France/Israel - Subjugation Considered as Foreign Policy

France/Israel: Subjugation Considered as Foreign Policy by Bruno Guigue 

Translation by Vic Sadot from the French published May 23, 2016. Note: One would expect more from a country that has known what life is like under occupation.

Original post in French: France/Israël : de la soumission considérée comme unepolitique étrangère Par Bruno Guigue le 22 mai 2016

 "Socialist" French Prime Minister Manuel Valls 

with "Likud" Party Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

There are 6 footnotes provided at the bottom of the translation. These items may not be well known to American or English language readers. Reading at least the parts of the citations in bold is recommended: 

(1) CRIF; (2) Manuel Valls; (3) Stéphane Hessel; (4) Jacques Chirac; 

(5) Bernard Kouchner; (6) General Charles de Gaulle. Hopefully, they will be helpful to you in understanding this article and considering the information and analytical perspective presented by Monsieur le Professeur Bruno Guigue. Bruno Guigue is an officer, essayist and French political scientist born in Toulouse in 1962. Former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and ENA. Professor of Philosophy and lecturer in international relations in higher education. He is the author of five books, including The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, The Invisible Remorse of the West (L'Harmattan, 2002).

Warmly recommended by the CRIF [1] (see Wikipedia citations below on the Representative Council of Jewish Leaders in France), Manuel Valls [2] went to Israel to pay his respects to the homeland at an international conference in which nobody believes. The new illustration of this sad reality: France, where the blessing of a certain community gives diplomatic accreditation, has given up its once independent voice. Formerly, the country listened to all sides with an attentive ear, claiming no particular allegiance in order to preserve its reputation for diplomatic independence. We no longer hear this today, not because we do not want to hear it, but because we have nothing more to say. 

For ten years, French leaders have thrown away our best diplomatic traditions. They have given up any ambition based on respect for national sovereignty and dialogue between peoples. Instead, they have chosen an allegiance to the Israeli occupation that led them to justify the unjustifiable in the bloody Zionist repression in Gaza. Faced with the violence of the occupier, the French government accused the resistance to occupation of having caused it. With a proven indulgence for Zionist crimes, France has denounced Palestinian officials for the horrors they have suffered, forgetting that it is the structural violence of the occupation that generates armed resistance and not the reverse.

In Tel Aviv, Manuel Valls will be able to proudly present the results of his balanced policy. Not only will the inversion between the victim and the executioner sum up French politics, but the process is being applied for internal use in France. Required by his Zionist Commander, ‘order’ reigns in France. The fraudulent conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is now an official doctrine taught in the schools of the French Republic. A servile French justice now criminalizes Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS movement to end the occupation of Palestine), a peaceful campaign initiated by Palestinian civil society. Popular rallies in support of Palestine are regularly banned in some cities; the current French President delivered equivocal  remarks at the ceremony in honor of Stéphane Hessel [3]; journalists, civil servants, citizens are intimidated or punished. Everything in government policy stigmatizes solidarity with an oppressed people and confirms allegiance made to their oppressors. (Note: See full Wikipedia citation selected below for Stéphane Frédéric Hessel. Summary: Hessel was a WWII French Resistance officer captured, imprisoned, tortured by the Nazi Gestapo; sent to Buchenwald and then Dora concentration camps; failed his first escape attempt; was saved by German camp officer Arthur Dietzsch who gave him and two other prisoners the identity of prisoners who had died of typhus; Hessel became a major international voice for universal human rights at the UN and as a speaker; Author of the book “Indignez-Vous!” (Be Outraged!), which was published in English as “Time for Outrage!”; Hessel spoke out against the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian people and for their universal human rights for which he received much criticism from Israel and Zionist Jews)

