The reality is somewhat more complex. Israel’s Supreme Court is weighing the claims of a Jewish organization that has legal title to the Sheikh Jarrah property and wants to evict the Palestinian tenants, who also claim ownership. Palestinians see the eviction case as part of the historical displacement of Palestinians, including current Israeli efforts to remove Palestinian residents from certain parts of Jerusalem, which they say violate international law.
But social media has little patience for nuance. The supermodels Gigi and Bella Hadid, whose father is Palestinian, have posted ceaselessly about Palestinian suffering over the last week, with Bella Hadid writing in one post: “You are on the right side or you are not. It’s that simple.”
Perhaps an even more telling measure of the online fervor was the backlash awaiting the singer Rihanna, who, under normal circumstances, can do no wrong in fans’ eyes, when she condemned “the violence I’m seeing displayed between Israel and Palestine!” drawing accusations that she was equating the two sides’ actions and the consequences. Sample reply: “You sounded like ‘all lives matter.’”
So far, the dead have been disproportionately Palestinian. Twelve people in Israel have also died, killed amid rocket fire launched by Hamas from Gaza or Jewish-Arab mob violence.
There have been some street protests. Thousands have marched in Jordan and Iraq, and small demonstrations took place in Lebanon as well as in Morocco, Sudan and Bahrain, three of the Middle Eastern countries that agreed last year to normalize relations with Israel. Protests have also broken out in Western cities including Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Berlin, London and Paris.
But Egypt, where political parties, professional associations and student unions have historically organized some of the region’s largest pro-Palestinian demonstrations, driving tens of thousands out into Cairo’s streets and squares, has been quiet.
That may have to do with fatigue with the Palestinian issue, Egyptians’ preoccupation with their own problems or the Egyptian government’s systematic suppression of organizing and protest. (Egyptian authorities arrested two Egyptian coordinators of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement two years ago, accusing them of terrorism, and they remain imprisoned.)
WASHINGTON — It was, President Donald J. Trump proclaimed in September, “the dawn of a new Middle East.”
Speaking at the White House, Mr. Trump was announcing new diplomatic accords between Israel and two of its Gulf Arab neighbors, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
“After decades of division and conflict,” Mr. Trump said, flanked by leaders from the region in a scene later replayed in his campaign ads, the Abraham Accords were laying “the foundation for a comprehensive peace across the entire region.”
Eight months later, such a peace remains a distant hope, particularly for the Middle East’s most famously intractable conflict, the one between Israel and the Palestinians. In fiery scenes all too reminiscent of the old Middle East, that conflict has entered its bloodiest phase in seven years and is renewing criticism of Mr. Trump’s approach while raising questions about the future of the accords as President Biden confronts what role the United States should play now in the region.
a January 2020 Trump peace plan proposing to create a Palestinian state, on terms heavily slanted toward Israeli demands, the accords intentionally “separated” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from Israel’s relations with the Arab world, Mr. Greenblatt said.
They “took away the veto right for the Palestinians for the region to move forward,” he added.
Others noted that, before agreeing to the accords, the U.A.E. extracted from Mr. Netanyahu a pledge to hold off on a potential annexation of swaths of the West Bank, a move that had the potential to set off a major Palestinian uprising. (Trump officials also opposed such an annexation and Mr. Netanyahu might not have followed through regardless.)
Dennis Ross, a former Middle East peace negotiator who served under three presidents, called the accords an important step for the region, but said the violence in Israel’s cities and Gaza illustrated how “the Palestinian issue can still cast a cloud” over Israel’s relations with its Arab neighbors.
“The notion that this was ‘peace in our time’ obviously ignored the one existential conflict in the region. It wasn’t between Israel and the Arab states,” Mr. Ross said.
a statement last week, the U.A.E.’s foreign affairs ministry issued a “strong condemnation” of Israel’s proposed evictions in East Jerusalem and a police attack on Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque, where Israeli officials said Palestinians had stockpiled rocks to throw at Israeli police.
