PARIS, March 5: Reporters sans Frontieres Secretary-General Robert Menard has sent out an SOS over the increasing intimidation that he says journalists are being subjected by Israel in their attempt to report on the Middle East, especially in the occupied territories.

In his plea, Mr Menard, whose organization fights for the rights of journalists around the world, also revealed that the French government had felt obliged recently to intervene, although discreetly so, with regard to Israel’s tendency to systematically consider press criticism of its activities as antisemitism.

Mr Menard says that the most recent wave of such accusations coincided with an interview given by David Levy, the former Israeli foreign minister, to French magazine Tribune Juive.

In the article, Mr Levy declares that not only are French Jews “subject to an increasingly dangerous wave of antisemitism”, but that the French press “bears a heavy responsibility” for the attacks that Mr Levy says have taken place against French Jews.

As a result of the interview, notes Mr Menard, French journalists reporting out of Israel and the occupied territories “have become potential targets of the vindictiveness of certain (Israeli) extremists”.

As to the substance of Mr Levy’s charges of stepped-up antisemitism in France, Mr Menard retorts by pointing to official statistics supplied by the French interior ministry, which indicate that the number of incidents for last year of “antisemitism” decreased significantly over the previous year and the start of the second Intifada.