A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [103]
Since De Gaulle's treatment of his own countrymen was marked by almost unbearable paternalism, it is not surprising that he treated poorer, weaker nations the same way. It seemed that since France had supplied the arms, it should be able to tell Israel how to use them. When on May 22, 1967, the Egyptians decided to block the Gulf of Aqaba, De Gaulle and his military advisers determined that this was not a serious threat to Israel. The Israelis, however, saw it as the first step in a joint Arab war against Israel. Rather than wait for what they were certain would be a coordinated military attack, they decided on a preemptive air strike. While Arab leaders were once again talking about the destruction of Israel and the massacre of Israelis, the President of France forbade Israel to go to war and announced an arms embargo to the Middle East. On June 5, when the Israeli air force began to obliterate the Egyptian air force, De Gaulle was furious.
From the perspective of French Jews, a war of extermination against Israel had begun, and France was not only refusing to help, it was embargoing. A fundraising committee quickly formed under the Baron Guy de Rothschild, so quickly that no one stopped to think that French Jews had never launched such an emergency fund drive before. Tightly organized demonstrations were immediately planned. To the Ewenczyks, there was nothing new about demonstrating for Israel, only this time they were really worried. If Israel did not get help quickly, the entire population, they feared, would be massacred. Their daughter Suzy marched with Lazare. Men in the Pletzl got shots and medical certificates and prepared to go fight in Israel. Henri Finkelsztajn marched with his father, Icchok, and with most of the people in the neighborhood. Chaim Rottenberg, the anti-Zionist troublemaker from Antwerp, organized his own Orthodox contingent and marched them to the mass show of support that was building in front of the Israeli embassy. Daniel Altmann, a wealthy seventeen-year-old student with no religious feelings at all, demonstrated and helped with the fundraising drive.
Each group had leaders with portable walkie-talkies to coordinate movements. An estimated 100,000 people brought Paris traffic to a standstill for hours in front of the Israeli embassy. Standing there 100,000 strong, Jews suddenly realized that French Jewry had changed. The North Africans had more than doubled the Jewish population of France to 650,000, almost twice as many Jews as before the war. It had become, after the United States, the Soviet Union, and Israel, the fourth largest Jewish population in the world. And now it was a population that was speaking out.
The Jews may have been surprised by their own numbers and the effectiveness of their organization, but De Gaulle was astounded. Even when Israel triumphed in only six days and most French cheered the Israeli victory, he turned French foreign policy away from Israel. In a November press conference called to explain the new policy, the French president reflected, “Some people even feared that the Jews, hitherto dispersed but remaining what they have always been—an elite people, self-assured and domineering—might, once reassembled on the site of their former grandeur, transform into ardent and conquering ambition the very moving wishes that they had been formulating for nineteen centuries: ‘Next year in Jerusalem.”
Jews reacted with shock and fury to the statement, and that surprised the general too. When Grand Rabbi Jacob Kaplan told him that his statement had been anti-Semitic, De Gaulle seemed baffled, insisting that it was