“It is not the anti-Semitism of men; it is, above all, the anti-Semitism of things, the inherent xenophobia of the body social or the body economic under which we suffer.”

– Vladimir Jabotinsky, Testimony to the Peel Commission House of Lords London, February 11, 1937

The Quai d’Orsay is demanding an explanation from Prime Minister Sharon following his warning that Jews should flee France in the face of escalating anti-Semitic attacks there. In remarks to American Jews meeting in the Israeli capital, Mr. Sharon had drawn a distinction. All prime ministers of Israel seek to encourage their co-religionists in other countries to move to the Jewish state. “I say that to all Jews around the world,” Mr. Sharon said. But in France, he went on,”I think it’s a must and they have to move immediately.”

As it happens, on the very day that Mr. Sharon was issuing his warning in Jerusalem, several of the most farsighted Jewish leaders in New York were circulating copies of the historic testimony of the Zionist prophet Vladimir Jabotinsky before the Peel Commission in London. Speaking in early 1937, he had sought to warn the British of the urgency of opening Palestine to Jews seeking to escape Europe. He was trying to convey the fact that absent the opening of Palestine, millions of Jews were going to die.

So Mr. Sharon isn’t the only one to look at the sickening events in France and be put in mind of dangers of an earlier time. Our Jacob Gershman sketched but a few particulars in his dispatch in yesterday’s Sun. In recent weeks, vandals destroyed a mural painted by Jewish schoolchildren, a 17-year-old Jewish student was stabbed in the neck in a Paris suburb, a town hall in Vichy was painted in swastikas, the slogan “Jews out” was painted on graves at Colmar, a Jewish center was set on fire at Toulon, and a school for Jewish boys was firebombed. It is a stain on the Fifth Republic.

Yet that kind of violence in and of itself wouldn’t lead a prime minister of Israel to urge the Jews to flee. What is special about France is the hostility of its government to the Jewish state. It is what Jabotinsky called, in one of his most famous phrases, the “anti-Semitism of things.”The eruption of violence against Jews in France has coincided with the endorsement by the Quai d’Orsay of the Palestinian right to take violent action against Jews in Israel and the embrace of the Palestinian Arab terrorist leadership by President Chirac and other French officials. As recently as April, Mr. Chirac stood with President Mubarak of Egypt and endorsed the authority of Yasser Arafat.

Throughout this period, France made a point of undercutting America’s own efforts to remove Saddam Hussein’s tyranny in Iraq, even though huge sums were being passed by his regime to the families of suicide bombers targeting Jewish civilians in Israel. There is evidence that key officials in France, too, were receiving oil vouchers from Saddam at the same time Saddam was underwriting the Palestinian Arab attacks on Jewish civil ians. French diplomats, meanwhile, have been making the most disgusting comments about the Jews and their democratically elected leaders.

This is the context in which Mr. Sharon issued his demarche on France. Mr. Chirac wants credit for his lugubrious statements against the anti-Semitic outrages occurring so frequently in his country. Even in a country as famous for hypocrisy as France, Mr. Chirac’s hypocrisy stands out. The French president didn’t even wait for the explanation demanded of Mr. Sharon by the Quai d’Orsay. No, the occupant of the Elysse promptly announced that the elected prime minister of the Jewish state wasn’t welcome to set foot on the soil of France.

The truth is that a war against the Jews is under way across a broad swatch of the globe. France isn’t pre-war Germany, and we don’t suggest Mr. Chirac is himself an anti-Semite. But it doesn’t matter. The government he leads is not with the Jews. It may shrink from declaring open war on the Jewish people. But, as in World War II, France is not standing with the Jews. It is, as it was, operating against them and collaborating with their most implacable enemies. This time, however, the Jews have a state. Its leader comes from a political party whose headquarters is named for Vladimir Jabotinsky. Only two days ago Mr. Sharon marked the 64th anniversary of Jabotinsky’s death. The Israeli leader understands the anti-Semitism of things. When he speaks of the predicament of the Jews of France, the world knows whom to believe.