FRANCE:As the presidential candidates court Israel, the Arab world suspects France could abandon its traditional policy of benevolence, writes Lara Marlowe.
The commemorative stamp issued by the Israeli post office but distributed exclusively by the Israeli branch of Nicolas Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement shows the right-wing French presidential candidate alongside a gift-wrapped ballot box with the words "mazal tov", meaning "congratulations" and "good luck".
Sylvain Semhoun, the UMP delegate for Israel and a member of the assembly of French citizens abroad, commissioned the four-shekel stamp to mark Mr Sarkozy's 52nd birthday, and has exhausted his stock of more than 1,000, giving them out to the party's volunteer workers.
In a telephone interview, he estimated that more than 100,000 of France's approximately 650,000 Jewish citizens also hold Israeli nationality. "Between 70 and 80 per cent will vote for Sarkozy," he predicted.
Would Mr Sarkozy's election mean the end of France's politique arabe? "All of us hope so," Mr Semhoun sighs.
The shift would be all the more stunning because Mr Sarkozy heads the party that was founded by President Jacques Chirac. In the first round five years ago, Mr Chirac won only 6.5 per cent of the Franco-Israeli vote.
The possibility of a Sarkozy victory and uncertainty about the Middle East policies of his rivals, the socialist Ségolène Royal and the centrist François Bayrou, have created unease in Arab embassies.
"It is certain that the Arabs will loose their last friend among Western heads of state," Talal Salman, the founder of the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir, wrote in Courrier International magazine.
"No one will provide the kind of impetus in the Middle East that Chirac did," says Randa Takieddine, an editorialist for the leading Arab newspaper al Hayat. Mr Chirac was the driving force behind UN Security Council resolutions 1559 and 1701, which demanded a Syrian departure from Lebanon and an end to last summer's war between Israel and Hizbullah.
He was the most vocal opponent of the US invasion of Iraq, and saw to it that the dying Yasser Arafat received the best possible care in France.
By contrast, Mr Sarkozy and Ms Royal give the impression of competing for the affections of the French Jewish community and Israel. The French cartoonist Willem caricatured them kicking and hitting each other and shouting: "I'm a better friend of Israel than you are."
After his philandering father, a minor Hungarian aristocrat, abandoned Mr Sarkozy's mother, he was raised in the household of his maternal grandfather, Benedict Mallah, a Jewish immigrant from Salonica. Mr Sarkozy has close contacts with US neo-conservatives, the former Israel prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu and the World Jewish Congress. "I would like to state how close I feel to Israel," he said in Washington last year.
During three weeks of race riots in the French immigrant suburbs in November 2005, Mr Sarkozy brought the Israeli public security minister Gideon Ezra and police commissioner Moshe Karadi to Paris to advise him as interior minister.
He frequently speaks of the Nazi holocaust against the Jews.
Though he does not say the word "Muslim", his complaints about immigrants who fail to adopt French values invariably refer to those who slaughter sheep in bath tubs and veil their wives.
The socialist deputy Julien Dray, whose brother is a doctor in the Israeli army, is one of Ms Royal's main advisers on the Middle East. She is nonetheless on poor terms with the French Jewish council CRIF, who clearly prefer Mr Sarkozy.
In a Middle East tour last winter, she managed to offend Arabs, Israelis and the French military alike, by meeting with elected representatives from Hizbullah and the Palestinians before seeing the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, then appearing to approve of the wall that Israel is building on Palestinian land, and of Israeli warplanes flying low over Lebanon.
Whoever becomes the next French head of state, policy may change less than expected. Presidents Giscard d'Estaing and Mitterrand were initially considered pro-Israeli, but did not dramatically alter France's politique arabe.
As General Charles de Gaulle once observed, countries have interests, not friends.
Slimane Zeghidour of TV5Monde points out that one-third of the world's French speakers are Arab. France has strong commercial ties with the Arab world. And the foreign ministry is considered a bastion of pro-Arabism.
"Nicolas Sarkozy said in an interview that he'd 'dust off' the foreign ministry," Sylvain Semhoun notes hopefully. "That's where the rub is; their policy never changes."