– By Scott Sayare –
PARIS — Despite calls for moderation and restraint by politicians, religious leaders and community activists, anti-semitic violence has begun to crop up across France (see Le Monde, Reuters, Le Figaro). But the French press, unlike the international media, hesitate, still, to acknowledge what seems to be the reality of the situation: that the nation’s young, frustrated immigrant Muslims (France has Western Europe’s largest Muslim population) have latched onto the Gazan cause as a rallying call. French Arabs, a largely frustrated, widely denounced underclass (Sarkozy, as interior minister under Chirac, himself popularized the term racaille, a pejorative term for France’s trouble-making urban youth), who have for 30 years been shunted out of sight and mind into the disintegrating cités and banlieus of the country’s metropolitan centers, have found in the Gazan conflict a cause on which they might be heard, an issue of global significance that might help to bring their plight, finally, to the forefront of French thought.
And the French populace more generally (with perhaps the exception of the Jewish population, also the largest in Western Europe) seems to agree with them on Gaza, which, for once, puts the “native” French in league with the country’s Arab population: an awkward alliance across deep social, class and ethnic divisions. But the use of violence and anti-semitic rhetoric in support of Gaza threatens, one would think, to weaken that consensus and undermine the immigrant cause.
French imams have already begun to call for a halt to violence, especially against Jews; whether those appeals will be enough to cool the simmering discontent of the youths now (assumedly) committing violent acts, the same demographic and sense of resentment at the heart of the riots of 2005.
Depending on the direction the conflict takes, the position staked out by the international community, and the perspective adopted by the French populace moving forward, Gaza and the Palestinian conflict might result in some positive domestic changes in France, or at the very least, a renewed focus on the problems of the banlieus.
