Playing intifada the new anti-semitism in France.

• Author: Mairowitz, David Zane

An explosive device was discovered by garbage collectors just outside the Jewish-run cultural center in Avignon in April. This is a building that also houses a theater called the Big Bang, just a three-minute walk from where I live. France has been living through a long series of anti-Semitic acts of varying nature for over a year now.

But so far, Avignon, a southern town of about 100,000 inhabitants, has been spared. I've noticed only one incident of graffiti on the walls of the local synagogue. There is no Lubavitcher community in town, and the few Orthodox Jews who live here do so with a certain integrated discretion. In short, there is virtually no Jewish "visibility" here. An anti-Semite would really have to do his homework in order to know where or even whom to strike. Talking to Claude Nahoum, head of the cultural center, I discover that the unexploded device was, in fact, a "plaster grenade," most likely French army equipment, and not made for wounding people. It was found across the street from the building, and was not accompanied by either a handwritten or telephone message. No one has ever claimed the action. In short, a dud. No big bang.

But such is the justifiable fear that many French Jews have been experiencing since the autumn of 2000 that a minor event of this nature takes on alarming proportions. The facts seem clear enough. In the last eighteen months, more than 400 individual acts of an "anti-Semitic character" have been recorded in France. A recent book published by the Union of Jewish Students in France and the organization SOS Racisme lists them all in chronological order. These attacks range from simple graffiti and verbal insults to burning synagogues and attacks on buses carrying Jewish schoolchildren. Many of these actions have been extremely violent but, as yet, there have been no deaths resulting from them.

The outbreak coincides with the onset of the second intifada in Palestine. They involve young kids of North African descent living in the notorious French cites--faceless, low income housing projects. Generally speaking, the more bourgeois areas inhabited by French Jews have not been targeted. "The violence has not been committed by the far right, or by organized Muslim fundamentalists," according to Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on extremist groups. "For the most part, the perpetrators are unpolitical and non-Islamist youth who are expressing a feeling of identification with the intifada."

"Playing intifada" is an explanation that reverberates among the Jewish intelligentsia here. The Arab kids, chiefly marginalized from French society and largely unemployed, identify with the Palestinians and carry the uprising into the streets of Paris or Marseille. They imagine themselves as Hamas or Jihad fighters. And when they can't find any Israelis in the cites, local Jews will have to substitute in...