Israel election: French corner of Israel turns spotlight on immigrant constituency

It could almost pass for a seaside town in Brittany. A spring storm has brought hammering rain and gale force gusts of wind, leaving the normally bustling Independence Square dark and deserted. Waves crash against the shore and many of the cafés (“Chez William”, “Pain Au Chocolat”) near the seafront have brought down their shutters for the day.

The small groups of smokers huddled in doorways are all speaking French – the language of restaurant menus, shop signage – and, most conspicuously, real estate.

"Ninety-eight per cent of our customers are French," says Jacques Benaroch, himself a recently arrived Parisian, who works at Sass Immo, one of about a dozen estate agents on the square that cater for the French market. "You can spend your whole day speaking French here. Unfortunately that's why I haven't managed to pick up much Hebrew."

French authorities estimate that as many as 150,000 French Jews live in Israel, and the number of new arrivals has been rising in recent years. In 2014, 7,000 chose to make aliyah (literally: go up), or move to Israel, double the figure for the previous year, making France for the first time the number one source of immigration to the Jewish state.

Netanya in particular has become a magnet for the French, attracting new arrivals with its beaches, relatively affordable housing and long-established community. “Those who are a bit religious head towards Jerusalem,” says Benaroch. “Those who want to party and have a bit of money go to Tel Aviv. It’s twice as expensive there as it is here. Netanya is more French than anywhere else in Israel.”

Hebrew lessons

When Benaroch arrived from Paris a year ago, the Israeli authorities gave him a standard cash grant of several thousand euro and free Hebrew classes for the first six months. He also availed of the services of voluntary organisations that specialise in helping new arrivals settle in. He admits it wasn’t easy, but has no regrets.

In France he worried about “all these Muslim acts getting more and more frequent”. “I feel better here than I do in France. I didn’t feel safe there. I feel safer here, even though it’s a country at war.”

France's debate on Jewish emigration was revived in January, when Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu went to Paris in the aftermath of a series of terrorist attacks, including on Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish supermarket, and urged French Jews to come "home" to Israel, assuring them the Jewish state would welcome them "with open arms".

The call hit a nerve in France, home to the largest Jewish population (600,000) in Europe. "France without the Jews is not France anymore," said prime minister Manuel Valls. Haim Korsia, the chief rabbi, stressed that Jews were an integral part of the republic. "We dream in French, we think in French, our culture is French, our language is French," he said. "Obviously France is our country."

Gad Idgui, secretary general of the Future of Judaism group, said he was uncomfortable with Netanyahu, the head of “a foreign” state, addressing a Parisian synagogue during an Israeli election campaign.

But as the cranes in the sky above Netanya attest, many are choosing to make the move. At Sasso Immo, the typical customers are a young family looking for a three-roomed apartment near the city centre. They also see a lot of retirees, and professionals who keep their jobs in France and travel frequently between the two countries. The authorities don’t keep figures for those who return to France, but Benaroch says it’s not that uncommon.

Stick together

Michel Dahan

, a shopkeeper who moved from Morocco in 1970, says the French in Netanya tend to stick together. “In Netanya everyone speaks French, so it’s not so much of a problem,” he says. “The real difficulty is when they go to a big city or try to deal with the banks or government offices, say, where they don’t speak French. That can be difficult.”

For many of the French in Netanya, moving involves reconciling themselves to lower salaries and a different standard of living. Martine Sitbon, who runs a clothes shop called La Parisienne, says she and her husband gave up great jobs and a comfortable middle class life in Paris to move with their two young children 17 years ago.

Unlike some of the people who make the move these days, who Sitbon says are driven by “fear”, for her and her husband it was simply the fulfilment of a lifelong ambition.

Brave

“We were a little bit tired of our lives in France, so we came here. We had everything in France, but we were brave. So we dropped everything,” she says. “When you come here, you have to accept that you’re not going to live the same life you had in France. You don’t have the same needs, for one. You work here, but your salary is much lower than in France. So you don’t live in the same way. You adjust our expectations.”

Sitbon, now 57, says her husband and children settled quickly but that for the first two years she “felt sick”. “It wasn’t without difficulty. When you don’t have the language, when you’ve left your family in France - everything you hold dear - and you go to a country you don’t know, where you don’t speak the language, it’s a very big handicap.”

Today Sitbon speaks Hebrew and regards Netanya as home but, like many others in the city, it has been important to her to keep her French passport. “I have two countries,” says Benaroch. “France was great to me, and it’s thanks to France that I’m here. I love France.”

Given their numbers, Israel's recent immigrants are an important political constituency. The influx of almost a million Russian-speakers from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s had a clear effect on Israeli politics, accelerating a wider rightward shift and leading directly to the creation a new political party, Yisrael Beiteinu, led by foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman. In recent weeks, parties have published multilingual leaflets and held events aimed specifically at speakers of English and French.

As many as 50,000 French immigrants may be eligible to vote on Tuesday. The majority are thought to lean to the right, but that hasn’t stopped parties from across the spectrum working assiduously to court their votes.

Labor leader Isaac Herzog has spoken of his "commitment" to France and reminded French audiences that his great-grandfather was a rabbi in Paris in the early 20th century. "The Jews coming from France want social justice, politics that inspire peace in the region and a balanced state that is both Jewish and democratic," he told French voters. "We are the only alternative to Netanyahu and we can meet your expectations."

Martine Sitbon plans to vote on Tuesday. She prefers not to share her voting intentions, but she’s not convinced the country needs a change. The economy could be doing better, she accepts, but “it’s a young country” after all. “Things are working well, and we hope that will continue,” she says. “And we have the army, we have security. Thanks to God we’re well protected.” Series concluded