As Robert Zaretsky has reported in Tablet Magazine, Le Pen fille has genuinely changed the party and has even leveraged its xenophobic, anti-Islamic platform to appeal to Jews. More than that: Her deputy, Louis Aliot, last month traveled to Israel in order to try to drum up support among Israeli residents enfranchised in France for the elections. (Israel may be even more consequential to the French parliament, the National Assembly: The brand-new eighth constituency—one of 11 overseas French constituencies—includes only eight countries, one of which is Israel, whose more than 70,000 eligible voters make up roughly half the entire constituency’s franchise.)

But the FN is still the FN. Marine Le Pen has been on the defensive because daddy was interviewed on television about a notorious 1987 interview in which he questioned the Shoah—and he responded by blaming CRIF, the Jewish community’s official spokesperson to the government, for distorting his words. Old soldiers never die.

French Far-Right Leader Making Gains in Run-Up to April Elections [Haaretz]
Related: Send The Marine [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: French Right Panders to ‘The Western Island’

It is hard to imagine a scenario that better serves the ambitions of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right Front National party. While the Socialists and the Gaullists throttle one another over the economy and immigration, Le Pen has mostly watched with a smile from the sidelines. She has good reason to grin: French opinion polls now show her in third place for next year’s presidential election. At roughly 20 percent, Le Pen trails Sarkozy by 6 percentage points and François Hollande, the Socialist candidate, by 10 points. (Squabbling over the crumbs is the rest of the packed field of candidates.) Le Pen’s prospects are even more promising because Sarkozy’s future is yoked to Merkel’s—critics now refer to the twosome as Merkozy—and Hollande’s greatest electoral advantage is that he is not Dominique Strauss-Kahn. To the extreme consternation of the left and right, nearly one in three French voters now has a positive opinion of Le Pen, according to the Ipsos/Le Point poll from mid-November.

Does this sea change in public opinion include the French Jewish community? The answer, unthinkable even a year ago, is yes, for reasons both practical and historical. French Jews and a political movement once steeped in anti-Semitism now seem destined to join forces.

***

Since its inception in the 1970s, the Front National has wrapped itself in the repellent rags of traditional French anti-Semitism. The series of outrageous dérapages, or verbal slips, of the movement’s founder and longtime leader Jean-Marie Le Pen—Marine’s father—are legion, ranging from his remark that the Holocaust was a “detail” of history to his rhyming of crematory (crématoire) with the name of a Jewish politician Michel Durafour. Thus the question of whether anti-Semitism was incidental or central to the Front National’s ideological essence was, from the perspective of French Jewry, entirely settled.

Until now, that is. Since she assumed its leadership at the beginning of 2011, Marine Le Pen has worked to “modernize” her father’s party—a diplomatic word for purging its most reactionary elements. Nolwenn Le Blevennec, a journalist for the news site Rue89 who reports on the Front National, notes that Le Pen has demoted party figures like Christian Bouchet, a notorious fan of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and expelled Alexandre Gabriac, who gave a Nazi salute at a party rally. She’s also distanced herself from Alain Solal, a prominent anti-Semite previously identified as one of Front National’s intellectuals. Even more notably, by making her father the honorary president of the Front National, Le Pen has effectively made him a figurehead shorn of actual power.

At the same time, Marine Le Pen has made a series of dramatic overtures to the Jewish community. Her trip to the United States in early November largely passed under the radar of the American media, but it was widely covered by the French press. At first, the visit wobbled between the surreal and slapstick. At one point, Le Pen’s handlers tried to bar the pack of French journalists from following her into the U.S. Capitol; once inside, the reporters found that Le Pen’s strenuous efforts to meet with a U.S. politician—indeed, any politician at all—ultimately yielded only a furtive 10-minute chat with Rep. Ron Paul. But then, days later, Le Pen pulled off a coup de théâtre: Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, attended a gathering she hosted at the United Nations. Despite the subsequent announcement from Israel’s foreign ministry that the meeting was based on a “misunderstanding,” all the press releases in the world can’t undo the image of a smiling Prosor standing side-by-side with a beaming Le Pen.