Manuel Valls in Israel

Now this poisonous climate is the expression of a deep renunciation of collective resignation. Conduct by officers of France, without culture, toward the Middle East, should have two objectives which derive from its political and historical vocation. It should dialogue with the southern countries by refusing any subordination to the dominant power. It should help to restore the balance in favor of a people under occupation, legitimizing the Palestinian resistance and revoking Israeli impunity. On the contrary, France has strengthened its allegiance to Israel and destabilizes the regional resistance to US hegemony, which Israel sponsors. Instead of loosening the grip of ‘Atlanticism’ (NATO), she tightens the screw further. Instead of speaking the language of reason, France married the most pernicious Zionist theses. François Hollande has blessed the Israeli repression in Gaza. Hollande included Hezbollah (Lebanese Resistance to Israel Invasions) on the European list of ‘terrorist’ organizations, and he has delivered arms to Syrian ‘rebels’  directed by NATO and the oil monarchies. By this submission of France to the ‘Atlanticist’ and Zionist interests, our country is paying with the discredit from which we will not recover anytime soon.

One must measure the historical regression represented by this national denial. With Jacques Chirac [4], Paris kept on course for promotion of international law and that served her brilliantly in the Iraqi case. France no longer weighs in like that on these matters, certainly not in a dispute submitted to the harmful influence of the American protector of Israel. But this difficulty did not formerly prevent the French leaders from hearing an independent voice. And when Jacques Chirac publicly admonished an Israeli policeman in front of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the symbolic words are still impotence acts. Heir of ‘Gaullism’ (Charles DeGaulle’s post WWII assertion of French independence in self-direction and diplomacy among the nations of the world), the policy at least stated the illegitimacy of the unilateral use of force. On behalf of the right of peoples to self-determination, France favored negotiated solutions. The voice of France was heard, if not heeded, because France was sovereign.

At his press conference of 27 November 1967, General de Gaulle summed up the problem that was poisoning the Middle East: "Israel is organizing an occupation in the territories that it has seized which cannot go without oppression, repression, expulsion; and it results in a resistance that Israel calls ‘terrorism’." François Hollande, is far from this frankness that once distinuished the reputation of Gaullist France. It now prefers the ‘Newspeak’ of ‘humanitarian’ imperialism to justify the war against a Syrian nation resisting ‘Western’ control. By preferring (Bernard) Kouchner [5]  to (General & President Charles) De Gaulle [6], French leaders have pledged the state of France’s allegiance to the rulers of the world. The alibi of ‘human rights’ provides the ideal cynical cover to move the ‘good’ people in the right direction. But we soon forget these ‘humanitarian’ considerations when it comes to places like Palestine martyred by her former friends. Palestine will remain as a living monument of remorse for such ‘compromises’. And history will record that they have submitted French foreign policy to the executioner.

For American readers, these selections from Wikipedia citations are recommended: (1) CRIF (Representative Council of Jewish Leaders in France); (2) Manuel Valls; (3) Stéphane Frédéric Hessel; (4) Jaques Chirac; (5) Bernard Kouchner; and (6) Charles de Gaulle.

[1] CRIF ConseilReprésentatif des Institutions juives de France (Representative Council of Jewish Leaders in France) “Overview: It is the official French affiliate of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), the world-wide umbrella organization of Jewish communities, and of the European Jewish Congress…”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conseil_Repr%C3%A9sentatif_des_Institutions_juives_de_France

[2] Manuel Valls - He is a French politician who has been the Prime Minister of France since 31 March 2014. He was the Minister of the Interior from 2012 to 2014. Manuel Carlos Valls Galfetti was born 13 August 1962… in Barcelona to a Spanish father and a Swiss mother… and lived there until he moved to France as a teenager; He is a member of the Socialist Party… In March 2014, following major losses to centre-right and extreme-right political parties in French municipal elections, President François Hollande appointed Valls to the post of Prime Minister... Valls is on the "right wing" of the Socialist Party, with a similar approach to the German and Dutch Social Democratic Parties. During the 2011 presidential primary, he defined himself as "Blairiste" or "Clintonien", and described his position as "in the tradition of Pierre Mendès France, Lionel Jospin and Michel Rocard"… As parliamentarian and interior minister, he took strong stances on secularism, supported crackdowns on the wearing of niqābs in public and defended a nursery which sacked an employee for demanding to wear one at work. He had harsh words for anti-gay marriage protesters.[18]… In his book To Put the Old Socialism to Rest ... And Finally be Left-Wing, he declared support for immigration "quotas"…  When (Black African political comedian) Dieudonné's quenelle gesture (Indicating someone is fed up with listening to BS; not a Nazi salute) became viral in 2013, Valls said he would consider "all legal means" to ban Dieudonné's "public meetings", given that he "addresses in an obvious and insufferable manner the memory of victims of the Shoah (Holocaust)."[20]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Valls

