Israeli prime ministers need no help when it comes to deporting Jews - witness Sinai, Gaza, Hebron for starters - but more help is always welcome, especially when it comes from the best, like France. This was where 12,884
As the French say, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Jews were rounded up in a two-day sweep, July 16-17, 1942, then whisked off into cattle cars en route to Drancy and finally Auschwitz.

This will forever be known as "The Round-Up of Paris" and what makes it classic is that the Nazis asked for some 8,000, but in unheard of efficiency and proficiency, the French police, never known for their alacrity, added a bonus of some 4,000 for the furnaces - many of them children who were first herded into Velodrome d'Hiver starving and parentless.

That was then, this is now and, as the French say, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

In his speech before the Knesset just the other day, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared that France "will always be Israel's friend" - as long, apparently, as Israel is ruled by Islamic terrorists. Sarkozy demanded that Jerusalem be divided, number one; number two, that the Knesset pass a law to compensate and deport all the Jews currently living in the Judea and Samaria (the West Bank).

Where have we heard something like this before? (Vichy)

In a report provided to the New York Times by Reuters, we read this from the lips of Sarkozy on his helpfulness to Israel: "France is ready to provide its guarantee, ready to mobilize its diplomatic services, its resources, its soldiers. You can trust France." Sarkozy, according to the article, did not specify what role French soldiers would play.

Well, Israel needs no help fighting its enemies on the battlefield. History proves this. Therefore, we can trust France to help deport Jews.

Israel's lack of success against Hizbullah may well be attributed to all the training that went into uprooting unarmed yeshiva students from Gaza. Should Israel's leaders decide to do likewise in Judea and Samaria, yet another pogrom, we have Sarkozy's word that France is ready with "resources" and "soldiers" to do the job.

French troops dragging Jews from their homes; this will not be an unusual performance. The least we can say is, "Here we go again!"

As my sister Sarah writes in her memoirs: Behold, one day Vichy police and Nazis were directing traffic at the train station. This was evidently a precursor to a round-up of Toulouse. My father, Noah, quite literally saw the handwriting on the wall (we were "on the list") and hastened us out of there, along with a number of other families for whom he provided the means to escape.

Sarkozy arrived in Israel at the right time, but delivered the wrong message.

Let the record show that on the day the Nazis arrived in Toulouse, Sarah's best friend immediately turned on her and called her a "dirty Jew." Let the record also show that a good number of Catholic French citizens came to our rescue along the route to our escape over the Pyrenees; these true heroes included nuns and priests.

France has always been a nation with a split personality; here, Robespierre and his reign of terror, there, Emile ("I Accuse") Zola and his constant defense of the underdog. Only years after the Dreyfus Affair, the false accusation against a patriotic French-Jewish soldier, based on raw anti-Semitism, France elected a Jewish citizen, Leon Blum, to serve as prime minister, a post he held three different times.

We never know which France will stand up.

Sarkozy has his own "West Bank," where rioting among "foreigners" is frequent, but no Israeli leader would dare suggest that he vacate Paris and deport Parisians.

Sarkozy arrived in Israel at the right time, but delivered the wrong message.

This visit only proves that Israel still dwells alone among the nations and must fend for itself against its enemies, and even its "friends."

Jack Engelhard's latest novel, the newsroom thriller The Bathsheba Deadline, is now ready in paperback and available from Amazon.com and other outlets. Engelhard wrote the international bestselling novel Indecent Proposal, which was translated into more than 22 languages and turned into a Paramount motion picture starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore.