward French
Jews, who can't do anything about it: "If they attack you on the
street, what can you do? Go around with a sign saying `I have nothing
to do with Israel?' Maybe you'll raise a flag? Maybe wear a yellow patch?"
The image of Jews as seen by the French "public" comes to
them, as noted, through the eyes of the media. "To identify the
attitude of the French media toward Jews in France, one must examine
who is chosen to respond "in the name of the Jews," says Dayan.
"There are people with official positions in the community, and
there are three groups of intellectuals. The first group identifies
automatically with Sharon; the second group automatically blames Israel
and negates its existence; and the third group of people like me, supports
`Peace Now' and opposes supporting or blaming Israel automatically."
The first group, in Dayan's view, represents the new identity of French
Jewry. Dayan doesn't see anti-Semitism in the customary broad context
of the phenomenon, but rather as an outcome of the internal societal
reconstruction of identities in France, which can be concisely rendered
as "Muslims, in; Jews, out."
"French society took a giant and revolutionary step from its standpoint
in order to absorb the Muslim immigrants. The model that had shaped
French identity since Napoleon's time, changed. There had been a very
paternalistic model of the educational system, very homogeneous from
the standpoint of values, but also color blind.
"This is the mold in which French identity has been shaped. This
is the mold thanks to which a son of farmers like Pierre Bourdieu or
a North African immigrant like Jacques Derrida, or like me, can become
well-known intellectuals. This is the enlightenment that so entranced
the Jews.
Muslims embraced
"This was the delicacy, the bait, the reason that people so love
the French. When this model was tested with respect to the absorption
of Muslims into French society, doubts surfaced. The result was the
change to which I refer. The French told the Muslims, `We are willing
to change in order to accept you.' In other words, we are prepared to
try to understand you so that you can feel part of us."
I gather that your attitude to this change is not necessarily negative?
"Not at all. I admire the effort the French made. Their willingness
to learn about the Qur'an and about Muslim symbols. The tremendous popularity
accorded to any exhibition connected with the Muslim world that opens
in Paris. It's true that the French attempt at integration with the
Muslim community hasn't succeeded thus far, but the attempt is real,
substantial, impressive.
"The problem that outrages me is that, in contrast to the effort
to build a new French identity - one that the Muslim immigrants can
feel an undifferentiated part of - an effort has been made in the other
direction, to remove the Jews from this identity and turn them into
a group apart, a marginalized group. Why does there have to be a symmetry
of that kind?"
In Dayan's approach, the Jews from the first group, the ones who reflexively
support Israel and Sharon, are precisely suited to the new identity
that France would like to accord the Jews. Their positions are perceived
as partisan and unacceptable to "public opinion" and hence
they themselves collectively are different, strange.
Those in the second group, whose members despise Sharon and cast doubt
on the State of Israel's right to exist , Dayan sees as the "desired"
Jews who comprise an integral community in the new French identity.
"Take for instance a former Israeli like Roni Brauman, who once
argued that the Jewish community's support for Israel is tantamount
to being a `partner in crime.' A few months later, a certain media outlet
approached Brauman to interview him about the future cultural life of
the Jews in France. Brauman's response was that `I don't know about
that, and it doesn't interest me,' but when he opposed the Jewish community's
support for Israel, he spoke as Jew."
The paradox is that Brauman from the outset was accorded a platform
by the media, to express his criticism of the community, with an implicit
understanding that he would be presented as a Jew voicing criticism
of the Jewish community.
The third group, Dayan's group, which in the days of Oslo was pampered
nicely, became during the intifada period the tragic victim of internal
societal developments in France. "In the last two years, the attitude
to this group has featured three characteristics," says Dayan.
"First, blocked access. I, who had been sought after for interviews,
I felt that they had stopped calling on me, and my letters to the editor
were no longer published. The second characteristic is tribalization,
meaning, a return to tribal characteristics. When they finally agreed
to print what I said, they wrote "Jew" over it. The third
characteristic is criminalization - by which I mean publication of two
books, and an article in Le monde diplomatique, with `lists' that include
some of the best minds in France, who were denounced as reactionaries."
Dayan says this involved intellectuals like philosopher Alain Finkelkraut;
author Pascal Bruckner; philosopher Pierre-Andre Taguieff, the only
non-Jew on the list, who became famous among other reasons because of
his work on the Holocaust; sociologist Trigano, and film director Tarnero.
And that's something new?
"Yes. It's an escalation that began last fall. In my opinion,
it smacks of McCarthyism, but this McCarthyism is directed at Jews and
at supporters of Israel."
Article publié sur Haaretz.com