Le Pen has not had big success with the Jewish community in France, though not for lack of trying. In March, shortly after Le Pen declared in the magazine Le Point that the Holocaust was the “summum of human barbarism,” the radio station of the Jewish community, Radio J, scheduled an interview with her. The Union of French Jewish Students deplored the invitation, and Richard Prasquier, the head of the Council of Jewish Institutions of France, condemned it as “unacceptable.” Though the radio station insisted the interview would be “no holds barred,” public pressure proved too great, and the station’s director canceled the interview.

In a subsequent interview, Le Pen described the decision as a “deeply anti-republican and anti-democratic.” (Then, just last week, the Jewish council played a leading role in preventing Le Pen from participating in a public debate at the University of Paris. Le Pen responded by bringing suit against the student union for violating her freedom of speech.) By lobbing back at the Jewish council the traditional critique aimed at her own party, Le Pen displayed the skills that have made her a formidable political figure. But is her outreach to French Jewry just a crude political calculation?

Rue89’s Le Blevennec believes that Le Pen is not anti-Semitic and genuinely wants to turn the page. In fact, “turning the page” were the very words used by Gilles-William Goldnagel, a prominent lawyer, conservative essayist, and leader of the French Jewish community, when he agreed to meet with Le Pen earlier in the year. Jean-Yves Camus, a well-respected political scientist who tracks the extreme right-wing, has also stated that Le Pen is free of her father’s anti-Semitism, not to mention his negationist reflex regarding the Holocaust.

Yet many others, such as the intellectual Caroline Fourest, the author of a controversial biography of Marine Le Pen, are not persuaded. According to Fourest, Le Pen has simply disguised her party’s xenophobia and latent anti-Semitism with the garb of republican respectability. Another observer, Valérie Hoffenburg, the former director of the French office of the American Jewish Committee, warns that other anti-Semites within the party, like her father’s closest ally, Bruno Gollnisch, remain influential. Besides, Hoffenberg argues, to condemn the death camps does not make Le Pen a true republican.

***

French Republicanism—the doctrine that affirms the equality and liberty of citizens and requires that the public sphere be entirely free of ethnic or religious claims—is the crossroads at which the Front National and French Jewry seem slated to either collide or collaborate. Upon their civil emancipation during the French Revolution, French Jews embraced republicanism, particularly its emphasis on a secular society, as their own.

But that might not be the case for much longer. The national debate over immigration and national identity—issues that involve the 5 million Muslims, mostly of North African origin, living in France—seems shriller by the day. The urban riots that convulsed France in 2005, followed by the appalling death of Ilan Halimi, a young French Jew tortured and murdered by several youths of North African background, have had an especially powerful impact on French Jewry. It may well be that the community has reached a point no less pivotal than 1967, when the Six-Day War, followed by Charles de Gaulle’s notorious remark that Jews were an elite and domineering race, ignited French Jewish self-consciousness.

According to Jean-Yves Camus, the political scientist, at least 5 percent of Jewish voters will support Le Pen in 2012. While he and other specialists debate the precise number—there are no surveys on the question—they agree that France’s Jewish community has been moving steadily toward the political right and, indeed, to the extreme right. Clearly, a Jewish Le Pen supporter is no longer the oxymoron it once was. Richard Prasquier, of the Jewish council, worries about this potentially tectonic shift, suggesting that French Jews are increasingly “receptive to and tempted by Le Pen’s discourse.” Perhaps the most immediate reason for this evolution is, that “for the first time since World War II, French Jews are afraid,” said the intellectual Alain Finkielkraut.

