Betrayal: France, the Arabs, and the Jews David Pryce-Jones Encounter Books 2006, $23.95, pp. 171

France: Europe’s “Muslim” Power?

The French so often make it so easy to be angry at them, and though the imperious arrogance of the Gaullist days is long gone, we are reminded every so often of the French determination to stick it in our ribs. There was, for example, that amazing spasm of misspeaking by Jacques Chirac, the president of the French Republic, earlier this year when he told reporters that it wouldn’t really matter all that much if Iran got a nuclear bomb or two. The statement was at odds with at least three years of official French policy, and it was retracted within hours. But how could the French president, no novice in the ways of the world, commit such a gaffe? Very likely the gaffe was actually a sincere expression of opinion by Chirac, conveying what might be called the deep structures of French foreign policy, which has always been more adversarial toward Israel than toward Israel’s enemies in the Middle East.

In Betrayal: France, the Arabs, and the Jews, David Pryce-Jones, an Austrian-born British journalist and senior editor at the National Review, elaborates on this distressing consistency in French attitudes and behavior. Distressing, at least, for those who believe (and Pryce-Jones is certainly among them)that French policy has been selfish, narrow-minded and harmful to the cause of Middle Eastern peace.

The conventional explanation for the French position has to do with the country’s eagerness to magnify its power via special relationships with the Muslim world. Or, as Pryce-Jones puts it, the French foreign-policy establishment has always maintained a “collective view that France and the world of Islam shared a common destiny.” Put another way, France was “une puissance musulmane,” a Muslim power, meaning that in the eternal competition with Britain, France’s special position in the Islamic world would advance its prestige—not least as the guardian of the Christian holy places in the Middle East.

Betrayal doesn’t offer an especially new or insightful theory of French behavior. Indeed, it describes a situation that many Jews and other supporters of Israel have bemoaned for years. What Pryce-Jones does do, via some impressive digging into the French Foreign Ministry archives, is compile a more complete record of this French tendency.

The French view, he argues, is no mere product of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when many European friends of Israel began to rethink their support, but is consistent with the spirit of French diplomacy in the region since the 19th century.

Chirac’s recent gaffe on Iran thus comes across as entirely consistent with French attitudes toward Iran before and since. It was France, after all, that warmly received the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the months before he returned to Tehran in 1979 to take power. During his stay in the suburbs of Paris, the French post office put at his disposal two telexes and six telephone lines, “enabling him to issue instructions and manipulate violence.” In other words, he was given the opportunity to incite a rebellion in another country and, in the long run, to undermine the possibility that reason and democracy might some day prevail in the Middle East, all while enjoying French protection from the shah’s police.

Pryce-Jones sees a close similarity between France’s indulgent treatment of Khomeini and another, less-well-known case in which France gave remarkable protection to a figure of deep iniquity. In a chapter titled “The Rescue of the Mufti of Jerusalem,” he shows how France protected Haj Amiin al-Husseini, who, as a close ally of the Nazis during World War II, was wanted for trial by the United States, Britain and Yugoslavia (the last because of his role in recruiting a Bosnian Muslim Brigade for the SS.) But the French attitude was summed up by one of those self-incriminating statements that Pryce-Jones has found in the archives. “The Mufti has certainly betrayed the Allied cause,” a certain Lescuyer in the French embassy in Cairo wrote in a telegram to his ministry. (Lescuyer is not further identified, not even with a first name.) Still, “nothing obliges us to undertake any action in this regard which could only harm us in the Arab countries.”

Pryce-Jones provides plenty of other illustrations to support his view of the French, and many of them are telling. And yet, overall, Betrayal is both frustratingly sketchy and interpretively overdrawn. It gives the appearance of a book based largely on archival research (with gobbledygook references clumsily inserted into the text itself, rather than as footnotes) and then rather hastily written, with Pryce-Jones always willing to believe the worst about the French.

