Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
France–Israel relations
Summary
France–Israel relations are the bilateral ties between the French Republic and the State of Israel. In the early 1950s, the two countries maintained close political and military ties. France was Israel's main weapons supplier until the French withdrawal from Algeria in 1962. Three days before the outbreak of the Third Arab–Israeli War in 1967, the government of Charles de Gaulle imposed an arms embargo on the region, mostly affecting Israel.
Under François Mitterrand in the early 1980s, bilateral relations improved greatly. Mitterrand was the first French president to visit Israel while in office. After Jacques Chirac was elected as president in 1995, France's relationship with Israel declined due to his support for Yasser Arafat during the first stages of the Second Intifada. After being elected as president in May 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy said that he would refuse to greet any world leader who does not recognize Israel's right to exist. Relations have continued to warm since 2017, under the presidency of Emmanuel Macron.
Napoleon and the Jews
Napoleon, the first and second Emperor of the First French Empire, declared emancipation by his decree allowing Jews to be free to worship their religion and prohibit any kind of persecution on Jewish people, and he obtained the title as a liberator. He remains highly respected by Jews even after the establishment of Israel.
The Dreyfus affair between 1894 and 1906 was the first and rather bitter connection between the Zionist Movement and France. The ousting of a Jewish French officer in a modern European state motivated Theodor Herzl in organizing the First Zionist Congress and pledging for a home for the Jews in 1897. During the fourth Zionist Congress in London in 1900, Herzl said in his speech there that "...there is no necessity for justifying the holding the Congress in London. England is one of the last remaining places on earth where there is freedom from anti-Jewish hatred." While the British Government began to recognize the importance and validity of the Zionist movement, the French remained absent.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.