[3] StéphaneFrédéric Hessel (20 October 1917 – 26 February 2013[2]) was a diplomat, ambassador, writer, concentration camp survivor, French Resistance member and BCRA agent. Born German, he became a naturalised French citizen in 1939. He became an observer of the editing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. In 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy magazine in its list of top global thinkers. In later years his activism focused on economic inequalities, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and protection for the post-WW2 social vision. His short book Time for Outrage! sold 4.5 million copies worldwide. Hessel and his book were linked and cited as an inspiration for the Spanish Indignados, the American Occupy Wall Street movement and other political movements… Refusing to adhere to the Vichy government of Marshal Philippe Pétain, Hessel fled to London and joined General Charles de Gaulle's group of Resistance members in 1941,[3][7] becoming a member of the Free French intelligence service (Bureau central de renseignement et d'action).[6] He returned to France, to organize Resistance communication networks in advance of the 1944 Allied invasion of France.[3] He was captured by the Gestapo and later deported to the Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps, where he was tortured by waterboarding.[7] Hessel, F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas and Harry Peulevé as well as Eugen Kogon and Alfred Balachowsky, escaped execution at Buchenwald through the help of ‘KZ Kapo’ Arthur Dietzsch who exchanged their identities with three prisoners who had died of typhus.[7][8] Hessel tried unsuccessfully to escape from Dora, but was able to avoid being hanged in reprisal. He later escaped during a transfer to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp,[3] and went to Hannover, where he met the advancing troops of the United States Army… Human Righst Advocate, Diplomat: After the war, Hessel became assistant to Henri Laugier, vice-secretary general of the United Nations in charge of economic and social affairs, and was an observer to the editing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[9]… Hessel called for the French government to make funds available to provide housing for the homeless[13] and denounced the French government's failure to comply with Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the Place de la Republique on 21 February 2008… On 5 January 2009, Hessel criticized the Israeli military attacks in the Gaza strip, saying "In fact, the word that applies—that should be applied—is 'war crime' and even 'crime against humanity'.[16] But this word must be used carefully, especially when one is in Geneva, the seat of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, who may have an important opinion on that issue. For my part, having visited Gaza, having seen the refugee camps with thousands of children, the manner in which they are bombed appears as a veritable crime against humanity."… In October 2010, Hessel's essay, Time for Outrage! (original French title: Indignez-vous !), was published in an edition of 6,000 copies (ISBN 978-1455509720)… In 2011, Stéphane Hessel published "Engagez-Vous !" ("Get Involved!")… In 2011, Hessel penned an article in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in which he compared the Nazi occupation of France during WWII with the occupation of Palestinian Territories by Israeli army in such terms: "the German occupation was, when compared for example with the present occupation of Palestine by the Israelis, a relatively harmless occupation, apart from exceptions like the arrests, detentions and executions, also of the theft of art treasures."[27]  Responding to the controversy raised by these remarks, he clarified that he was drawing "no parallel between the horrors of Nazism and the illegal attitude of a state" (Israel); that he naturally supported the existence of Israel but that he wished to be able to criticise the actions of the Israeli authorities without automatically being accused of "antisemitism"… On 26 February 2013, Hessel died overnight at age 95…  His final work, "Don’t Give Up: In the Trenches with the Spanish for Liberty and Progress", will be published posthumously. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A9phane_Hessel