Last month, the U.A.E. also denounced “acts of violence committed by right-wing extremist groups in the occupied East Jerusalem” and warned that the region could be “slipping into new levels of instability in a way that threatens peace.”
Bahrain and other Gulf states have condemned Israel in similar tones. A statement on Friday from the U.A.E.’s minister of foreign affairs, Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan, called on “all parties,” not only Israel, to exercise restraint and pursue a cease-fire.
One former Trump official argued that public pressure on Israel by countries like the U.A.E. and Bahrain carry more weight after the accords, coming as they do from newly official diplomatic partners. None of the governments who are party to the accords are playing a major role in efforts to secure a cease-fire, however — a responsibility assumed in the past by Egypt and Qatar.
changed longstanding U.S. policy by declaring that the United States did not consider Israeli settlements in the West Bank a violation of international law. (The Biden administration intends to reverse that position once a review by government lawyers is complete.)
Mr. Trump also moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, officially recognizing the city as Israel’s capital, in a move that infuriated Palestinians who have long expected East Jerusalem to be the capital of any future state they establish.
“Trump opened the door for Israel to accelerate home demolitions, accelerate settlement activity,” Ms. Hassan said. “And when that happens and you see Israel acting upon it, that’s when you see the Palestinian resistance.”
Former Trump officials note that expert predictions of a Palestinian eruption during Mr. Trump’s term, particularly after the embassy relocation, never came to pass, and suggest that Mr. Biden’s friendlier approach to the Palestinians — including the restoration of humanitarian aid canceled by Mr. Trump — has emboldened them to challenge Israel.
Even some Trump administration officials said any suggestions that the accords amounted to peace in the Middle East were exaggerated.
“During my time at the White House, I always urged people not to use that term,” Mr. Greenblatt said.
BRUSSELS — The Arab world is unified in condemning Israeli airstrikes in Gaza and the way the Israeli police invaded Jerusalem’s Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites. Governments have spoken out, protests have taken place, social media is aflame.
But by and large the condemnation is only words, not actions — at least so far. The region’s concerns have shifted since the last major Israeli incursion into Gaza in 2014, with new fears about Iran’s influence, new anxieties about popular unrest in Arab countries and a growing recognition of the reality of Israel in the Arab world.
Even those countries that normalized relations with Israel last year — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco — have all openly criticized Israeli policies and called for support of the Palestinians and the defense of Jerusalem. The escalation of violence has put a great strain on those governments, which had argued that their closer relationship with Israel would help restrain Israeli actions aimed at the Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza.
“I have not seen any Arab state that has not expressed support for the Palestinians on a rhetorical level, and it would be very difficult for them to say anything otherwise,’’ said H.A. Hellyer, a scholar of Middle East politics at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington. “But what they do about it is very different.’’
Aqsa Mosque struck a chord, said Khaled Elgindy, director of the Palestine program at the Middle East Institute. Gaza is one thing, but “Jerusalem is important for the Arab League and for clear stakeholders, like the Jordanians and the Saudis,’’ who are the guardians of the holy places of Islam, he said.
Israeli police raid of the Aqsa Mosque on Monday — which left hundreds of Palestinians and a score of police officers wounded — was “a no-brainer for them given the sensitivity of Al Aqsa and the violence shown to worshipers on the holiest night of Ramadan in one of Islam’s holiest sites,’’ said Zaha Hassan, a human rights lawyer and a visiting fellow at Carnegie.
expel Palestinian families from Sheik Jarrah, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, resonated with Palestinians in exile both abroad and in Israel. “There is not a single Palestinian who doesn’t know what it means to have their home taken or threatened to be taken,’’ Ms. Hassan said.
Hamas had been vowing for weeks that it would defend Jerusalem, and after those events in the city at the start of this week, it acted on its threats, firing a barrage of rockets at Jerusalem and drawing Israeli airstrikes in return.
Egypt and Jordan, which have long had diplomatic relations with Israel, are deeply engaged in trying to de-escalate the conflict, but they must also be wary of public anger, which would only worsen if Israel were to launch a full-scale ground war against Hamas in Gaza.
Ismail Haniya, and U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.
The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, while sending security officials to try to mediate between Israel and Hamas, has himself said little about current events.
However, his foreign minister, Sameh Shoukry, told Arab colleagues at an urgent Arab League meeting that “the way that Arabs — on the popular and official levels — are intent on following what is happening in Jerusalem is the greatest message that affirms Palestine has been and will always be the central Arab cause.”
The Arab League is also pressing for an emergency debate in the U.N. Security Council, which the United States put off until at least Sunday. The Arab League needs to keep in front of the debate on Jerusalem, the analysts agree, and not cede the field to Hamas.
“This time the struggle is not only about Gaza but about Jerusalem and Al Aqsa and Muslims are committed to their defense,’’ Mr. Winter said. “Hamas has done a good job in its messaging strategy, and Arab countries must deal with this interpretation.’’
Egypt’s government is also worried, as are many in Israel, that destroying Hamas might open the door to even more radical actors in Gaza. But Egypt and other Arab countries, even if they repress internal protests and dissent, must align themselves in some fashion with public opinion, even if they fear that protests against Israel might quickly turn into protests against themselves.
For the Arab countries that recently recognized Israel, the confrontation is an embarrassment and a dilemma because it tests their influence, or lack of it, on Israel, analysts said.
The diplomatic recognitions were “supposed to give them leverage, and one of their arguments was that Israel won’t want to disrupt these new relations with the Arab world and so will hold back on things like settlements and Gaza,’’ said Mr. Elgindy of the Middle East Institute.
In fact, he said, “I believe the opposite — the Israelis now have more cover.’’
While these countries are unlikely to sever their new ties with Israel because of the economic and technological benefits, it will be more difficult for Morocco and Sudan, where there are more open displays of public opinion.
Qatar and Turkey are among the most prominent defenders of Hamas. Qatar owns the powerful Al Jazeera network, which is giving full coverage to the Palestinian and Hamas side of the story.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has long been a fervent critic of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, especially in Gaza. On Friday, in predictably harsh terms, he vowed that Turkey would not stay silent and accept the persecution of Palestinians.
“By attacking the sacred site of all three religions, the terrorist state of Israel has crossed all boundaries,” Mr. Erdogan said, addressing his ruling party. “If we don’t stop the attacks now, everyone will become targets of this savage mentality.”
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Carlotta Gall from Istanbul, Rana Sweis from Amman, Jordan, and Nada Rashwan from Cairo.
filed first-time claims for state jobless benefits last week, an increase of 18,000, the Labor Department said. It was the second consecutive weekly increase after new claims hit a pandemic low.
At the same time, 152,000 new claims were filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program covering freelancers, part-timers and others who do not routinely qualify for state benefits. That was a decline of 85,000.
Neither figure is seasonally adjusted.
Claims rose above one million early in the year but havecome down since then, helped by the spread of vaccinations, the easing of restrictions on businesses in many states and the arrival of stimulus funds.
Most individuals received payments of $1,400 in recent weeks as part of the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion relief package, and the funds should bolster consumer spending in the coming months.
On Friday, the government reported that employers added 916,000 jobs in March, twice February’s gain and the most since August. The unemployment rate dipped to 6 percent, the lowest since the pandemic began, with nearly 350,000 people rejoining the labor force.
Still, there is plenty of ground to make up.
Even after March’s job gains, the economy is 8.4 million jobs short of where it was in February 2020. Entire sectors, like travel and leisure, as well as restaurants and bars, are only beginning to recover from the millions of job losses that followed the pandemic’s arrival.
The ballots in the union drive at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., are expected to be counted by hand starting either Thursday afternoon or Friday morning.Credit…Charity Rachelle for The New York Times
The union seeking to represent workers at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama said late Wednesday that there were 3,215 ballots cast — or about 55 percent of the roughly 5,800 workers who were eligible to vote.
The ballots are expected to be counted by hand starting either Thursday afternoon or Friday morning in the National Labor Relations Board’s office in Birmingham, according to the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union. Hundreds of ballots are being contested, mostly by Amazon, the union said.
