Monday's murder of an Arab in Tel Aviv, allegedly by a French Jewish immigrant, shocked and frightened many Jews in France, according to Sami Gozlan, a former police inspector in Paris. Gozlan, who currently tracks attacks on Jews in France, explained that they fear the murder of East Jerusalem taxi driver Taysir Karaki, to which Julian Soufir confessed, will worsen the already tense relations between Jews and Muslims in that country. Their fears were shared by French Jewish immigrants to Israel, who expressed concerns that Jewish relatives and friends back in France would be subject to revenge attacks there.

Soufir's mother, who still lives in Paris, was besieged Tuesday by journalists, friends and relatives trying to understand how a "shy, quiet" boy, as his friends described him, had become a cold-blooded murderer. Mrs. Soufir declined to speak to Israeli journalists directly, but according to Gozlan, she intends to come to Israel to try to answer that question for herself. She is seeking, he said, "to understand what happened."

Gozlan added that she plans to pay a condolence call on the victim's family and tell them that her son was not raised in an atmosphere of hate.

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Julian Soufir grew up in a middle-class suburb of Paris, one with a large population of immigrants from North Africa, both Jewish and Arab. The Soufir family is originally from Tunisia, part of the wave of North African immigrants who arrived in France in the 1960s.

In recent years, relations between Jews and Arabs in the Parisian suburbs have worsened markedly, and fear of attacks has helped persuade many Jews, Julian among them, to move to Israel.

Gozlan, who began to look into Soufir's history after the murder, said that he was unaware of the alleged killer ever having been personally attacked by Muslims. "I found no sign that he sought revenge," he said. "He moved to Israel, became more religious and recently began to lose contact with reality."

The arrest of the main suspect and his brother Jonathan Soufir was the main topic of conversation Tuesday among members of Israel's 100,000-strong French community, which is largely concentrated in Ashdod, Jerusalem and Netanya. Jonathan lives in Netanya.

The restaurants and cafes of Netanya's Independence Square have long been a favorite gathering place for French immigrants living in the Sharon region. Tuesday, many sat and read press reports of the murder, which took place in Tel Aviv.

"Jews who immigrated from France were shocked," Jerome Maslati, who immigrated 15 years ago and lives in Ramat Hasharon, said Tuesday. "We are very fearful of revenge against Jews in France. It all depends on how the French papers treat it. For now they are actually trying to calm things down, because they fear escalation. If there are riots, the Jewish Agency will have a lot of work, because many Jews will want to move to Israel."

State to recognize slain cabbie, family as terror victims
Taysir Karaki, the East Jerusalem taxi driver who was murdered in Tel Aviv on Monday, will be recognized as the victim of a hostile act if the police determine that the motivation for his murder was nationalist. This will make his family eligible for National Security Institute assistance, including a monthly stipend of about NIS 10,000.

The Compensation Law for Victims of Hostile Acts was amended last year to include not only the victims of a terror organization but also of "any violent act whose main purpose is to harm a person because of his or her national-ethnic origin and which is rooted in the Israeli-Arab conflict."

The amendment followed the 2005 incident in Shfaram in which an Israeli soldier shot to death four Arab passengers on a bus.

The victims' families were compensated beyond the letter of the law, because at that time the law granted compensation only to victims of acts perpetrated by "enemy forces."

There have been other cases in which the families of Arabs killed for nationalist reasons received NII recognition, including that of two Palestinians murdered by an Israeli in Shilo two years ago, as well as the 13 Israeli Arabs killed by security forces in October 2000.