Background Report Mitterrand’s Historic Visit to Israel

On Wednesday, March 3, history will be made and recalled. Francois Mitterrand, the President of France, will be the first French head of state to visit the State at Israel since it was born in 1948.

Indeed, he may even well be the highest ranking French official to tour the land of the Jewish nation since Napoleon who, in his conquest of Palestine in 1799, reached the fortress of Acre only to be turned back by the British and Arabs.

In fact, one of the scheduled highlights of Mitterrand’s trip will be a visit to Acre which the French still call St. Jean d’Acre. In a passage of his memoirs about the Egyptian and Syrian campaigns, Napoleon stated: “Had St. Jean d’Acre fallen, I would have changed the face of the world.”

In 1982, some historians are also likely to point out that it was during Napoleon’s dash through Palestine he issued a proclamation for a Jewish State.

SEEKS TO IMPROVE RELATIONS WITH ISRAEL

The 1982 sojourn will climax the new French President’s policy to improve relations with Israel. Shortly after his election last May, he indicated that a trip to Israel was high on his agenda and he was invited by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who greeted his election warmly.

Mitterrand has, after all, had close ties with the Jewish community of France; he had and still has a number of Jewish advisors, such as Jacques Attali; he has and still maintains close relationships with friends in Israel, especially Israel Labor Party leaders whom he met often and frequently at Socialist international meetings in Israel and Europe during the days when he was head of the opposition Socialists.

In fact, in December 1980, five months before his election of President of the Republic, Mitterrand attended the Israel Labor Party convention as a fraternal delegate from abroad. Unlike most other foreign delegates, he agreed to take part in the opening session held at the Binyanei Ha’coma in Jerusalem.

Mitterrand’s first public act on the day following his election was to visit the grave of his friend, the late Jewish Senator Georges Dayan. He then sent a personal invitation to Israel Labor Party Chairman Shimon Peres to attend his inauguration.

Dispatches from Paris last spring noted that a sign of Mitterrand’s interest in Jewry also was his invitation to the noted Jewish writer, Elie Wiesel, who lived in France, and to Pierre Dreyfus, now a Cabinet member but then an industrialist and president of French ORT, to attend the official inauguration.

TIES TO THE JEWISH COMMUNITY

Mitterrand’s ties to the Jewish community go back to the dark days of World War II when Mitterrand himself, a resistance organizer, met his future spouse in 1943. Her family was active under the Nazi occupation in sheltering persecuted Jews.

There are five Jews in the French Cabinet. Three of them — Justice Minister Robert Badinter, Industry Minister Pierre Dreyfus, and Culture Minister Jack Lang — have been involved in the French Jewish community.

Despite the rocky road of Franco-Israeli relations, many French Jews generally viewed Mitterrand, when he took office, as continuing the legacy of French Socialist Prime Ministers, such as Leon Blum and Pierre Mendes-France (both Jews) and Guy Mollet, who led France into the alliance with Israel in the 1956 Sinai Campaign.

According to French Jews, Mitterrand is personally considered to be pro-Jewish and pro-Israel. As one French Jewish leader put it: “Regarding Jews, there is no blemish on him, not one at all.”

Mitterrand was a member of the Honorary Committee of the LICRA (the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism.) He has even suggested that a law be presented to the Parliament to reinforce measures against racism and anti-Semitism.

Since he took office last May 21, Mitterrand has repeatedly stressed the new Administration’s desire to improve ties with Israel. When Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson, with Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, announced in New York last fall the Presidential visit, Cheysson told reporters that France intends to hold regular dialogues on the political and technical issues with Israel. He noted that the absence of such dialogue during the past years was “an anomaly.”

APPROVED OF CAMP DAVID

Mitterrand is proud of the fact, and he repeats it often, that he was previously “the only French leader of a major political party to approve of Camp David,” and France will contribute to the international peacekeeping force in the Sinai. Both French officials and Jewish leaders here in Paris say the Mitterrand government is “even-handed.”

Relations at least are warmer and friendlier. Mitterrand’s views on Israel and a Palestinian state are well known and he is proud of his consistency, even though parts of that consistency are obviously at adds with the government of Israel.

“I have constantly expressed the same position at all times. I would do nothing to endanger Israel’s existence nor the means to exist, but I do not think it is realistic to pretend that the Palestinian problem does not exist,” Mitterrand has said.

He has also stated: “I have always told my friends in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that they would recognize that the Palestinians should have a homeland…. I am not telling them what they should do, because I am in favor of bilateral negotiations between opponents.”

Mitterrand’s comments in Israel will be studied. On this trip, too, as before, he will be in Jerusalem where he will meet President Yitzhak Navon and Begin. He is scheduled to address the Knesset and visit Yad Vashem. Symbolically, his itinerary calls for a visit to Mount Herzl, the resting place of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, who wrote “The Jewish State” in a hotel room in Paris as a result of the Dreyfus trial.

He will receive an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University, will meet the French colony in Tel Aviv and visit a kibbutz. He is, after all, no stranger to French Jews who live in Israel nor to those who were in the resistance.

(Tomorrow: Part Two)