[4] Jacques RenéChirac (born 29 November 1932) is a French politician, who served as the President of France from 1995 to 2007. Chirac served as Prime Minister of France from 1974 to 1976, from 1986 to 1988, and as the Mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995… Along with Vladimir Putin (Chirac called Vladimir Putin "a personal friend".[36]), Hu Jintao, and Gerhard Schröder, Chirac emerged as a leading voice against George W. Bush in 2003 during the organization and deployment of the United States led military coalition to forcibly remove the then current government of Iraq controlled by the Ba'ath Party under the leadership of Saddam Hussein which resulted in the 2003–2011 Iraq War. Despite intense US pressure, Chirac threatened to veto, at that given point, a resolution in the UN Security Council that would authorise the use of military force to rid Iraq of alleged weapons of mass destruction, and rallied other governments to his position. "Iraq today does not represent an immediate threat that justifies an immediate war", Chirac said on 18 March 2003. Chirac was then the target of various American and British commentators supporting the decisions of Bush and Tony Blair.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Chirac

 

[5] BernardKouchner (born 1 November 1939) is a French politician and physician. He is the co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Médecins du Monde. From 2007 until 2010, he was the French Minister of Foreign and European Affairs in the center-right Fillon government under president Nicolas Sarkozy, although he had been in the past a minister in socialist governments. In 2010, the Jerusalem Post considered Bernard Kouchner the 15th most influential Jew in the world.[1] Since 2015 Kouchner is workstream leader for the AMU (Agency for the Modernisation of Ukraine), where he contributes his expertise in healthcare. [2] … due to a conflict of opinion with MSF chairman Claude Malhuret, he established Doctors of the World ('Médecins du Monde') in 1980… Kouchner was born in Avignon, to a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, he began his political career as a member of the French Communist Party (PCF), from which he was expelled in 1966 for attempting to overthrow the leadership… French Foreign Minister: After the election of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, Kouchner was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in François Fillon's government, even though Kouchner supported Sarkozy's Socialist rival Ségolène Royal during the campaign. He has since been expelled from the Socialist Party for his acceptance of the post.[13] He was dismissed in the November 2010 Fillon cabinet reshuffle… On the US-led Invasion of Iraq (2003) Kouchner is a longtime advocate of humanitarian intervention. In early 2003, he pronounced himself in favour of removing Saddam Hussein as President of Iraq, arguing that interference against dictatorship should be a global priority…”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Kouchner

[6] General andPresident Charles de Gaulle – Born 22 November 1890 – Died 9 November 1970. Charles de Gaulle was a French military general and statesman. He was the leader of Free France (1940–44) and the head of the Provisional Government of the French Republic (1944–46). In 1958, he founded the Fifth Republic and was elected as the 18th President of France, a position he held until his resignation in 1969. He was the dominant figure of France during the Cold War era and his memory continues to influence French politics… Born in Lille, he graduated from Saint-Cyr in 1912. He was a decorated officer of the First World War, wounded several times and later taken prisoner at Verdun. He tried to escape with a fellow prisoner, but failed several times… Refusing to accept his government's armistice with Nazi Germany in 1940, de Gaulle exhorted the French population to resist occupation and to continue the fight against Axis powers in his Appeal of 18 June. He led a government in exile and the Free French Forces against the Axis. Despite frosty relations with Britain and especially the United States, he emerged as the undisputed leader of the French resistance. He became Head of the Provisional Government of the French Republic in June 1944, the interim government of France following its Liberation…  He retired in the early 1950s and wrote his War Memoirs, which quickly became a classic of modern French literature. When the Algerian war was ripping apart the unstable Fourth Republic, the National Assembly brought him back to power during the May 1958 crisis… In the context of the Cold War, de Gaulle initiated his "Politics of Grandeur", asserting that France as a major power should not rely on other countries, such as the US, for its national security and prosperity. To this end, de Gaulle pursued a policy of "national independence" which led him to withdraw from NATO's military integrated command and to launch an independent nuclear development program that made France the fourth nuclear power. He restored cordial Franco-German relations to create a European counterweight between the Anglo-American and Soviet spheres of influence. However, he opposed any development of a supranational Europe, favouring a Europe of sovereign nations and twice vetoed Britain's entry into the European Community. De Gaulle openly criticised the US intervention in Vietnam and the "exorbitant privilege" of the US dollar, and supported an independent Quebec.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle