TESTAMENT DE GERARD ARAUD ANCIEN AMBASSADEUR EN ISRAEL
Hurt and angry
By Avirama Golan
To the casual observer, it would seem that a person who could sit on the beautiful stone balcony of a spacious home overlooking the Mediterranean, while his skilled, polite retainer hovers over him, pouring fresh water and fine wine into the right glasses at the right time, could not be happier. Gerard Araud, the outgoing French ambassador to Israel, might be wary of using the word "happy" in summing up his tour of duty here. But he readily concedes with a wide, boyish smile, that he has a great fondness for this landscape and this place, and even for these people. Araud, 53, is slated to become head of the political-security branch of the French foreign affairs ministry. He is very pleased with this post, as Israel should be: Araud will be able to provide in-depth and intelligent explanations of Israel's problems to policy-makers back at home. Although he is very careful not to allow even a crumb of political affiliation to cling to him, a survey of his colleagues and friends from university days will suffice to show that he is very well connected on the center-right, although he doesn't have a problem with the left, either. He is unwilling, of course, to officially forecast who will win the presidential elections in France - Nicolas Sarkozy or Segolene Royal - but it seems that he will be able to manage in a political-diplomatic environment with either of them.
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Israelis find it difficult to understand the French, especially their official envoys. This is Araud's second diplomatic posting in Israel. The first was also his diplomatic debut abroad, from 1982-1984, when he served as first secretary of the embassy in Tel Aviv. Although he had wanted New York, in the end his Israeli experience stood him in good stead in subsequent postings in Washington, D.C., the United Nations, and Kosovo. Araud encountered Israeli hostility toward his country right after he became ambassador, in 2004. At that time, he forgot diplomatic protocol and said on Army Radio, "Israel has an anti-France psychosis." The response was so stormy that since then he has forced himself to write and rewrite, examine and reexamine every speech, and watch his mouth even in casual conversation. "I was not okay," he says, "but I was very angry." Bon vivant Gerard Araud is a passionate man, full of joie de vivre, warm and curious. It is hard not to sense, even as he begs not to be misquoted or misunderstood, the feelings that emerge between the lines: sometimes friendly and sometimes angry, sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes insulted. "How can a famous TV anchorman say without batting an eye that all French are anti-Semites, and it goes by the board?" he asks. "How can a serious journalist say to me, in front of other people, that he knows that we French were the Nazis' biggest collaborators? What does that have to do with reality? If someone were to speak that way in France about Israel, oh ho! What would have happened!" Not five minutes into the conversation, the envoy is already waving his hands. No self-respecting Parisian would dream of expressing himself with such fervor. But Araud, who now lives in Paris, is a typical "southerner." He was born in Marseilles to a religious Catholic family, but was sent to public school. The school was like something out of books by Goscinny and Sempe, about little Nicolas and his friends. He had no small number of Jewish teachers, but little Gerard did not know they were Jewish. "Now I understand, by their names," he says, "but in the 1950s the atmosphere was so republican. Who spoke in those days about religion or origin? We were French, citizens of Marseilles, and that was it." Being from Marseilles, he finds places that do not have a seashore suffocating. He deeply inhales the first breeze of autumn on the beach in Jaffa; soon, on the way back to Paris, whose European beauty is heavy, gilded, over-adorned, he will be able to spend two weeks on his favorite Greek island, Idra. There, in the steep alleys navigated by heavily laden donkeys and mules (there are no cars or roads), he likes to watch the sun set over the dock and the giant hovercrafts that blare their horns and anchor, discharging hundreds of people every day; that is how he rests. Because Araud learned ancient Greek in high school, and realized it would not help him at all in negotiating with the vegetable and fruit vendors on the island, he began to study modern Greek from tapes; just as he misses the Mediterranean in Paris, he will miss the people, too. "That is what I like most about Israel," he says. "The people. I have made good friends here. But not necessarily the kind that most diplomats know." A remark about the reputation the ambassador has developed, as a typical Tel Aviv bon vivant, makes him laugh. "The one and only time I went out here to a pub, Gideon Levy was there writing an article about young people who go to pubs. From that moment everybody thought that I like to run around on Sheinkin. The truth is that most of the time I hosted people here. In three years there were 2,000 people here for dinner, 21,000 for cocktails, we opened 200 bottles of Champagne and 1,500 bottles of wine." Araud watches the surprised reaction, amused. "That is not so much," he explains. "The Israelis don't drink at all. They only eat." He himself is on a diet most of the time that can drive his fellow diners crazy: Only fish, vegetables, a good wine and black coffee. No dessert, although he knows all the fancy names for the magnificent deserts the chef at the ambassador's residence prepares - including that of a complicated cream cake named after some 17th-century sporting event, for example. The few times he was a guest at the home of a friend, he was shocked to discover the gap between the lifestyle he knows in France and the average Israeli one. 'Social elevator' Araud would never say these things on the record, but listening closely, one hears interesting assessments from an individual who considers himself (and rightly so) to be a person of fine taste, with quite a good grasp of aesthetics and art. Supporting this is the average-to-above-average financial situation of a senior diplomat who quickly rose in the "social elevator" - the accepted term in France for the means by which members of the lower classes from the periphery manage, thanks to excellent education (in the case of Araud, the Polytechnique and the Academie Nationale Diplomatique), to climb up and penetrate the upper class. Not the wealthy bourgeoisie stratum, but definitely that of people making good salaries that allow for a very comfortable life. According to Araud's friends, he did not believe it, for example, when he saw senior Israeli officials, university professors and former ambassadors living in four-room flats or in what is known in Israel as a "cottage." In comparison to the huge apartments with the dark-wood floors, the fireplaces and marble cornices, the heavy rugs, the antique furniture (real antique, not what the French call "old"), with silver and porcelain dishes, decorative gilded gates and a uniformed guard at the entrance - the more modest premises seemed to him a bit meager. Yet the homes of the wealthy, on the other hand, were not to his taste. Too much flashy money, too little of the European culture he loves. In general, huge gaps between the rich and the poor seem dangerous to him, and he does not hesitate to say so openly. "In the 20 years that have passed since I was first here, everything has happened with such dizzying speed - and not for the good," he says. "I am far from being a socialist, but how did you allow yourselves to go from the kibbutz ideology, centralization and modesty, to wild privatization in the most extreme Thatcheresque style? I can't understand it, in this society." When the envoy is asked to explain what he means by "this society," he weighs his words carefully. "It is complex, there are many groups. " He finds neutral words, but anyone who saw him dumbfounded and wavering between confusion and embarrassment during visits to the popular religious figure Baba Baruch in Netivot and to holy graves in the Galilee, or looking on in amazement at a high-tech industry, or speaking about writers and local artists with admiration, will understand that Araud has become acquainted with more than the ordinary Israeli creme-de-la-creme. He also has criticism for his European colleagues. "Europeans have no idea what Israel is," he explains. "They come here and meet more or less the same circles of the intellectual left, and hear more or less the same ideas in the same English, and go back home thinking that the only thing that interests Israelis is the conflict and that their lives are wonderful and everyone goes around the world from conference to conference. I know other Israelis. First of all, people from the right, like Gideon Sa'ar and others. What they have to say might not be so comfortable for Europeans, but it is serious and important. I know Ofakim, Sderot, Kiryat Shmona - maybe not really, not close-up, but I know them. I have spoken with people about their daily difficulties, their existential fears, and this is what Europe does not understand." "Perhaps I got irritated when people attack us here. It still makes me angry, for example, when the Dreyfus affair - which all my life I knew as one of the great moments in the life of my nation, because thanks to that important