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Last update - 03:01 12/05/2008 Changing the world that made the Holocaust By Ofri Ilani Tags: France, Charles de Gaulle  The student revolt that shook France 40 years ago, in May of 1968, erupted over an extraordinary issue: In the student dormitories at the Sorbonne the strict separation between men and women had been enforced for generations. In 1968, students headed by Daniel Cohn-Bendit barricaded themselves into the campus with a demand to cancel the rule and to allow them to have visitors of the opposite sex in their dorm rooms. The protest turned into an extensive uprising of university students, high school students and workers that for several weeks swept in Paris and all of France and let to a nearly total strike of the French economy. The aims of this short-lived revolution were also unusual with respect to other revolutions in history: Though the students who revolted did indeed want to improve the wage conditions of the employees of the university, and to change the institution's hierarchical structure, they also set more ambitious aims for themselves, such as "the elimination of work" and the destruction of the bourgeois way of life. The most precise expression of these ideas was reflected in the slogan "L'imagination au pouvoir" (Let imagination rule), which they sprayed on walls around the city. Forty years after the waning of the revolution, the names of the student leaders still arouse controversy in France. In extensive articles in recent weeks that have been devoted to the topic in the French press, once again the names of the leaders of the revolt are being mentioned, among them Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Alain Geismar, Alain Krivine, Jacques Sauvageot, Pierre Goldmann, Bernard Kouchner, Andre Glucksmann, Daniel Bensaid, Nathan Weinstock and Benny Levy. These revolutionaries, who were young students at the time, are considered by the French right to have been the factor responsible for "the corruption of values" in France, the results of which are evident to this day. Only infrequent mention, however, is made of the fact that all of the personages on this list, and most of the leaders of the student revolt, were Jewish − some of them the children of families that had been largely annihilated in the Holocaust. The massive Jewish presence in the organizations of the radical left is manifested in a joke that circulate in France in the years after 1968: "Why don't they speak Yiddish at meetings of the Revolutionary Communist League," a reference to a Trotskyite organization that played a key role in the uprising. The answer: "So that Bensaid can understand." It's not that Daniel Bensaid wasn't Jewish, he just happened to be of of North African origins. (Altogether, 11 of the RCL's 12 heads were Jewish.) Advertisement "The leadership of the student movement had a great many Jews − so much so that many people in France saw it as a Jewish movement," says Prof. Yair Oron of Israel's Open University, author of the book "We Are All German Jews" (Hebrew, 1999), which deals with the Jewish radicals on the French left. "Nevertheless, many of the student leaders did not attribute importance to their Judaism. They wanted to be part of the secular society and to change it. From their perspective, their revolt was a way of doing this." On the basis of interviews conducted with dozens of leaders of the leftist movements of the period, Oron found that the Holocaust played a key role in motivating the Jewish youngsters to mount the barricades and to battle the institutions of the society in which they had grown up. "Many of the radical activists in the student revolt had been children during the war and others were the children of survivors. It is clear that this influenced them," he says. According to Oron, "The perception of the leaders of the radical left is that the regime against which they fought, the world against which they revolted, was the same world that had made the Holocaust, and therefore it needed to be changed. They thought, and I agree with them, that even after the defeat of the Nazis and the Vichy regime, France of the 1960s had not learned the profound lessons of the Holocaust; that the conservative society of their day was no different in essence from [French] society of the 1930s." It's little wonder that a number of the movements had anthems containing motifs drawn from the struggle against the Nazis, and that among the slogans sprayed on the walls of the Sorbonne were those equating the French police to the SS. "Cohn-Bendit to Dachau" Bernard Luxembourg, today a resident of Yehud, south of Tel Aviv, worked in the 1960s as the director of a laboratory of the auto manufacturer Renault, in the city of Valence in southeastern France. He was 37 at the time and even though he was in management, a strong socialist consciousness throbbed within him. "I was always on the left," he relates. "My workers knew this and they consulted me about how to organize." He says that on May 13, 1968, he invited all of the lab's employees to go out and demonstrate as a sign of solidarity with the students? struggle. "I said that I was going to demonstrate and nearly all the workers at the laboratory said: 'We're going with you,'" he recalls. Luxembourg was not a French citizen, but rather a