French anger at Israel as Netanyahu visits

As usual, the visit will be accompanied by street protests from various leftist pro-Palestinian groups that have long opposed Israeli policy.
But this time, his delegation might detect something else at work, as anger over Israeli state policy spreads beyond the extremes of left and right into the mainstream and even into French Jewish opinion.
Israel's friends in France now fear that frustration at Netanyahu's intransigence over Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank will translate into opposition to the existence of the state itself.
An online petition dubbed the "European Jewish Call for Reason" or "JCall" has gathered more than 6,000 signatures, including prominent Jewish figures such as philosophers Bernard-Henri Levy and Alain Finkielkraut.
"Israel faces existential threats," the group warns, criticising the Netanyahu government's "pursuit of settlements in the West Bank and in the Arab districts of East Jerusalem."
"These policies are morally and politically wrong and feed the unacceptable delegitimisation process that Israel currently faces abroad," it says.
Mainstream Jewish representative groups in France have distanced themselves from the petition -- even if some of their members have signed -- but agree that radical opposition to Israel is gathering recruits.
"Anti-Israeli criticism in France has spread beyond the far left, because extreme left thinking has a strong influence on society as a whole," said Gilles William Goldnadel, chairman of the France-Israel Association.
For Goldnadel, this influence promotes "the delegitimisation of the state of Israel, notably by means of protests and boycott calls."
Calls for protests and boycotts against Israel are common in France.
Thursday's visit will see street rallies, and already this week a pressure group has launched a lawsuit against a French cosmetics chain it accuses of selling Israeli products produced on occupied Palestinian land.
A pressure group, Generation Palestine, is to stage a protest and a concert in Paris on the eve of Netanyahu's visit, accusing Israel of pursuing a policy of "Jewification" in Jerusalem.
But if protests were limited to radical leftist and Muslim groups, they would be easier for Israel's supporters to dismiss.
Increasingly, formerly pro-Israeli supporters have begun weighing in, especially since the return to power last year of Netanyahu and a coalition led by his right-wing Likud party.
"Jewish intellectuals are uncomfortable with the criticism and feel obliged to distance themselves from the Israeli government," Goldnadel said, adding that he personally saw no change in Israeli policy since the vote.
The JCall petition has been criticised in some quarters as a betrayal of Israel by European Jews playing into the hands of its enemies, but its organisers insist they still have the state's best interests at heart.
"And it's because we continue to have confidence in it that we are calling it out in this way," wrote Paris lawyers and JCall signatories Michel Zaoui and Patrick Klugman in Thursday's edition of Le Monde.
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