For reasons of state

France discovered the Arab world with Napoleon’s ill-fated expedition to Egypt in 1798. If David Pryce-Jones is to be believed, this event marked the beginning of two centuries of pernicious Arabophilia and anti-Semitism, leading successive French governments to support unpleasant Middle Eastern despots and turn a blind eye to Islamic terrorism.

Like most large generalisations, this one requires a fair amount of tendentious selection to support it. Pryce-Jones draws his examples from a wide field. The Dreyfus affair, the exclusion of Jews from the higher reaches of the pre-war diplomatic service, the racial policies of Vichy France, the granting of asylum to the Mufti of Jerusalem and later to Khomeini and Arafat, are all pressed into service. So are a variety of anti-Semitic remarks by French officials and ministers over the years, most of them long ago. At one point we are told that modern French governments have been deliberately indulgent towards North African migrants who beat up or murder Jews or torch cars in suburban Paris, a proposition which is illustrated by some rather ambiguous examples, but supported by nothing that would count as evidence in a serious work of history. However, all of these things are marginal by comparison with what Pryce-Jones regards as the main crime of France, namely its failure to support the cause of Israel in the Middle East.

The problem about all this is that it runs together a number of distinct phenomena with very different causes. First, there is the casual anti-Semitism which was characteristic of almost all European and American elites until well into the 20th century. This fact is sometimes uncomfortable to remember in the post-Holocaust world. But it has rarely had any serious political consequences. In a man like Churchill, brought up at the end of the Victorian era, it was consistent with strong support for Zionism.