France is looking farther away from Israel than ever before. French, Israeli flags. Illustrative.
France is working to get the Israelis and Palestinians to cooperate and compromise, but France looks to have had their own cooperation issues with Israel. A Fox News report said that more than a year ago France’s main intelligence agency reportedly turned down the offer of advanced Israeli counterterrorism software—simply because it was Israeli.
Roughly one year later, 130 people were killed in the Paris terror attacks last November, and an Israeli source told Fox News he believes the Israeli software could have prevented the attacks from even happening in the first place. The source, familiar with the technology, told Fox News that there was “higher-level instruction not to buy Israeli technology,” despite the fact that French officials liked the software.
The source said the program sifts through the piles of intelligence from various agencies and highlights persons of particular interest. The Israeli told Fox News the technology might have enabled the French to prevent the vicious Paris attacks—a highly coordinated string of attacks at different venues.
The source conceded that the French might have been concerned about the ability to hack the software, but believes it was politics and not logistics that killed the Israeli software pitch. A European Union official denied any official boycott of Israeli technology, but one Israeli expert says that doesn’t mean that cooperation in security hasn’t been negatively impacted by Europe’s worsening relationship with Israel.
Meanwhile, since the bombings in Brussels, there has been European interest in Israeli security technology, according to sources in the Fox News article.
Unlike France in early 2015, Israel still recognizes that the free world needs to stand together against ISIS and terrorism in general. Following the Paris attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had an opportunity to speak with the French ambassador at a conference last November.
“It’s difficult for civilized men and women to recognize that our cities, our airways, sometimes our waterways are prowled by beasts that devour the innocent in their way,” said Netanyahu in comments released by his office at the time.
“And the forces of civilization, when they realize the severity of this problem, have no option but to unite very clearly and defeat these beasts. The beasts increasingly have a name—it is radical Islam…We must stand together and fight together militant Islam.”
(By Joshua Spurlock, www.themideastupdate.com, April 25, 2016)