Forever France

Those who savor the ironies of history will perk up at the recent report that the French secret services were tailing the founding father of Israel, Theodor Herzl, back when he was but a foreign correspondent in France. It turns out, Uri Dan reports in the New York Post, that French counter-intelligence was following Herzl for a decade, including the years when he was based in Paris for the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna. The French file on Herzl was "packed with surveillance reports on his activities," Mr. Dan reports. They felt Herzl spent "money suspiciously beyond his means," Mr. Dan reports, and was "expressing hostility towards the French" and "going to the Turkish sultan to plead for the Jewish immigration to Palestine." Where was Inspector Clouseau when they needed him?

The fact is that Mr. Herzl's four year posting in Paris was probably the most fateful foreign assignment ever given a newspaperman. He got there in 1891 as French anti-Semitism was coming into full flower. He wrote about it for the Neue Freie Presse, and he wrote a play, called "The Ghetto," to dramatize the problem of anti-Semitism. But it was the Dreyfus case that put things into sharpest relief. Herzl was a witness to the humiliation of Dreyfus as the officer, a Jew, was stripped of his rank on January 5, 1895. "The shouts of 'Death to the Jews' ringing in his ears," the Encyclopedia Judaica writes,"Herzl became convinced that the only solution was the mass exodus of the Jews from their places of residence, infested by anti-Semitism, and their resettlement in a territory of their own."

Mr. Dan's report is a timely reminder of France's role in the creation of the Jewish state — and of the fact that French paranoia has a long history. Today, as a new effort is being made to find a peaceful solution, the French continue to make trouble. They meet with Yasser Arafat and his terrorist loyalists. They operate against Israel within the United Nations system. They send their diplomats out to dinner parties around the world to sneer at Prime Minister Sharon. One recent French foreign minister even suggested that there was some legitimacy in the suicide bombings against Jewish women and children. To which one can only add, plus ca change.