The vote counting will be shown on a videoconference call to a small number of outsiders, including journalists, in addition to representatives from the union and the company.
Union elections are typically held in person, but the labor board determined that the election should be conducted by mail to minimize risks during the pandemic. The ballots were sent to workers in early February and were due at the agency before March 30. Since then, Amazon and the union have had a chance to challenge whether particular worker were eligible to vote.
When the public counting is done, the agency will announce the formal results if the margin of victory for one side is greater than the number of contested ballots.
If the margin is narrower, then it could take two to three weeks for the N.L.R.B. to hold a hearing to sort through the contested ballots and take evidence from both sides on whether they should be counted.
The Baoshan Second Reservoir. Not a single typhoon made landfall during last year’s rainy season.Credit…An Rong Xu for The New York Times
Officials are calling Taiwan’s drought its worst in more than half a century. And it is exposing the enormous challenges involved in hosting the island’s semiconductor industry, which is an increasingly indispensable node in the global supply chains for smartphones, cars and other keystones of modern life.
Chip makers use lots of water to clean their factories and wafers, the thin slices of silicon that make up the basis of the chips, Raymond Zhong and Amy Chang Chien report for The New York Times. In 2019, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s facilities in Hsinchu consumed 63,000 tons of water a day, according to the company, or more than 10 percent of the supply from two local reservoirs.
In recent months, the government has:
But the most sweeping measure has been the halt on irrigation, which affects 183,000 acres of farmland, around a fifth of Taiwan’s irrigated land.
The Taiwanese public appears to have decided that rice farming is less important, both for the island and the world, than semiconductors. The government is subsidizing growers for the lost income. But Chuang Cheng-deng, 55, worries that the thwarted harvest will drive customers to seek out other suppliers, which could mean years of depressed earnings.
The Ikea store in Franconville, France, where employees were monitored, documents showed.Credit…Elliott Verdier for The New York Times
Prosecutors are accusing the French arm of Ikea, the Swedish home furnishings giant, and some of its former executives of engineering a “system of espionage” from 2009 to 2012, in a criminal trial that has riveted public attention in France.
The alleged snooping was used to investigate employees and union organizers, check up on workers on medical leave and size up customers seeking refunds for botched orders, Liz Alderman reports for The New York Times. A former military operative was hired to execute some of the more clandestine operations.
In all, 15 people are charged. A verdict from a panel of judges is scheduled for June 15.
The case stoked outrage in 2012 after the emails were leaked to the French news media, and Ikea promptly fired several executives in its French unit, including its chief executive. There is no evidence that similar surveillance happened in any of the other 52 countries where the global retailer hones a fresh-faced image of stylish thriftiness served with Swedish meatballs.
Victims’ lawyers described a methodic operation that ran along two tracks: one involving background and criminal checks of job candidates and employees without their knowledge, and another targeting union leaders and members.
Ikea’s lawyer, Emmanuel Daoud, denied that systemwide surveillance had been carried out at Ikea’s stores in France. He argued that any privacy violations had been the work of a single person, Jean-François Paris, the French unit’s head of risk management.
Emails and receipts showed that Mr. Paris handed much of the legwork to Jean-Pierre Fourès, who surveilled hundreds of job applicants, gleaning information from social media and other sources to speed vetting and hiring. He also did background checks on unsuspecting customers who tangled with Ikea over big refunds. He insisted that he had never broken the law in gathering background material.
The surveillance encompassed career workers. In one case, Mr. Fourès was hired to investigate whether Ikea France’s deputy director of communications and merchandising, who was on a yearlong sick leave recovering from hepatitis C, had faked the severity of her illness when managers learned she had traveled to Morocco.
