French Jews Demand Probe into Alleged ‘Non-Aggression’ Pact with Palestinian Terrorists

French Jews demand an investigation into alleged “non-aggression” pact with Palestinian terror group following 1982 massace at Paris kosher restaurant.

By Ben Cohen, The Algemeiner

France’s representative Jewish organization on Monday demanded a parliamentary investigation into last week’s revelations by a former French intelligence chief that the country’s security services agreed a secret non-aggression pact with a Palestinian terrorist group.

In a statement, Francis Kalifat — president of French Jewish organization CRIF — declared that if the revelations turned out to be true, “it would constitute an unprecedented state scandal.”

Last week,the newspaper Le Parisien reported that the former head of French intelligence, Yves Bonnet, had admitted to making a secret pact with the Abu Nidal terrorist organization, guaranteeing its operatives free movement within France in exchange for a promise of no further attacks on French soil.

According to Le Parisien, Bonnet made his sensational confession in January this year to the magistrate in charge of investigating the Aug. 9, 1982  attack by Abu Nidal terrorists on “Chez Jo Goldenberg,”  a busy kosher restaurant on the rue des Rosiers in Paris. Six people were murdered and 22 wounded in the atrocity, for which no person has yet been convicted.

Kalifat said that Bonnet’s claims warranted “the establishment of a parliamentary committee of inquiry and the lifting of defense secrecy” around the investigation into the rue des Rosiers attack and its aftermath.

According to Le Parisien, the pact was allegedly reached during a clandestine meeting shortly after the rue des Rosiers attack between Bonnet and representatives of the Abu Nidal group — not the terrorists who executed the massacre, he claimed, but individuals he described as their “stooges.”

‘We Made a Kind of Verbal Deal’

“We made a kind of verbal deal in which I said, ‘I don’t want any more attacks on French soil and in return I’ll let you come to France and I guarantee nothing will happen to you,’” the paper quoted Bonnet — a former head of the DST, the French intelligence service — as having said.

The paper added that other senior French officials, including the chief of staff of then-President François Mitterand, were aware of the pact with the Abu Nidal organization — a now-extinct Palestinian terrorist group that was supported at different times by Iraq, Syria and Libya.

Along with the attack on the rue des Rosiers, the group’s atrocities included the Sept. 1986 shooting at the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul, Turkey, that killed 22 worshippers, and the December 1985 simultaneous attacks on US and Israeli airport counters in Rome and Vienna, which killed 18 people and injured 111.

Kalifat stated that his organization was also calling on President Emmanuel Macron “to do everything possible at the diplomatic and judicial level to ensure that the terrorists responsible for this massacre, who have taken refuge in Jordan, the West Bank and Norway, will face French justice.”