West Bank Violence Widely Reported on in French Media

The escalating violence on the West Bank in recent days has received wide coverage in the French media, including the three State-controlled television channels. Most editorial comment has condemned Israel’s tough toctics in dealing with Palestinian demonstrators.

Le Monde warned in a front page editorial that the West Bank crisis could lead to a rift between Israel and Egypt after Israel completes its withdrawal from Sinai next month and suggested that this would force some of Israel’s best friends, including France and the U.S., to adopt pro-Arab positions.

The Foreign Ministry, in commniques issued yesterday and today, officially “deplored” the continued violence. It announced that the French Consu General in Jerusalem, on instructions from the Quai D’Orsay, visited the ousted mayor of El Bireh, I brahim Tawil, yesterday.

The removal of Mayor Tawil and his town council by the Israeli authorities last week was the immediate cause of the present wave of protest demonstrations on the West Bank and the Israeli army’s crackdown.

SYMPATHY FOR WEST BANK PALESTINIANS

But even before the El Bireh episode, France demonstrated sympathy for the West Bank Palestinians While President Francois Mitterrand paid his official visit to Israel earlier this month, Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson, who accompanied him, met with five Arab mayors on the West Bank.

Cheysson said he was “personally affected” by what the French have termed the “mistreatment” of Mayor Bossam Shaka of Nablus, a leading Palestinian nationalist who was maimed two years ago by a bomb believed to have been planted by Jewish extremists.

So far the mainstream Jewish community organizations here and the traditional Jewish establishment have made no public comment on events on the West Bank. But a number of Jewish leaders have privately expressed regret over the flare-up of violence. Several leftwing Jewish organizations called today for “an end to violence” and on Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. The organizations, “Socialism and Judaism,” “Identity and Dialogue,” “Young Jewish Socialists,” and “Michmor” are relatively small bodies but some of them have prestige in French intellectual circles. The Organization of Jewish Socialist Students (CLESS) issued a call to the leftist opposition in Israel to “present a credible alternative” to the policies of Premier Menachem Begin’s government.