A Carnival cruise ship docked last year in Long Beach, Calif. The cruise line has threatened to move its ships outside of U.S. ports.Credit…Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
Carnival Cruise Line, the largest cruise operator in the United States, is optimistic that several of its U.S.-based lines will be up and running by July, it said on Wednesday as it reported its first quarter financials. Booking volumes for future Carnival cruises were about 90 percent higher in the first quarter of 2021 than in the previous quarter, “reflecting both the significant pent-up demand and long-term potential for cruising,” Arnold Donald, the chief executive of Carnival Corporation, the cruise line’s parent company, said in a statement on Wednesday. The company reported a net loss of $2 billion for the first quarter of 2021.
Unions representing employees at two prominent podcasting companies owned by Spotify, the audiostreaming giant, announced Wednesday that they had ratified their first labor contracts. The larger of the two unions, with 65 employees, is at The Ringer, a sports and pop culture website with a podcasting network. The second union, at the podcast production company Gimlet Media, has just under 50 employees. The two groups were among the first in the podcasting industry to unionize, and both are represented by the Writers Guild of America, East.
A “help wanted” sign at a Home Depot in Mount Prospect, Ill. Confidence about hiring in the U.S. economy is growing. Credit…Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press
S&P 500 futures were up on Thursday, pointing to a rise when Wall Street trading starts, a day after the benchmark index set another record the previous day. Investors are awaiting the latest weekly jobless claims report, which could provide a fresh measure of a strengthening economy.
European markets were mostly higher and Asian stocks had a mostly positive day. Oil futures were lower, and Treasury yields slipped.
Investors on Wednesday were buoyed by remarks in the minutes of the Federal Reserve officials’ meeting last month, which suggested policies that have supported the markets and businesses through the pandemic were not about to be removed.
Fed policymakers have said they want to see “substantial further progress” toward their employment and inflation goals before scaling back the accommodative measures.
Weekly jobless claims numbers, to be released later on Thursday, come amid growing confidence about hiring in the U.S. economy. The payrolls report for March showed an impressive gain of 916,000 jobs. But even with that improvement, the economy is still 8.4 million jobs short of where it was in February 2020.
Investors are also digesting more details of President Biden’s corporate tax plan, which aims to raise as much as $2.5 trillion over 15 years. It includes a strict new minimum tax on global profits and cracking down on companies that try to move profits offshore.
Stocks, bonds and oil
In European, trading the Stoxx Europe 600 was 0.4 higher after hitting a record high at the close of trading on Wednesday. In Britain, the FTSE 100 was also 0.4 percent higher. In Asia, the Hang Seng in Hong Kong ended the day 1.2 percent higher.
In New York, S&P 500 futures were 0.3 percent higher, after the index rose 0.2 percent on Wednesday.
Oil futures were slipping, as rising coronavirus infections weigh on projections of oil demand. Brent crude, the global benchmark, was 0.2 percent lower at $63 a barrel, and the U.S. benchmark, West Texas Intermediate, fell 0.5 percent, to $59.47 a barrel.
Yields on 10-year Treasury notes were down more than 2 basis points, to 1.64 percent.
Prosecutors are accusing the French arm of Ikea, the Swedish home furnishings giant, and some of its former executives of engineering a “system of espionage” from 2009 to 2012, in a criminal trial that has riveted public attention in France.
The alleged snooping was used to investigate employees and union organizers, check up on workers on medical leave and size up customers seeking refunds for botched orders, Liz Alderman reports for The New York Times. A former military operative was hired to execute some of the more clandestine operations.
In all, 15 people are charged. A verdict from a panel of judges is scheduled for June 15.
The case stoked outrage in 2012 after the emails were leaked to the French news media, and Ikea promptly fired several executives in its French unit, including its chief executive. There is no evidence that similar surveillance happened in any of the other 52 countries where the global retailer hones a fresh-faced image of stylish thriftiness served with Swedish meatballs.
Victims’ lawyers described a methodic operation that ran along two tracks: one involving background and criminal checks of job candidates and employees without their knowledge, and another targeting union leaders and members.
unsuspecting customers who tangled with Ikea over big refunds. He insisted that he had never broken the law in gathering background material.
The surveillance encompassed career workers. In one case, Mr. Fourès was hired to investigate whether Ikea France’s deputy director of communications and merchandising, who was on a yearlong sick leave recovering from hepatitis C, had faked the severity of her illness when managers learned she had traveled to Morocco.