These so-called transfuges—voters who cross not just party but ideological lines—clearly welcome Le Pen’s repeated claims that current immigration policies will destroy French culture and society. As she declared at a party conference in September, France is “confronted by a multiculturalism that is wreaking havoc with her laws, her mores, her traditions, in short the values of her civilization and her identity.” The Front National promises to slam shut the door on immigration, encourage legal aliens to leave the country, and beef up the police force. Insecurity will, on cue, disappear. As for national identity, Le Pen has borrowed a few pages from her father. Earlier this year she described as a “new occupation” the practice of Muslims in Paris praying on the sidewalks, lacking sufficient space in mosques. And there is the élan with which Le Pen has continued her party’s tradition of holding an annual celebration at the statue of Joan of Arc in Paris, which makes it all too easy for the fearful to see Marine Le Pen’s battle against the barbarian hordes from across the Mediterranean as a continuation of Joan’s struggle against the perfidious invaders from across the Channel. (Or, for that matter, against Brussels. Le Pen has astutely tied fears over immigration to her denunciations of globalization and the European Union. As the euro crisis worsens, her popularity improves.)

Against this background, Le Pen’s effort to seduce the French Jewish community takes on even greater significance. It is only by channeling popular fear and loathing at Muslims that the Front National has made room under its “republican” umbrella for its previous bête noire: the Jews.

CORRECTION, December 13: This article originally stated that the politician Michel Durafour committed suicide. He did not.

Combine all this with the genuine flux in the Republican race—with Herman Cain stubbornly sticking around the top and Newtmentum capturing the country’s imagination—and we may have the first genuinely exciting GOP debate tonight. In anticipation, a few days ago I talked to Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, about Jewish Republicans’ stake in the race and what he hopes to hear tonight.

How did you feel about the “start at zero” comments?
I think there’s a big difference between the Romney comments, which if you look back were in reference to Pakistan, not in terms of what Gov. Perry was advocating. But the thing that is important to realize is that, first of all, the attacks by Congressman Wassermann Schultz are extraordinarily disingenuous: It is absolutely false for her to assert that the Republicans want to zero-out aid to Israel. If you look at Mitt Romney’s position paper, he talks about increasing aid to Israel. What Perry said, which was probably articulated in an inartful way, is that we are giving foreign aid, to his mind, to a lot of countries that don’t further the strategic values of the United States.

Secondly, I think in a broad, general view, yeah, OK—does that mean we are giving aid to countries that are not acting in our best interests? Maybe. The reality is that in the dire economic times we find ourselves in, we don’t have the luxury as a nation to do everything as business as usual all across the board. As we’re looking to make huge sacrifices domestically, it would be irresponsible not to look at other areas. Support to Israel, though, is not one of those areas that is really threatened by that discussion.

What are you hoping to hear from the candidates tonight?
We’re looking for some clarification on some of the questions of foreign aid. I’m sure it will come up, and I think it will put to bed any question about the commitment of the Republicans on critical aid to Israel. These are very dangerous times, and I think the Jewish community will be looking to see how the Arab Spring is looking to be more like an Arab Winter. We see Syria now teetering on the edge. Libya, Egypt: The rise of radical elements there pose tremendous risks to Israel. It goes without saying the issue of Iran is critical, not just for the countries in that region, but for the United States and our allies around the world. In terms of the peace process, you will start to see from the Republicans a vision that is very different from the direction of the current administration. The contrast will be very striking.

What do you see a Republican administration doing on the peace process that the Obama administration hasn’t?
You’ve got to make very clear that you need a partner for peace. One of the things that George Bush clearly understood is that trying to force a process forward when you don’t have two parties willing to make a lasting and meaningful peace isn’t good, and by action and by deed we can say the Palestinians are not ready to be true partners for peace. They snubbed this president, they snubbed the United States by moving forward on the unilateral declaration at the U.N. The notion that we’re going to force a process forward in this climate is naive and reckless.

What do you expect these candidates to do, if president, that Obama doesn’t on Iran?
The president keeps talking about these crippling sanctions and how all the pressure of the international community is one of the achievements of his administration so far. But every day we get closer to Iran having a nuclear weapon. This administration has sent mixed messages regarding the military option, whether it’s on or off the table. I think right now because America is seen as a much weaker player globally, our ability to really impact Iran through sanctions is hindered. Clearly our ability to get folks like the Russians and the Chinese onboard is creating a safety valve for the Iranians. We can’t seem to build a unified international coalition. I think you’ll see the Republicans onstage talk about that and show a very clear and distinct difference.

