...Betrayal: France, the Jews, and the Arabs started as a long essay in Commentary, but even in its extended form is only a slender 171 pages. It is nonetheless a devastating catalogue of both France’s depredations, first against the Jews, and now against Israel, and its institutionalized policy of favoritism toward the Muslim Middle East. Pryce-Jones’ central charge is that France’s desire to be the Middle East’s most ostentatiously helpful European ally, combined with its governing elite’s enthusiasm for anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, has caused France to enter into a Faustian bargain with the Muslim world -- an arrangement that has repeatedly proven destructive both to France’s foreign policy interests and to its own vaingloriously celebrated values. France’s posture toward Muslims, Pryce-Jones declares, “has been what the Maginot Line was militarily, a masking of reality, a standing invitation to self-deception.”...