VERSAILLES, France — The USB stick mysteriously appeared from an unidentified deliveryman. It held an explosive trove: a cache of startling emails detailing an intricate effort by Ikea executives in France to dig up information on employees, job applicants and even customers.
“Tell me if these people are known to the police,” read one executive’s message to a private investigator, seeking illicit background checks on hundreds of Ikea job applicants.
“A model worker has become a radical employee representative overnight,” read another. “We need to find out why.”
A decade after those emails surfaced, they are at the center of a criminal trial that has riveted public attention in France. Prosecutors are accusing the French arm of Ikea, the Swedish home furnishings giant, and some of its former executives of engineering a “system of espionage” from 2009 to 2012.
The alleged snooping was used to investigate employees and union organizers, check up on workers on medical leave and size up customers seeking refunds for botched orders. A former military operative was hired to execute some of the more clandestine operations.
The case stoked outrage in 2012 after the emails were leaked to the French news media, and Ikea promptly fired several executives in its French unit, including its former chief executive. There is no evidence that similar surveillance happened in any of the other 52 countries where the global retailer hones a fresh-faced image of stylish thriftiness served with Swedish meatballs.
unsuspecting customers who tangled with Ikea over big refunds. He insisted that he had never broken the law in gathering background material.
Today in Business
Some Ikea managers tapped police sources to gain access to government databases for job applicants at up to nine stores, seeking records on drug use, theft and other serious offenses. People whose files turned up “dirty” would not be hired, according to plaintiffs’ lawyers. As in the United States, applicants in France must consent to background checks.
The surveillance encompassed career workers. In one case, Mr. Fourès was hired to investigate whether Ikea France’s deputy director of communications and merchandising, who was on a yearlong sick leave recovering from hepatitis C, had faked the severity of her illness when managers learned she had traveled to Morocco.
He engaged a contact to pose as an airline worker and ask the 12-year Ikea employee, Virginie Paulin, to furnish copies of her passport stamps to win a free ticket offer. The passport confirmed her travel to Morocco.
“Excellent!” Mr. Baillot, the chief executive at the time, wrote in an email to Mr. Paris and Claire Héry, who was the director of human resources. “We’ll do more checks after Christmas to corner her,” he wrote. (Ms. Héry’s lawyer, Olivier Baratelli, said there was no evidence she had been aware of systemic surveillance. The charges against her were dropped.)
told The New York Times in 2012 that she had a second home in Morocco, and had flown there to recuperate from her illness. She said she had been so distraught by her dismissal that she attempted suicide.
Ikea officials paid particular attention to unions and their efforts to recruit members. In 2010, tensions erupted when Adel Amara, a union leader at an Ikea store in Franconville, northwest of Paris, rallied employees to strike for a 4 percent raise. Ikea said the strike had cost it millions of euros in lost sales.
After that, Ikea “tried to prevent more strikes by turning to a system of espionage,” said Vincent Lecourt, a lawyer for one of the store’s French unions. Ikea managers set up a surveillance net to gather information to fire Mr. Amara and curb militant union activity, plaintiffs’ lawyers said.
GSG, a French security company hired by Mr. Paris, advised Ikea to set a “legal trap” for Mr. Amara, and sent one of its agents to pose as a cashier, court documents showed. The mole infiltrated workers’ ranks, reporting conversations with Mr. Amara and his wife, also an Ikea employee, while spying on a number of other union activists.
“Their plan was to infiltrate the unions and explode them from the inside,” Mr. Lecourt said.
Mr. Paris also hired a bodyguard disguised as an administrative assistant with the goal, he testified, of protecting officials who claimed that Mr. Amara had harassed them. Mr. Amara was later found liable by a criminal judge for moral harassment after Ikea France filed a complaint.
Mr. Daoud, Ikea France’s lawyer, said there was no proof of the unions’ allegations. “There was no hunting down of union members,” he said.
