The understandable reaction in places like Bondy is fear. “People are scared,” says Levy, who works as a secretary for the municipal sports association. And while tremors have swept through all the “foreign” communities, many of the 400 Jewish families among Bondy’s 47,000 residents see themselves potentially besieged. Like other Jews in France, especially those in immigrant neighborhoods, they are feeling the brunt of what some call “the new anti-Semitism.” It’s a melange of hatred from different sources that also despise each other: the old Catholic, crypto-fascist right with which Le Pen traditionally is identified, and the unemployed, almost aimlessly violent young men who target their Jewish neighbors to avenge the perceived sins of Israel, or to emulate the supposed glory of Osama bin Laden.
Annie Levy’s husband, Lionel, a team-handball coach, is thinking of taking her and their two young daughters to Israel. His parents are there. But Annie doesn’t want to go. One of the things that makes her proud of her town is the mix of people. France may not see itself as a nation of immigrants, but on the streets of Bondy it sure feels like one. Both the Jews and the more numerous Arabs came mostly in the 1950s and 1960s from Algeria. The leaders of the two communities hail from the same little village.
Altogether, some 50 nationalities are represented in this one town, says Sidi-Hamed Selles, who runs cultural programs for city hall. “A lot has been done [by local government] so that people will listen to each other.” he says. And many still do. Lionel Levy’s best buddy is Dramane Doumbia, a Muslim originally from Mali. One of Annie’s good friends is Fonta Diagne, a nurse’s assistant and a Muslim who was born in Senegal. “It’s only when I came to France that I had a sense how compartmentalized a society could be,” says Diagne over a drink at the Levys’. “In Senegal we always welcome strangers.” Doumbia sees the violence being imported from abroad. “The media are paving the way for this,” he says. None of these friends believes in the clash of civilizations. None of them wants to surrender to fear and hate. “If everybody leaves,” says Annie Levy, “it’s like saying Le Pen is right.”
But the sad truth is, many people think he is. And in Bondy a strange thing is happening. Le Pen may even have attracted a few Jewish votes. As Le Pen plays the anti-Arab card for all it’s worth, he’s toned down the Jew-baiting that helped make him infamous in earlier campaigns. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz last month, he watched his words carefully. He no longer referred to a prominent Jewish woman journalist, Anne Sinclair, as “a juicy kosher butcher.” He didn’t trifle with his own reputation for anti-Semitism, as he did in the past, by saying, “I don’t like Chagall and my favorite composer is Wagner. Does that make me anti-Jewish?” But he was quite comfortable likening France’s 6 million Muslims to a clandestine army readying for an inevitable clash of cultures. “They entered in civilian dress, in jeans,” said Le Pen. “[French authorities] would never let 6 million people with weapons enter our territory. But a person in jeans can become a soldier.”
In a troubled working-class town like Bondy, that kind of fantasy can almost seem plausible. Socialist Mayor Gilbert Roger is careful to say there’s no real confrontation, as such, between Muslims and the Jews in the community. “It’s a generational conflict,” he says, with most of the violence coming from young men with Arab backgrounds who’ve got no work and a lot of time to stoke their anger. The satellite-television dishes on almost every balcony in the bleak housing projects at the north of town bring a steady stream of Arabic broadcasts showing the suffering of Palestinians at Israeli hands. Some make out Osama bin Laden to be a hero. “After September 11,” says Roger, “young people thought he was like Zorro.”
Faced with that kind of hostility, French Jews have hoped for help and support from their government, but only rarely have found it. “I fear that a large number of Jews went for an extremist vote [for Le Pen] out of a feeling that they were abandoned by the French state,” says Sammy Ghozlan, president of the Council of Jewish Communities of Seine-St-Denis.
“It’s something I’ve seen coming for years with all these burnings, this throwing of Molotov cocktails, this spitting at people,” says Jacques Benichou, vice president of a local Jewish community organization. His neighbor, an Arab, is a trusted friend. They watch over each other’s houses. But the kids in the public housing across the road throw rocks at Jews when they pass. “That’s where Le Pen has a point. You have to be more severe and punish people,” says Benichou.
The Levys and their friends are not fooled. Le Pen “is an illusionist,” says Lionel. But if the hatreds Le Pen exploits continue to grow, they have to wonder where they will fit into the picture of Bondy, and indeed into the picture of France.