trial, and Emile Zola's 'J'accuse,' the father of Emmanuel Levinas decided to move to France - is interpreted here as clear proof of the eternal imprint of anti-Semitism on the French. You hate us so fundamentally and passionately, you forgive the Dutch for helping to kill the majority of Jewish community, the Belgians for their high rate of membership in the Nazi Party - and we are the worst in your eyes. That makes me angry. I am hurt, I am helpless. France is my country, it is my homeland, and I don't think it deserves so much shame. But I am sad to see that in France and in Europe in general, they do not see you in a realistic light." Israeli fear More than anything else, the ambassador says, he does not agree with the fear he senses in Israel, but understands their roots. "Your traumas are too close," he says. "You have a historical heritage of loss and insecure wanderings that passes through you even if it seems to us from the outside that you are a huge military power and an amazing center of thinking and creativity." Araud recalls a story from two years ago that he says amazes him to this day. "A very respectable conference was held in Paris on the subject of the Middle East in 2010. There were people there from the highest levels of academia in the world, Israelis as well, of course. But none of the speakers discussed Israel. It seemed obvious to me that really the problem of the Middle East in the coming years is not Israel at all. Is there any lack of dangerous places? Then suddenly an Israeli women diplomat came up to me, whose name I will not mention, looking very angry and insulted. I asked her what happened and she said: 'I know why no one has mentioned Israel,' she said. 'Because none of you believes that Israel will be around in 2010.' "I was shocked. Who thinks something like that? That was the first time, but not the last, that I heard this fear. For us, the Europeans, it is difficult, almost impossible, to understand such deep existential fear, but I recognize it as one of the strongest factors impacting thought and decision-making in Israel. Anyone taking this mood into consideration sees everything differently: the isolationism, the disengagement, the convergence, the building of a Great Wall of China between you and your neighbors. And if you add to this the weakness of the Israeli political system, which in recent years has gotten a great deal worse, and because of which it is hard for the government to make painful decisions - one can begin to understand the real picture. "I will try," Araud pledges, "to explain Israel with empathy and logic. I have experienced a deep process of the senses and the intellect here. When I was a boy I didn't know what Jews were; I thought they simply had 'missed the boat' of Jesus and stayed as they were, behind, and here I discovered an entire world. In the evenings when I am not having people over, I sit quietly alone and read - and it is almost entirely Israeli literature. You have great and wonderful literature, the most interesting in Europe. 'A Tale of Love and Darkness' by Amos Oz is one of the most wonderful books I ever read, and the novels of Yehoshua Kenaz are to my mind the best of literature. I just finished reading 'Infiltration.' What I learned from it about Israel and Israelis no diplomat or scholar could ever learn at any cocktail party or from any briefing."
By Avirama Golan
To the casual observer, it would seem that a person who could sit on the beautiful stone balcony of a spacious home overlooking the Mediterranean, while his skilled, polite retainer hovers over him, pouring fresh water and fine wine into the right glasses at the right time, could not be happier. Gerard Araud, the outgoing French ambassador to Israel, might be wary of using the word "happy" in summing up his tour of duty here. But he readily concedes with a wide, boyish smile, that he has a great fondness for this landscape and this place, and even for these people. Araud, 53, is slated to become head of the political-security branch of the French foreign affairs ministry. He is very pleased with this post, as Israel should be: Araud will be able to provide in-depth and intelligent explanations of Israel's problems to policy-makers back at home. Although he is very careful not to allow even a crumb of political affiliation to cling to him, a survey of his colleagues and friends from university days will suffice to show that he is very well connected on the center-right, although he doesn't have a problem with the left, either. He is unwilling, of course, to officially forecast who will win the presidential elections in France - Nicolas Sarkozy or Segolene Royal - but it seems that he will be able to manage in a political-diplomatic environment with either of them.