What did you make of the Obama-Sarkozy hot-mic gaffe? The defense an Obama supporter would make is that Obama was having the conversation in the first place because he was persuading President Sarkozy to back him and Israel at the U.N.
I mean regardless of the context, I don’t know if that’s a defense of the comments and the feelings. What everybody got to see was really an uncensored, raw look into how the president of the United States and how the president of France truly feel about Prime Minister Netanyahu. I think the president showed his true colors. I think anybody, Republican or Democrat, would be hard-pressed to think that had that happened with George Bush or President Clinton, they wouldn’t have pushed back and responded to Sarkozy—to come to Netanyahu’s defense or at least take issue, not agree with the president calling him a liar. I could very easily see Bill Clinton coming to his defense, as many in the Jewish community could see him doing.

The RJC doesn’t endorse primary candidates, correct? But it does in the general?
Correct.

Earlier: GOP Debate Prompts Clash on Israel, Iran
Iran Report, Gaffe Provide GOP Opening

• Rep. Gabrielle Giffords appeared for an ABC News interview last night and is recovering remarkably. [Huff Post]

• Jordan’s King Abdullah is the first Arab leader to state publicly what many privately believe: that it’s time for Syria’s President Assad to go. [WSJ]

• The son of a conservative Iranian politician with alleged ties to the 1994 Jewish Community Center bombing in Buenos Aires was found dead in a Dubai hotel room. It was nominally suicide; some are suspicious. Oh boy. [LAT]

• French President Nicolas Sarkozy sent Prime Minister Netanyahu a letter pledging friendship after he was caught on a hot mic saying that Bibi is a “liar.” [JTA]

• Jeff Goldberg suggests President Obama needs to do something similar—for the sake of U.S. and Israeli security. [Bloomberg View]

• Immensely good essay by ace Times reporter Anthony Shadid on Syria, the Assads, and the fear Arab dictators have inflicted on their peoples. [Frontline]

• The famed 1980s New York City graffiti artist who went by “Neo” turns out to have been a cop named Steven Weinberg. [HuffPo]

• An argument for releasing jailed Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti. [IHT]

• An essay about trying to conceive when both of you are Tay-Sachs carriers. [Kveller]

• Jewish South Florida gentleman demands more Hannukah-themed stamps. [The Palm Beach Post/Vos Iz Neias?]

The famous (in that world) Nazi-themed episode of Star Trek, complete with a threatened planet called Zeon, will be aired in Germany for the first time. All that’s left are Tribbles!

And as if they did not have enough ammunition, you have an open-mike moment yesterday, in which French President Nicolas Sarkozy was overheard confiding in Obama (who is in Paris), of Prime Minister Netanyahu: “I cannot stand him. He is a liar.” To which Obama reportedly replied: “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day!” That Obama finds Bibi frustrating is about as newsworthy as the fact that the subway took too long and was too crowded this morning on my way to work. But it still serves to (further) confirm the impression that Obama and Bibi have a bad personal relationship and that, under their leadership, their countries have experienced a weakened one (surely U.S. ambassador Dan Shapiro was protesting a bit much when he insisted yesterday that the “special relationship” is “stronger than ever before”); and with just a little imagination, you could call this Obama’s fault.

At this point, the list of alleged personal slights at Bibi—the missed photo-op, the 45-minute Hillary Clinton phone call, the “‘67 borders’ surprise, and on and on—is long enough that this is just another drop in the bath. But it’s what we’re talking about today instead of, say, how Obama may very well be completely committed to preventing Iran from getting the bomb, even if it means the use of U.S. military force (such is Jeffrey Goldberg’s argument in his latest column). Which means it’s a good day for the GOP.

