Hence it is interesting to note that, notwithstanding the neoconservative accusations that Europe is "anti-Israeli", EU-Israeli trade has seen a threefold increase in the last decade alone. This confirms the EU as Israel’s major trading partner and the number-one market for Israel’s imports—surpassing even the United States in volume.

By adopting a strategy of constructive engagement in the Middle East through the MU, France and the EU could try—through the use of both diplomatic and economic resources—to achieve the kind of goals that the Bush Administration is trying to advance through the use of its military power: Challenging the status quo in the Middle East, while advancing the cause of peace and political and economic reform.

Washington’s pundits have been describing France’s new president Nicolas Sarkozy as an admirer of America’s economic dynamism and predict that he will improve Paris’s relationship with Washington. But very little attention has been paid in the U.S. capital to a proposal by the new occupant of the Élysée Palace that seems to set a challenge to the Bush Administration’s Mideast policy: setting up a "Mediterranean Union" (MU) under which 16 southern European, Middle Eastern and North African countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea—including Turkey, Israel and its Arab Neighbors—would form a loose economic community that would focus on such policy issues as trade, immigration, security and energy.

France has to be nice to the Arabs since 40% of the Parisian population is now Muslim immigrants.

I read somewhere after Sarkozy was elected, that he was
paying illegal immigrants from North Africa to emigrate.
That was around the same time the riots began over those two muslim kids getting accidentally injured.