That claim has not doused a sense of injustice among workers who said they were forever marked by the moment they learned their employer was spying on them.
Soon after Ikea fired Mr. Amara in 2011, he said in an interview, a USB stick was delivered to his home by a person who refused to identify himself, containing the explosive email trove that became the basis of the lawsuit.
The documents included receipts of nearly €1 million for surveillance operations, as well as a 55-page internal report on Mr. Amara’s union activities, personal situation and legal records dating to when he was a teenager. There were lists naming hundreds of job applicants and employees to undergo undisclosed checks, as well as the orders to investigate some customers.
“That’s when I understood that Ikea was spying this whole time, and that it was a regular practice,” Mr. Amara said. “It was absolutely surreal.”
Mr. Amara said he took the USB stick to French news outlets, he said, unleashing the media firestorm around Ikea France that led to police investigations and the current trial.
“Ikea acted as if it was all powerful over its employees,” he said.
“If Ikea hadn’t been exposed,” he added, “it would have just kept going.”
The disparities also touch on everything from government subsidies to private schools to credits on personal income for donations, which overwhelmingly favor Catholics and high-income taxpayers. But they are perhaps most glaring in physical structures. Even as Mr. Macron has pledged to nurture an “Islam of France,” followers of the faith suffer from an acute shortage of proper mosques across the country.
“It’s a total paradox,” Saïd Aït-Laama, an imam, said in an interview before Friday Prayer.
Unable to finance mosque-building themselves, generally unassisted by the state, Muslim communities have turned to governments abroad for help.
But that may now become more difficult under Mr. Macron’s new law, which is intended to combat Islamism by toughening rules on secularism and controls over religious organizations, including tightening the flow of foreign donations.
Last week, the government said that the new law would allow it to oppose the public financing of a large mosque in Strasbourg, in the eastern region of Alsace, where, for historical reasons, the construction of religious buildings can still qualify for government subsidies.
The interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, pressed the local government to cancel the funding, saying that the association behind the Strasbourg mosque had ties to the Turkish government.
Even before new law was drafted, the City Council of Angers used real-estate regulations last year to stop mosque leaders from turning to Morocco. A provision in Mr. Macron’s law would allow the national government, too, to oppose the sale of religious buildings to a foreign government if the French authorities consider the sale a threat.
Mr. Macron has said that the legislation is critical to fighting the kind of radical ideology that has sent French youths to fight in Syria and led to the deaths of more than 250 French people in Islamist terrorist attacks since 2015. Last fall, four people were killed in three separate terrorist attacks.
A documentary recently broadcast on Moroccan state television, “In Your Eyes, I See My Country,” which has been shown at festivals in Marrakesh and elsewhere, follows Ms. Elkayam and Mr. Cohen, her husband, on a trip to Morocco, including visits to their grandparents’ hometowns. It shows Moroccans embracing her, clutching her hand, even telling her that they remember the names of her grandparents.
Being an Arabic-speaking Jew, in both Israel and Morocco, means living with a complex, sometimes conflicting set of expectations, said Aomar Boum, an anthropologist at the University of California Los Angeles, who specializes in Jewish-Muslim relations. In the film, it is clear that Ms. Elkayam is “carrying a heavy weight,” he said. “It’s only the music that connects the dots.”
The film, which is scheduled to be shown next month at the Miami Jewish Film Festival, shows her and Mr. Cohen performing concerts for largely Muslim audiences, and it ends with him spending days in his family’s former village, where he dresses in traditional Moroccan clothes and country boys welcome him like a brother.
Kamal Hachkar, the film’s Moroccan director, said, “What touched me the most about Neta is that I quickly understood that she sang to repair the wounds of exile.” The documentary, he added, “is a way of defying the fatality of the large history which separated our parents and grandparents and that our generation can recreate links through music, which is a real common territory and melting pot for Jews and Muslims.”
The political context is inescapable.
“Singing in Arabic is a political statement,” Ms. Elkayam said. “We want to be part of this area, we want to use the language to connect with our neighbors. It isn’t only to remember the past.”