GOP Field Attacks Obama Foreign Policy With Tough Talk on Iran [NYT]
Report: Sarkozy Calls Netanyahu a ‘Liar’ [Ynet]
Why Obama Might Save Israel From Nuclear Iran [Bloomberg View]
Earlier: Perry’s Ascent Heralds Israel’s Rise as Issue
Frontrunning Romney Picks Fight on Israel

• This is the moment that will define Mahmoud Abbas’ legacy. [NYT]

• An exhibit of photgraphs of children from around the world opened at Park51, otherwise known as the Ground Zero mosque—which is to say, it opened—to little fanfare or protest. [Forward]

• The TV and radio host Shelly Yacimovich won the Labor Partly leadership. [AP/WP]

• Lars von Trier clarified that he is not sorry for his remark at Cannes identifying with Hitler, only for not making it clear he was joking. [NYT ArtsBeat]

• Judging by the troop buildup, Syrian protesters are due for a new crackdown. [DPA/Haaretz]

• Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak will be visiting his home-away-from-home—the New York-D.C. Acela corridor—tomorrow and Friday. [The Envoy]

• Facebook will not close pages that deny the Holocaust, for reasons of free speech. A survivors group has criticized the company. [JTA]

• Harold Bloom’s favorite book in the Bible is Jonah, and here he explains why. [NYRB]

• French President Nicolas Sarkozy became the first European leader to call for a two-state solution that recognizes Israel as “for the Jewish people.” [Contentions]

• The skinniest house in the world is being built in Warsaw for Tablet Magazine columnist Etgar Keret. [Fast Company]

We all need someone …

Here’s why. DSK was the leading candidate of the leading party, the Socialists. The frontrunner is now François Hollande, but he is not quite the candidate DSK was, and besides, this scandal could tarnish the Socialists generally. And if they hemorrhage voters, some may go to the incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy’s right-wing party, but some more may find themselves drifting to the far-right National Front, which also aligns itself as the party of the working class (complete with a May Day parade and everything). The FN is led by Marine Le Pen, daughter of the notorious anti-Semite Jean-Marie Le Pen, and she has refashioned her party to make it more acceptable to the mainstream.

She is the weekend’s big winner: The weakening of the Socialists makes it more likely that her party will advance to the second round of France’s presidential elections next year, in which she would be pitted against only one other party. And while she has formally repudiated her father’s and her party’s past of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, she is not someone whom Jewish folks should be all too excited about. It will be bitterly ironic if she ends up gaining greater legitimacy and power due to the personal misconduct of someone who happens to be Jewish.

I.M.F. Chief, Apprehended at Airport, Is Accused of Sexual Attack [NYT]
Earlier: Is Marine a Different Animal?

• A State Department spokesperson called “outrageous” the comments of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, condemning the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. [Haaretz]

• Madonna, Malawi, and Kabbalah. [NYMag]

• Former Israeli president and convicted rapist Moshe Katsav will not have to do jail time pending his appeal. [AP/WP]

• This is way old, but I learned today that President Obama has a Jewish half-brother. [WP]

• The Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim participated in a rare performance in Gaza as a show of solidarity. [AP/Haaretz]

Not enough people remember this awesome post-9/11 rant in Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour (caution: Lots of cursing, and equal-opportunity use of racial stereotypes in the Spike Lee manner).

Le Pen fille has inarguably repudiated her father’s anti-Semitism, although some would argue that it has morphed into her party’s strong anti-immigrant platform and its more-than-whiff of Islamophobia. Arthur Goldhammer, a top blogger on French politics and affiliate of Harvard’s Center for European Studies—oh, and a cousin-of-The-Scroll—found the profile “a remarkably uncritical piece, in my view, quite shocking in the degree to which it lends itself to her effort to differentiate herself from her father.” I asked him over email to tell me more about what Le Pen the Younger represents and what she could mean for French Jews and for Israel.