Advertisement
Israelis find it difficult to understand the French, especially their official envoys. This is Araud's second diplomatic posting in Israel. The first was also his diplomatic debut abroad, from 1982-1984, when he served as first secretary of the embassy in Tel Aviv. Although he had wanted New York, in the end his Israeli experience stood him in good stead in subsequent postings in Washington, D.C., the United Nations, and Kosovo. Araud encountered Israeli hostility toward his country right after he became ambassador, in 2004. At that time, he forgot diplomatic protocol and said on Army Radio, "Israel has an anti-France psychosis." The response was so stormy that since then he has forced himself to write and rewrite, examine and reexamine every speech, and watch his mouth even in casual conversation. "I was not okay," he says, "but I was very angry." Bon vivant Gerard Araud is a passionate man, full of joie de vivre, warm and curious. It is hard not to sense, even as he begs not to be misquoted or misunderstood, the feelings that emerge between the lines: sometimes friendly and sometimes angry, sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes insulted. "How can a famous TV anchorman say without batting an eye that all French are anti-Semites, and it goes by the board?" he asks. "How can a serious journalist say to me, in front of other people, that he knows that we French were the Nazis' biggest collaborators? What does that have to do with reality? If someone were to speak that way in France about Israel, oh ho! What would have happened!" Not five minutes into the conversation, the envoy is already waving his hands. No self-respecting Parisian would dream of expressing himself with such fervor. But Araud, who now lives in Paris, is a typical "southerner." He was born in Marseilles to a religious Catholic family, but was sent to public school. The school was like something out of books by Goscinny and Sempe, about little Nicolas and his friends. He had no small number of Jewish teachers, but little Gerard did not know they were Jewish. "Now I understand, by their names," he says, "but in the 1950s the atmosphere was so republican. Who spoke in those days about religion or origin? We were French, citizens of Marseilles, and that was it." Being from Marseilles, he finds places that do not have a seashore suffocating. He deeply inhales the first breeze of autumn on the beach in Jaffa; soon, on the way back to Paris, whose European beauty is heavy, gilded, over-adorned, he will be able to spend two weeks on his favorite Greek island, Idra. There, in the steep alleys navigated by heavily laden donkeys and mules (there are no cars or roads), he likes to watch the sun set over the dock and the giant hovercrafts that blare their horns and anchor, discharging hundreds of people every day; that is how he rests. Because Araud learned ancient Greek in high school, and realized it would not help him at all in negotiating with the vegetable and fruit vendors on the island, he began to study modern Greek from tapes; just as he misses the Mediterranean in Paris, he will miss the people, too. "That is what I like most about Israel," he says. "The people. I have made good friends here. But not necessarily the kind that most diplomats know." A remark about the reputation the ambassador has developed, as a typical Tel Aviv bon vivant, makes him laugh. "The one and only time I went out here to a pub, Gideon Levy was there writing an article about young people who go to pubs. From that moment everybody thought that I like to run around on Sheinkin. The truth is that most of the time I hosted people here. In three years there were 2,000 people here for dinner, 21,000 for cocktails, we opened 200 bottles of Champagne and 1,500 bottles of wine." Araud watches the surprised reaction, amused. "That is not so much," he explains. "The Israelis don't drink at all. They only eat." He himself is on a diet most of the time that can drive his fellow diners crazy: Only fish, vegetables, a good wine and black coffee. No dessert, although he knows all the fancy names for the magnificent deserts the chef at the ambassador's residence prepares - including that of a complicated cream cake named after some 17th-century sporting event, for example. The few times he was a guest at the home of a friend, he was shocked to discover the gap between the lifestyle he knows in France and the average Israeli one. 'Social elevator' Araud would never say these things on the record, but listening closely, one hears interesting assessments from an individual who considers himself (and rightly so) to be a person of fine taste, with quite a good grasp of aesthetics and art. Supporting this is the average-to-above-average financial situation of a senior diplomat who quickly rose in the "social elevator" - the accepted term in France for the means by which members of the lower classes from the periphery manage, thanks to excellent education (in the case of Araud, the Polytechnique and the Academie Nationale Diplomatique), to climb up and penetrate the upper class. Not the wealthy bourgeoisie stratum, but definitely that of people making good salaries that allow for a very comfortable life. According to Araud's friends, he did not believe it, for example, when he saw senior Israeli officials, university professors and former ambassadors living in four-room flats or in what is known in Israel as a "cottage." In comparison to the huge apartments with the dark-wood floors, the fireplaces and marble cornices, the heavy rugs, the antique furniture (real antique, not what the French call "old"), with silver and porcelain dishes, decorative gilded gates and a uniformed guard at the entrance - the