Debate on Middle East lights passions in France

By publishing his "Letter to an Israeli Friend" in Le Monde, Prof Pascal Boniface, a political science professor and director of a research centre that sometimes works for the French government, says he "just wanted to show that it is still possible in this country to criticise Israel without being labelled an anti-Semite, and that this sort of intellectual terrorism is no longer appropriate."

Mr Boniface's article prompted a month-long debate that has reached an intensity rare outside Israel, probably unequalled here since Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Chatila massacres.

Mr Boniface's most vociferous critic has been Mr Elie Barnavi, a former history professor who is Israel's ambassador to Paris.

Mr Barnavi was angered by the link Mr Boniface made between the Jewish diaspora's support for Israel, Israeli repression of the intifada, and public perception of Jewish communities around the world.

The path taken by the Sharon government would, Mr Boniface predicted, "lead to further attacks (by Palestinians), more criticism of your country on the international level. And it will lead, in time, for Jewish communities abroad, to a danger of isolation from other citizens," he wrote.

"By blindly supporting a policy considered by more and more people to be unjust - not to say hateful - the French Jewish community risks isolating itself."

Responding to Mr Boniface, also in Le Monde, Mr Barnavi said he didn't know what was "more revolting", the "hypocrisy" of Mr Boniface's title, "the honeyed, ingratiating tone that cannot hide and implacable hostility" or the contrast with another text, "full of ideological insinuations", which Mr Boniface wrote for the French socialist party's internal consumption.

When we spoke on the telephone, Mr Barnavi singled out Mr Boniface's references of French Jews' support for Israel. "When he talks about the Jews of France in a general way, and he warns them against the possibility of isolation within the nation al community, that is inadmissible," Mr Barnavi said.

It was all right to criticise Israel's policies, he said, but not its "moral legitimacy". He took particular exception to the Le Monde headline on Mr Boniface's counter reply: "Is it Forbidden to Criticise Israel?".

Mr Boniface had summarised the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as follows: "After a war, a country occupies territory in violation of international law.

"Thirty-four years later, this occupation continues, despite repeated condemnation by the international community. The population in these occupied territories is denied the right to self-determination and sees imposed on it . . . the destruction of houses, confiscation of land, imprisonment without trial, daily humiliation.

Mr Barnavi gave his own version of the 1967 war - contested in a letter by Egypt's ambassador to Paris - and reiterated the myth that "from Camp David to Taba", Israel had offered the Palestinians an "independent and viable state".

This war debunked in the August 9th issue of The New York Review of Books by Mr Robert Malley, former special assistant to the US president, Mr Bill Clinton, for Arab-Israel affairs.

In France, the Middle East specialists Mr Rene Backmann and Mr Alain Gresh, in Le Nouvel Observateur and Le Monde Diplomatique, have also discredited attempts to blame the Palestinians for the failure of the negotiations.

Mr Barnavi says he once campaigned for the Peace Now movement, but "was never a pacifist". He has widely and repeatedly justified Israel's policy of assassinating Palestinian activists.

Yet he is dismayed by "the terrifying rise of hatred of Israel", and example of which, he told me, was the treatment of Jews at the Durban conference on racism.

Both Mr Boniface and Mr Barnavi said messages of support - and insults - flooded in after their confrontation in the pages of Le Monde. Mr Boniface has received anonymous threats.

"They don't show the treats to me," Mr Barnavi said.

"I'm the one who walks around surrounded by bodyguards - not Mr Boniface. I am the walking target."

Describing himself as "a Jew of the 20th century", the former French justice minister Mr Robert Badinter contributed his own comment to Le Monde.

He argued that because of Israel's "existential anguish", there was no point "giving back the occupied territories, abandoning the settlements, recognising East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, compensating the Palestinian refugees" as long as Palestinians hoped for the destruction of Israel.

Although 585 Palestinians have been killed - nearly four times the 156 Israeli who have died - in the current intifada, Mr Badinter did not mention the Palestinians' "anguish".

The journalist and writer Michele Manceaux, who said she too had been "an anguished young Jew", scolded Mr Badinter.

"How can he, an eminent lawyer, think that anguish confers rights?" she asked.

"The Palestinians do not want the death of the Jewish State," Ms Manceaux concluded.

"They want a Palestinian state alongside it. They want their part of Jerusalem, and they have the right to it - even if they were not victims of the Holocaust. . ."