While much of the mainstream media failed to focus on it, the French government recently blocked off the exhibitions of all Israeli defense companies at this year's annual Paris Air Show, held last month.
With echoes of the cynically rigged trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French Army officer falsely convicted of treason in 1895, the French exclusively targeted the Israeli displays amidst the many corporate booths displaying the military wares manufactured by defense firms from around the world.
Israel Aerospace Industries CEO Boaz Levy told Aviation Week and Space Technology, "We are shocked by the behavior of the Paris Air Show organizers and the French authorities..." But perhaps we shouldn't be, because anti-Semitism has deep roots in France. Some historians believe that it was Dreyfus being "railroaded" to the infamous prison colony, Devil's Island, that helped inspire Theodor Herzl to found the modern Zionist movement in 1897.
Dreyfus would eventually be exonerated, but the stain on France's honor would only grow during World War II, when French collaborators would welcome the opportunity to hand over their Jewish neighbors to the German occupation forces.
Bezhalel Machlis, CEO of Israeli defense company Elbit Systems, suggested that French defense-industrial interests and their potential loss of customers to Israeli companies were behind the French shutdown of the Israeli exhibitions at the Paris Air Show. If only it were that simple. One can't help but think it was the French government taking umbrage with Israeli military forces defending their citizens from the murderous actions of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.
Israeli Defense Ministry Director General Amir Baram may have put the matter in perspective when he told one reporter, "Battlefield performance speaks for our products far more than any exhibition on French soil."
In a footnote of historic irony to this sad little episode on French soil, German Ministry of Defense State Secretary Benedikt Zimmer made it a point to visit all the Israeli exhibits in a show of support.
As one who endured five years of a life sentence on Devil's Island before it was publicly revealed he had been framed by his anti-Semitic superiors, Dreyfus would probably offer a Gallic shrug at his country's latest actions and ask, "What were you expecting?"
Lawrence Kadish serves on the Board of Governors of Gatestone Institute.