more modest premises seemed to him a bit meager. Yet the homes of the wealthy, on the other hand, were not to his taste. Too much flashy money, too little of the European culture he loves. In general, huge gaps between the rich and the poor seem dangerous to him, and he does not hesitate to say so openly. "In the 20 years that have passed since I was first here, everything has happened with such dizzying speed - and not for the good," he says. "I am far from being a socialist, but how did you allow yourselves to go from the kibbutz ideology, centralization and modesty, to wild privatization in the most extreme Thatcheresque style? I can't understand it, in this society." When the envoy is asked to explain what he means by "this society," he weighs his words carefully. "It is complex, there are many groups. " He finds neutral words, but anyone who saw him dumbfounded and wavering between confusion and embarrassment during visits to the popular religious figure Baba Baruch in Netivot and to holy graves in the Galilee, or looking on in amazement at a high-tech industry, or speaking about writers and local artists with admiration, will understand that Araud has become acquainted with more than the ordinary Israeli creme-de-la-creme. He also has criticism for his European colleagues. "Europeans have no idea what Israel is," he explains. "They come here and meet more or less the same circles of the intellectual left, and hear more or less the same ideas in the same English, and go back home thinking that the only thing that interests Israelis is the conflict and that their lives are wonderful and everyone goes around the world from conference to conference. I know other Israelis. First of all, people from the right, like Gideon Sa'ar and others. What they have to say might not be so comfortable for Europeans, but it is serious and important. I know Ofakim, Sderot, Kiryat Shmona - maybe not really, not close-up, but I know them. I have spoken with people about their daily difficulties, their existential fears, and this is what Europe does not understand." "Perhaps I got irritated when people attack us here. It still makes me angry, for example, when the Dreyfus affair - which all my life I knew as one of the great moments in the life of my nation, because thanks to that important trial, and Emile Zola's 'J'accuse,' the father of Emmanuel Levinas decided to move to France - is interpreted here as clear proof of the eternal imprint of anti-Semitism on the French. You hate us so fundamentally and passionately, you forgive the Dutch for helping to kill the majority of Jewish community, the Belgians for their high rate of membership in the Nazi Party - and we are the worst in your eyes. That makes me angry. I am hurt, I am helpless. France is my country, it is my homeland, and I don't think it deserves so much shame. But I am sad to see that in France and in Europe in general, they do not see you in a realistic light." Israeli fear More than anything else, the ambassador says, he does not agree with the fear he senses in Israel, but understands their roots. "Your traumas are too close," he says. "You have a historical heritage of loss and insecure wanderings that passes through you even if it seems to us from the outside that you are a huge military power and an amazing center of thinking and creativity." Araud recalls a story from two years ago that he says amazes him to this day. "A very respectable conference was held in Paris on the subject of the Middle East in 2010. There were people there from the highest levels of academia in the world, Israelis as well, of course. But none of the speakers discussed Israel. It seemed obvious to me that really the problem of the Middle East in the coming years is not Israel at all. Is there any lack of dangerous places? Then suddenly an Israeli women diplomat came up to me, whose name I will not mention, looking very angry and insulted. I asked her what happened and she said: 'I know why no one has mentioned Israel,' she said. 'Because none of you believes that Israel will be around in 2010.' "I was shocked. Who thinks something like that? That was the first time, but not the last, that I heard this fear. For us, the Europeans, it is difficult, almost impossible, to understand such deep existential fear, but I recognize it as one of the strongest factors impacting thought and decision-making in Israel. Anyone taking this mood into consideration sees everything differently: the isolationism, the disengagement, the convergence, the building of a Great Wall of China between you and your neighbors. And if you add to this the weakness of the Israeli political system, which in recent years has gotten a great deal worse, and because of which it is hard for the government to make painful decisions - one can begin to understand the real picture. "I will try," Araud pledges, "to explain Israel with empathy and logic. I have experienced a deep process of the senses and the intellect here. When I was a boy I didn't know what Jews were; I thought they simply had 'missed the boat' of Jesus and stayed as they were, behind, and here I discovered an entire world. In the evenings when I am not having people over, I sit quietly alone and read - and it is almost entirely Israeli literature. You have great and wonderful literature, the most interesting in Europe. 'A Tale of Love and Darkness' by Amos Oz is one of the most wonderful books I ever read, and the novels of Yehoshua Kenaz are to my mind the best of literature. I just finished reading 'Infiltration.' What I learned from it about Israel and Israelis no diplomat or scholar could ever learn at any cocktail party or from any briefing."
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