[Craving even more FPM content? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more. Click here to sign up.]
Ah, France, Mère des armes, des arts, et des lois. Douce France, cher pays de mon enfance. The chestnut trees marching in single file, the soothing plash of the fountains in Aix, the 1961 Lafite, Rothschild to start and the 1970 Chateau d’Yquem to end the meal at, a glimpse of Mont St-Victoire, the water lilies at Giverny, the bouquinistes along the Seine, the crêpes in Redon, the observatory in Meudon, les sanglots longs des violons, maître corbeau sur un arbre perché, the bateaux-mouches, the schoolboys with their cahiers and cartables… but that’s enough. That’s the good part.
The bad part is Drancy, a station on the way to Auschwitz, and the roundup of Jews at the Vel’ d’Hiv in July 1942. The bad part is Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and Je suis partout, and Picasso not lifting a finger to save the life of his Jewish friend, the poet Max Jacob. The bad part is the rapacity of the French government, particularly when it comes to Jewish property. Does anyone remember the 38,000 Parisian apartments, once owned by Jews who either fled from the Nazis, or who were murdered during the Holocaust, and the shameful refusal of the city officials to do much by way of restoring properties to their rightful Jewish owners? Instead, those apartments, stripped of every bit of their contents — the paintings on their walls, their furniture, the rare stamps and coins and books and jewels left behind — by the Germans in what they termed “Operation Furniture,” often remained in the possession of those who had taken them over after their owners had left, and refused to give them back to those owners or their relatives when some of them, the unmurdered, returned after the war. Some of the apartments were rented out by the city government at peppercorn rents to the politically well-connected. Now we have another story of a Jewish victim of French avarice and indifference. This story, however, takes place not in Paris, but in Baghdad. More about this attempt by a Jewish family to recover the rent they were never paid by the French government can be found here: “Grandson of expelled Iraqi Jews sues French gov’t for millions unpaid rent on house used as embassy,” by Mathilda Heller, Jerusalem Post, June 30, 2025:
Seventy years after his grandparents were forced out of their home in Baghdad, Philip Khazzam is suing the French government for over $17-million in unpaid rent relating to the property, which has served as the French embassy in Iraq since the 1960s. Khazzam spoke to The Jerusalem Post on Monday from Montreal, where he lives.
Khazzam’s grandfather, Ezra Lawee, and Ezra’s brother Khedouri, built the house and lived there with their children.
“My grandfather and brother did everything together, they lived in the same house,” Khazzam told the Post.
Until things started “to get very difficult for the Jews,” in the late 1940s, Khazzam’s family had a good life in Baghdad alongside the other 150,000 Jews in the country.
However, in 1951, over 100,000 Jews were airlifted from Iraq. Most headed to Israel, but the Lawees left for Canada.
“They had someone take care of the house after they left, and then in 1964 they rented it to the French government to use as their embassy.”
A few years later, Saddam Hussein told the French government to stop paying the Lawees and pay his regime instead. “For another year or two, we continued to get paid, and then it stopped,” said Khazzam….
The property has been valued by Iraqi certifiers, and the unpaid rent is estimated at more than $20-million and counting.
He believes the reason they never contacted us is because they knew if they took over, we’d charge them the full rent. “It may have been somewhat okay from an individual, but from a country? They took advantage of a family,” he said.
“Various Iraqi prime ministers have given a nod to us to unfreeze the property, no one is standing in our way, but there is a lot of red tape when it comes to unfreezing properties in Iraq.”…
Khazzam does not want the legal hassle of suing in a French court, with all the likely delays that could be strung out for years; furthermore, he lives in Canada, and can’t easily appear for court sessions in Paris. He wants the easiest, and the most just, course to be followed by France. First, recognize what you owe in past rent and pay it to the Khazzam family. Second, in order to simplify matters, the French government should agree to buy the property that is now the French Embassy.
The French are not eager to do the right thing. They don’t want to pay $17 million in back rent — three million less than it might have claimed — and $9 million in “moral damages,” the latter referring to the fact that the French government was knowingly cheating the owner, the Khazzam family, out of their rightful rent.
There is a way that the French might be persuaded to pay the back rent owed, and to buy the property. That is, if the Elysée is convinced that the harm done to France’ s public image will far outweigh the payment rightfully requested by the Khazzams, it might give in. Just imagine a 60 Minutes episode, for example, dedicated to the Khazzam family’s attempts over several years to have the French government pay the $17 million in back rent it owes for the embassy in Baghdad, and the callous refusal of that government even to engage with the Khazzam family, refusing to answer their letters, brushing them off as so many irksome mosquitos. How immense would the public relations damage be to the image of France?
