Blog : France 42

Sami Gozlan, who currently tracks attacks on Jews in France, explained that they fear the murder of East Jerusalem arab taxi driver Taysir Karaki, to which Julian Soufir confessed, will worsen the already tense relations between Jews and Muslims in France.

Soufir's mother, still lives in Paris. 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.

Taysir Karaki, the East Jerusalem arab 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."
(haaretz.com 16.05.2007)