native of Germany. For that reason, he was compared in Valence to Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who did not have French citizenship either and who was depicted by opponents of the revolt as a "German Jew." According to Luxembourg, "When I marched through the streets with the laboratory workers, there were people who said: ?He is our Cohn-Bendit. Let's make his life hell.'" Eyal Shafran, who in 1967 was a ninth-grader at a Parisian school and a member of the Hashomer Hatzair socialist-Zionist youth movement, recalls the calls of "Cohn-Bendit to Dachau" that were heard at the counter-demonstrations mounted by right-wingers, supporters of Charles de Gaulle. Together with his schoolmates, he participated in the leftist demonstrations in the streets of Paris. "We were all leftists, even though I didn't really understand what all the fuss was about. As far as we were concerned, it was a big party, or a kind of adventure. We sang revolutionary songs and there were arguments and speeches. In the evening we went to visit our counselors in the youth movement, who were among the people who had barricaded themselves into the Sorbonne. All of Paris was paralyzed, with no public transportation and they arrested so many people that the police set up a kind of jail in one of the hospitals. I was lucky and I always managed to escape from the police." According to Shafran, "This was a very meaningful event in my youth. There was a feeling that it was possible to live in a society that would not be like the one we had lived in before. That it was possible to question everything, to argue about everyghing, and that not everything had been writ in stone generations ago," relates Shafran. Eli Ben Gal, a member of Kibbutz Baram, was born in France in 1940. He says he has hated the land of his birth since he childhood. "I have always felt deep loathing for French culture and the French people − mainly because of the Holocaust and the anti-Semitism, but also because of their hypocritical nature," he says. In 1958, when he was 18 years old, Ben Gal immigrated to Israel. He joined Baram, a kibbutz associated with Hashomer Hatzair, where he worked a shepherd. In 1968 he went back to France after the student revolt had shaken the foundations of the republic and the mass strikes had brought de Gaulle's government to the brink of collapse. According to Ben Gal, the France that he encountered on his return was completely different from the country of his memory. "I felt that I was in a different place. I found a society that had changed. The hypocrisy that I hated, the racism, the colonialism − had suddenly become the object of hatred in all of France. I think that France was defeated in World War II because it was corrupt and because most of the French supported the Nazis. Nineteen-sixty-eight was the attempt by the younger generation to take revenge on the veteran generation for its collaboration." In the years that followed 1968, most of the leftist student movements adopted a tough anti-Zionist stance, and supported militant Palestinian organizations. Guests of Fatah The heads of the Maoists, Alain Geismar and Benny Levy, even spent a period in 1969 at the Karameh Refugee Camp in Jordan, as guests of Fatah. Ben Gal, for his part, established an extreme left-wing Zionist group in France, which had as its aim integration into the student movement. He dubbed it the Revolutionary Jewish Organization. "The French left had become very anti-Zionist, whereas Zionist activity in France was for the most part very right-wing," he says. "The organization that I established tried to represent an Israel of the left, one that supported dialogue with the Palestinians. We organized revolutionary activities in Paris. For example, we went to the German Embassy and tied ourselves up, in protest against the arrest of anti-Nazi Jewish activists." After about three years of activity in France, Ben Gal returned to Israel. He says that after a short grace period, the France that he had despised returned and showed its ugly face. "The France I had hated was itself again," he says. "When the left came to power, it elected [Francois] Mitterrand, who was a corrupt person in his very essence," he says. Over the past 30 years, many of the leaders of the leftist organizations became more moderate or turned to different paths. Daniel Cohn-Bendit joined the Green Party in Germany, Benny Levy became an observant Jew and moved to Jerusalem, where he became a co-founder, together with Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard-Henri Levy, of an institute devoted to the teachings of philosopher Emanuel Levinas. Bernard Kouchner is the foreign minister in the government of Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy himself frequently attacks the tradition of May 1968, and in his election campaign he argued that it was his aim to bring about the collapse of the "moral degeneracy" that was presaged by the student revolt. Bookmark to del.icio.us   A top priority Barack Obama: We will keep Israel's security a priority. Tale of a key Cartoon film on Nakba describes Jews as 'enemies of homeland'.   1.   SLOGANS 13:21  |  michhell 12/05/08   2.   snow wind food 19:05  |  Di 12/05/08   3.   sonething to be "proud" of 19:35  |  robert 12/05/08

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