For example, he cites one instance of “exceedingly mischievous” French meddling that virtually makes the blood boil. In late 2000, following the outbreak of the second intifada, he reports, Ehud Barak and Yassir Arafat met in Paris for a summit brokered by Madeleine Albright to discuss a cease-fire. Just as agreement seemed within grasp, however, “Chirac telephoned Arafat with the advice not to sign but to hold out for more concessions. So there was no agreement.”

That’s about the extent to which Pryce-Jones examines the incident, which cries out for more explanation. After all, the truth is that Chirac is neither an evil nor a stupid man, but Pryce-Jones makes no effort to speak to a member of his entourage or to a French analyst to try to understand Chirac’s motives.

Neither does Pryce-Jones take into account the intense American efforts a few months before—and followed up at Taba as Bill Clinton was leaving office—to broker an Israeli-Palestinian deal. Instead, he gives the impression that Chirac, with a single phone call, put a stop to what might otherwise have been a historic deal. No doubt, French (and, more generally, European) indulgence of Arafat through the years encouraged the Palestinian leader to always hold out for more—as he notoriously did in rejecting the oh-so-favorable Taba solution, in January 2001. True, too, France and Europe could have done better (though, through the official European Union foreign-policy chief, Javier Solana, they did collectively press Arafat to agree to the terms on offer). In any case, I know of no serious American Middle East analyst who attributes the collapse of the peace talks to France, rather than to Arafat and the Palestinians themselves.

There seems to be a certain frustrated vision behind much of Pryce-Jones’s concern—the vision of a transatlantic alliance unanimous about what needs to be done in the Middle East (namely support Israel and face down Arab violence and intransigence), and able to summon the unified power to get it done. France certainly has not seen eye to eye with Israel or the United States in this regard, but, particularly in recent years, this does not seem to be a policy whose origins, as Pryce-Jones would have it, lie in primeval French anti-Semitism, the Dreyfus affair or France’s philo-Arabism. Rather, the French share a genuinely different appreciation of the politics on the ground. Certainly since at least the era of the philo-Semitic François Mitterrand, France has not so much gone its own way in the Middle East as anchored a widespread European view, and this view—in contrast to the American one—is that Israel is mainly at fault in its conflict with the Palestinians, and that the Palestinians are largely victims.

This is not to say that the French position is uninfluenced by the old desire to be a Muslim power, or that France is identical in this respect to every European country. It isn’t. But Pryce-Jones’s book loses further power by its failure to take the general European context into account. And beyond European. The truth is that you don’t have to cross the Atlantic to find the view that Western policy should be more sympathetic to the Palestinians, or that American foreign policy has become a hostage to Israeli interests.

In the end, Pryce-Jones’s partially satisfactory volume is better at elucidating a historical France than a contemporary one. He uncovers in his archival search a mournful catalogue of anti-Semitic and pro-Arab longings, especially among the aristocratic elite that for decades ran French foreign policy. Following World War II, as the UN vote on partition of the British-Palestinian mandate loomed, France’s consul-general in Jerusalem, Rene Neuville, announced to the French Foreign Ministry that the Jews were “racist through and through… quite as much so as their German persecutors and in spite of their democratic pretensions.” This early and ugly conflation of Zionism with racism was accompanied by the fear that “our grandeur in the Levant” would be severely harmed by the creation of a Jewish state.

That’s a stunning illustration of a repellent attitude, but after all, France did vote for partition at the UN, even as Britain abstained, a fact acknowledged by Pryce-Jones but, like much else in this thin volume, underexplained. France then became the young state’s major arms supplier, until Charles de Gaulle perpetrated his volte-face as the 1967 war loomed. These are complex, fascinating and important matters, and, in this book, Pryce-Jones reminds us of one of their dimensions: the mischief wreaked by France’s vainglorious quest for prestige and influence in the Muslim world. Still, a full, meticulous, judicious history of France’s relations with Israel, Arabs and the Jews has yet to be written.

Richard Bernstein is the author of six books, including Fragile Glory: A Portrait of France and the French and Ultimate Journey.