| Abstract | In 1967, however, Jews overwhelmingly perceived Israel to be vulnerable, and their continued identification with the Jewish state made them feel vulnerable as well. Among the differences was a dramatically different social and political context in France and the world: decolonization, the Algerian War and other struggles for "national liberation" had by 1967 radically sensitized the Left to claims of oppression and imperialism. What is more, French President Charles de Gaulle, who had not been in a position to formulate French policy toward Israel during either the 1948 or 1956 wars, had both explicitly and indirectly expressed his desire to move France away from the United States and closer to the Soviet Union and the Arab world. Because the United States was a strong supporter of Israel, and the Soviets and Arabs unabashed enemies, Jews felt both popular and governmental support for Israel to be rapidly declining. In this context, French Jews heard Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's repeated calls in 1967 for the "destruction" and "annihilation" of Israel in a very particular way: Israel would be "destroyed" as had been the plan for biblical "Israel" during the Holocaust, and de Gaulle would abandon "Israel" (both biblical and juridical) as Marshal Philippe Pétain had abandoned the Jews during World War II. As tensions in the Middle East heightened in late May-June 1967, virtually all segments of the French Jewish population expressed an immediate, total identification with Israel, as many had done since 1948, but the identification in 1967 was with a nation perceived to be vulnerable by a community that experienced itself as vulnerable. An international discursive context permeated by images of racism and oppression, a particularly Middle Eastern discourse where threats of Israeli destruction were common and a domestic context where Left and Right seemed to be merging into an alliance with Israel's enemies combined to bring the shock of the Holocaust abandonment to the forefront of Jewish consciousness. French Jewry's communal identification with both the Jewish state and a redemptive account of the Nazi genocide transformed in discussions surrounding the Six-Day War into a nationally announced identification with Israel and a traumatic narrative of the Holocaust.
The affinity between Le Monde and La Croix ran deeper than shared entreaties that Israel master its victory. Both had avoided supporting either side during the early stages of the crisis and war, Le Monde by trying to mediate the Arab and Israeli positions, and La Croix by focusing on the danger to holy places in Jerusalem. And at the end of the war, both constructed interpretations of the situation in the Middle East that reinforced the discursive shift in Holocaust identification. Like the Catholic newspaper, Le Monde's first analysis that clearly supported one side in the conflict was a compassionate appeal to pity the Arabs, an appeal that those who had supported Israel when it had "seemed" threatened now turn to the Arabs "in distress." Moreover, as the word "reproach" began to appear with increasing frequency in public discourse to describe European "guilt" for the Holocaust, which in turn explained mass support for Israel, Le Monde argued that the most serious "reproach" would be to abandon the Arabs, which again suggested that the contemporary situation was analogous with the Holocaust. In a discursive arena where the unparalleled evil of the Nazi genocide of the Jews was a common assertion, Le Monde's lament that the situation for Arab soldiers was "a tragedy without precedent" implied that the Holocaust had not been an outstanding case of evil, indeed that the contemporary Arab plight was itself a greater tragedy than the Holocaust. The ways in which both Le Monde and La Croix narrated a strong identification with the Arabs, combined with multiple calls for Israel to "master its victory," further turned on its head the dominant Holocaust narrative of the early part of the war, namely that Arabs were Nazis and Jews once again victims.
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