How is Le Pen like her father?
It is true that Marine Le Pen has worked hard to dissociate herself from her father’s anti-Semitic image. She has explicitly described the Holocaust as the great tragedy of the 20th century and recently expelled a party member who was photographed giving the Nazi salute. But she has retained Bruno Gollnisch, whom she defeated for the party leadership and who, like her father, who remains honorary president of the party, has been convicted of questioning the existence of the Holocaust. Both he and her father marched in the front rank in Sunday’s May Day party parade. Her party does enjoy substantial support from the working class, but working-class anti-Semitism has long existed in France. Ms. Le Pen has focused her message on the economic crisis, but remember that her two likeliest main opponents have Jewish affiliations: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, is Jewish, and President Nicolas Sarkozy has a Jewish mother. Her attacks on “international financial capital” and on the IMF as the agent of international capital revive age-old extreme right stereotypes associating “international capital” with Jewishness. Indeed, “rootless cosmpolitan” was a code-word for “Jew” in the 1930s, and Le Pen’s attacks on Strauss-Kahn as a man who has abandoned his country to serve the interests of finance in a foreign capital are heard as a dog-whistle by anti-Semites.

A quick reminder: Why should Jews be cautious of the National Front?
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party’s former leader, referred to the Holocaust as a “minor detail” of the history of World War II and once referred to a Jewish minister, Michel Durafour, as Durafour crématoire, a pun on the French for “crematory oven” (four crématoire). In 1999, he was convicted by a German court of “minimizing the Holocaust.” Others involved in the founding of the Front National came out of extreme right-wing movements associated with anti-Semitism.

Is the difference between her and her father more style or more substance?
It’s quite a bit of both, and her father is reportedly not happy with her reorientation of the party line. He also allegedly advised her not to expel the young member who made the Nazi salute, for fear of alienating “older elements” in the party, who have no problem with this sort of thing.

Do you think Jewishness and anti-Semitism will enter into the presidential campaign?
Covertly, via the kind of symbolism I mentioned above. But even before Marine Le Pen assumed the leadership, anti-Arab and more generally anti-immigrant sentiment had replaced anti-Semitism as the party’s main “social” theme. Since French anti-Semites consider French Jews to be foreigners anyway, the xenophobic line appeals to those hostile to Jews without having to name them.

How does Israel fit into this? As an influential member of the EU and the U.N. Security Council, France is an important country for Israel right now.
The FN has not shown hostility to Israel in recent years because of its emphasis on anti-Muslim themes. Muslims are a much larger “alien” group in France today, and since Israel is an object of Muslim hostility, there has been no reason for an anti-Islamic party to take an anti-Israel line.

Is Sarkozy moving to his right in response to her? And if so, doesn’t that indicate that she has tapped into a broader current in French politics and society?
Sarkozy has long emphasized law-and-order themes, and he has repeatedly promised to tighten enforcement of immigration laws. These issues helped him appeal to extreme-right voters in 2007, and he was thought to have “destroyed” the FN by co-opting its issues. But Marine Le Pen has been able to take back those voters, and in response Sarkozy has tried to revive some of his hard-right themes, but thus far without much effect.

Finally, is there anything more French than—as Marine Le Pen’s mother did—leaving your husband for his biographer?
No comment.

Marine Le Pen, France’s (Kinder, Gentler) Extremist [NYT]
Le Pen in the Times [French Politics]

Meanwhile, the talk of France (besides Libya) is a book by the grandson of a prominent minister in Marshal Pétain’s Vichy government that argues that most of the entire group of Frenchmen that did not actively resist Nazi occupation—including the book’s titular “Very Nice People,” and including the author’s grandfather, who is commonly seen as heroic—share responsibility for the deportation and eventual murder of thousands of French Jews. That individuals like his grandfather committed small, brave acts to save individual Jews is nearly beside the point, the author argues. “In the end it was not at all necessary to be a monster to participate in the worst,” he tells the Wall Street Journal. “There was an anti-Semitism of the state. Men like my grandfather were prepared to do absolutely anything to preserve a little fragment of national sovereignty.” Though most have criticized the book, some Frenchmen have come to its defense: Its detractors, said one such defender, are “right-thinking conformists,” parroting a “warmed-over couplet about the Pétainist-Resistant who with one hand sent Jews to the gas chamber and with the other, claimed to have saved a few.” The speaker is, of course, Lévy.

