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Mitterrand Gets Taste of Own Medicine Over Arafat Visit
Few recent events have stirred "au fond," the Jewish community in France, as the two-day visit of Yasser Arafat to Paris. Just as in the United States, the voices of organized Jewry, rather than of individual Jews, were heard most clearly objecting to the reception by President Francois Mitterrand of the Palestinian president.
While a minority of France's 650,000 Jews, the largest Jewish community in Europe after the Soviet Union, followed the advice of the widow of former French Prime Minister Pierre Mendes-France, and of former President of the European Parliament Simone Veil that one must "negotiate with one's enemies," many more vociferously objected to this new recognition afforded the PLO. For days before the visit on radio talk shows, television news programs, and in the print media, the government was attacked for its decision to receive Arafat.
The Council of French Jewish Institutions, which has maintained close ties to successive Israeli governments, in an angry letter questioned Mitterrand's wisdom in inviting Arafat and expressed the hope that France "does not lose its soul in media events which have no morrow." Apparently forgotten was the fact that Mitterrand was the first French president ever to visit Israel and had sided with the Jewish community in its 1967 battle with then-President Charles de Gaulle. In the council letter to Mitterrand, Chief Rabbi David de Rothschild and Council President Theo Klein described Arafat as "a terrorist leader who has spilled French blood."
Not all Jewish opinion was so shrill, however. Another member of the executive committee of the Council of French Jewish...