I’d submit this isn’t a coincidence, or even, entirely, unrelated. In his masterpiece, Power and the Idealists, Tablet Magazine contributor Paul Berman writes of a generation of Frenchmen, largely mapping on to the American Baby Boomers, who grew up wondering what they would have done during the Occupation. “The militants who had fought in Spain or in the Resistance were the Series A generation,” Berman explains.

The militants of their own generation, his and Kouchner’s, had to recognize that, by contrast, they were strictly Series B. They were the generation of the second rate—the less-than-Malraux, less-than-Camus generation. The students were résistants who had nothing to resist. They pretended to resist, even so, and pretending merely aggravated their self-doubts. They dreamed, therefore. They went to the movies.

For their knowledge that their parents lived in historical times, they compensated both by policing those among their parents who behaved incorrectly and by dramatically reenacting those times with whatever new struggle happened to be at hand.

The “Kouchner” in Berman’s paragraph is Bernard Kouchner, a charter member of this group of Boomer-era French intellectuals, as well as the founder of Doctors Without Borders. Until recently, he was also France’s foreign minister—which brings us back to Sarkozy, who appointed him; and who is himself descended in part from Greek Jews; and who now, as French president, perhaps wishes, with Lévy, to avoid again staining the French flag by associating it with mass slaughter. Thus concludes your occasional lesson that the past is neither dead nor past.

Man in the News: Nicolas Sarkozy [FT]
How Bernard-Henri Lévy Started the Libyan War [FrumForum]
Vichy’s ‘Very Nice People’ [WSJ]

• Lawyers for Haaretz reporter Uri Blau will hand over the confidential documents allegedly given him by accused traitor Anat Kamm. [Haaretz]

• The IDF’s new device of choice for breaking up West Bank protests is a truck, nicknamed “The Skunk,” that shoots out horribly bad-smelling liquid. [LAT]

• Reports have it that the meeting in Paris two weeks ago between Presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Shimon Peres was quite tense, with Sarkozy repeatedly criticizing Prime Minister Netanyahu. [Haaretz]

• Google made its first-ever purchase of an Israeli company, buying tech start-up Labpixies, which is involved in the search-engine business, for $25 million. [JPost]

• Prominent Jewish Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) told a politically conservative, Jewish-themed TV show that he told President Obama that the administration’s hard line on Israel “has to stop.” [Ynet]

• The Israeli government warned that it would oppose a peace plan that the United States writes and then imposes on the parties. A solution to the conflict, it said, must be “homegrown.” [WSJ]

• French President Nicolas Sarkozy cautioned that a failure of the international community to act on Iran would result in a “disastrous” Israeli strike. [Ynet]

• Israeli troops shot and killed an Islamic Jihad militant who was trying to plant explosives on the Gaza border. [NYT]

• Yom HaShoah celebrations in New York City over the weekend emphasized the passing of stories and memories on to the youngest generation. [NYT]

• Late Polish President Lech Kaczynski continues to be remembered as an unprecedented friend to the Jews and Israel—the first Polish leader to attend a Polish synagogue, for example. Prime Minister Donald Tusk (who was not on the plane) is also considered friendly to Israel. [JTA]

The Sarko-Slayer? [The Economist]

Earlier this week, the New York Times disclosed that French President Nicolas Sarkozy personally told Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu that his foreign minister, the far-right ultra-nationalist Avigdor Lieberman, was toxic and should be fired, comparing Lieberman to France’s best-known xenophobe Jean-Marie Le Pen. Given the iciness between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu, there’s a good chance the U.S. president has prevailed upon his European allies to do some gentle nudging and needling of their own. Merkel’s statements are exactly in line with the main criterion put forth by both the European Union and American State Department. And if anyone on the continent is in a position to deflect an anti-Arab boor, surely it’s the part-Jewish head of state who wants the burka banned and the rioting “scum” of the Parisian banlieues brought to heel.

Merkel: Settlements Ruin Efforts for 2-state Solution [JPost]

Sarkozy Comments on Israeli Minister Make Waves [NYT]